skews13
Diamond Member
- Mar 18, 2017
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Almost two years ago, I wrote an article for Politico endorsing Donald Trump for president. It was a tongue-in-cheek effortāI āsupportedā Trump only because I thought he would lose to Hillary Clinton, disastrously, and that his defeat would cleanse the Republican Party of the extremism and nuttiness that drove me out of it. I had hoped that post-2016, what remained of the moderate wing of the GOP would reassert itself as it did after the Goldwater debacle in 1964, and exorcise the crazies.
Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the partyās demise. In the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency would fix much of what ails our country. On November 8, I voted for Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.
Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max Bialystock was by the success of āSpringtime for Hitler.ā For two months after Trump won, I couldnāt read any news about the election, and considered abandoning political commentary permanently. It wasnāt just that Trump disgusted me; I was disgusted with myself for being so stupid. I no longer trusted my own powers of observation and analysis.
Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the inverse of what Iād imagined. Trump didnāt lose; he won. The Republican Party isnāt undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling, perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.
Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trumpās proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.
And if those policies werenāt enough, conservativesāwho, after all, believe in liberty and a system of checks and balances to restrain the government to its proper roleāhave plenty of reason to be upset by those actions Trump has taken that transcend our traditional right-left ideological divide. Heās voiced not only skepticism of NATO, but outright hostility to it. Heās pulled America back from its role as an international advocate for human rights. Heās attacked the notion of an independent judiciary. He personally intervened to request the FBI to ease up on its investigation of a former adviser of his, then fired FBI Director James Comey and freely admitted he did so to alleviate the pressure he felt from Comeyās investigation. For those conservatives who were tempted to embrace a āwait-and-seeā approach to Trump, what theyāve seen, time and again, is almost unimaginable.
And yet as surprising as this all has been, itās also the natural outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics. Trump is what happens when a political party abandons ideas, demonizes intellectuals, degrades politics and simply pursues power for the sake of power.
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āTrump Is What Happens When a Political Party Abandons Ideasā
Trump was a guaranteed loser, I thought. In the Virginia presidential primary, I even voted for him, hoping to hasten the partyās demise. In the weeks before the November election, I predicted a Clinton presidency would fix much of what ails our country. On November 8, I voted for Clinton and left the ballot booth reasonably sure she would win.
Needless to say, I was as dumbfounded by the election results as Max Bialystock was by the success of āSpringtime for Hitler.ā For two months after Trump won, I couldnāt read any news about the election, and considered abandoning political commentary permanently. It wasnāt just that Trump disgusted me; I was disgusted with myself for being so stupid. I no longer trusted my own powers of observation and analysis.
Almost everything that has happened since November 8 has been the inverse of what Iād imagined. Trump didnāt lose; he won. The Republican Party isnāt undergoing some sort of reckoning over what it believes; his branch of the Republican Party has taken control. Most troubling, perhaps, is that rather than reassert themselves, the moderate Republicans have almost all rolled over entirely.
Trump has turned out to be far, far worse than I imagined. He has instituted policies so right wing they make Ronald Reagan, for whom I worked, look like a liberal Democrat. He has appointed staff people far to the right of the Republican mainstream in many positions, and they are instituting policies that are frighteningly extreme. Environmental Protection Administration Administrator Scott Pruitt proudly denies the existence of climate change, and is doing his best to implement every item Big Oil has had on its wish list since the agency was established by Richard Nixon. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is actively hostile to the very concept of public education and is doing her best to abolish it. Every day, Attorney General Jeff Sessions institutes some new policy to take incarceration and law enforcement back to the Dark Ages. Trumpās proposed budget would eviscerate the social safety net for the sole purpose of giving huge tax cuts to the ultrawealthy.
And if those policies werenāt enough, conservativesāwho, after all, believe in liberty and a system of checks and balances to restrain the government to its proper roleāhave plenty of reason to be upset by those actions Trump has taken that transcend our traditional right-left ideological divide. Heās voiced not only skepticism of NATO, but outright hostility to it. Heās pulled America back from its role as an international advocate for human rights. Heās attacked the notion of an independent judiciary. He personally intervened to request the FBI to ease up on its investigation of a former adviser of his, then fired FBI Director James Comey and freely admitted he did so to alleviate the pressure he felt from Comeyās investigation. For those conservatives who were tempted to embrace a āwait-and-seeā approach to Trump, what theyāve seen, time and again, is almost unimaginable.
And yet as surprising as this all has been, itās also the natural outgrowth of 30 years of Republican pandering to the lowest common denominator in American politics. Trump is what happens when a political party abandons ideas, demonizes intellectuals, degrades politics and simply pursues power for the sake of power.
continue reading...
āTrump Is What Happens When a Political Party Abandons Ideasā