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It’s about to get very intense, folks
by digby
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| Holiday soother: A baby spider monkey — (Mom is not a Trump fan) |
I feel as if I’ve been writing about Donald Trump for a lifetime. It’s only been three and a half years — it just feels like a lifetime. And it’s not over yet. In fact, it could go on for some time if this country doesn’t sober up. There are some signs that it is. But he hangover is going to be a doozy.
On the day Trump descended that escalator I happened to be on the Bradcast on KPFK here in Santa Monica and I talked about how I had a sick feeling in my stomach as I watched the ridiculous spectacle. As someone who’s written about politics 24/7 for the past 15 years, I was all too aware of how batshit crazy the Republicans have become.
The sad truth is that if you closely observe politics in this country, particularly the right wing, the Trump phenomenon did not come as huge surprise.
But Trump is the symptom, not the disease. The sickness that pervades the Republican Party has always been part of American culture. We were a slave-owning country for a very long time and we committed genocide on the native inhabitants of this land. Those wounds don’t ever fully heal. This revanchist, antediluvian strain in our politics flares up and then retreats over and over again. We are in the midst of a very bad bout at the moment.
The Trump crisis is life-threatening mainly because of the complex nature of the challenges we face, with technology and globalization transforming everything on the planet at the same time that we must deal with the existential threat of climate change. The alliances that have sustained the world in the post WWII era are fraying and adversaries are flexing their economic and technological muscle, pushing the boundaries to see how far they can go. This man’s overwhelming incompetence combined with the malevolence and ideological extremism of his party is setting the whole world on a course from which it may not be able to recover.
But there are signs that the country is waking up. If Trump has done one positive thing it’s that by being such a visible and ostentatious asshole, people who didn’t pay attention or were only peripherally aware of what has gone wrong in our politics can see it now. It might be possible to break the right-wing fever, at least for a time, and allow this country to some gain strength and heal up. But it’s going to get very intense before that happens. This is Donald Trump we’re talking about.
All of this is to say that we have our work cut out for us. I’m going to keep writing this blog and publishing anywhere they’ll have me to document what’s going on and try to keep my head as all of this unfolds. I hope you will continue to stop by over the next year as the election season unfolds and we’ll try to make sense of all of this together.
If you can contribute to the annual holiday fundraiser to keep this little project going for another year, I would be most grateful. Your support is what keeps me going. (I’ll make you a deal — put a little something in the Hullabaloostocking and I’ll watch Fox and read Breitbart so you don’t have to. 🙂
The paypal buttons are on the sidebar and below as is the snail mail address.
As always I am immensely grateful for your continued loyalty and interest in my scribbles.
And I wish all of you Very Happy Hollandaise!
cheers — digby
Digby’s Hullabaloo
2801 Ocean Park Blvd.
Box 157
Santa Monica, Ca 90405