For many years I was a registered Republican. My parents had been, that’s how I started my voting record. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Ronald Reagan was probably a sham worse than Nixon. But I stayed Republican, thinking I could work within the party…or at least help sabotage it from within. I saw the ‘Moral Majority’ doing the same thing, taking over from the other side of an ideological wall. While I was growing more liberal, educated, tolerant, and cosmopolitan…my party was openly regressing.
Around 2000, I abandoned the GOP and became an Independent voter. For years, I’d told myself the Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility. But trickle down economics never worked. The GOP’s usual mandate of practical business strategies and responsible stewardship took a back seat to social conservatism, to an unholy alliance between big business and religious organizations brokered by shameless social engineers like Frank Luntz.
We now have Young-Earth creationists serving to guide government science departments. From deregulation and underfunding of government oversight…we get exploding fertilizer plants not inspected for 30 years, plus catastrophic lead levels in mismanaged water supplies. Our infrastructure crumbles around us. The openly obstructionist Republican Party has gone from willfully not doing its job because ‘Ewww, Black President!’, to being unable to do its job at all. We’ve gone from ‘Global warming is a liberal hoax’ to ‘Global warming is real but it’s too late to do anything about it, so let’s just pray over it and assume God can save us.’
We have depressed, resentful middle-aged white people lashing out at a world changing too fast for them to adapt. We have depressed, economically-stressed POC being swayed by false promises of inclusion and affinity fraud. We have the most loathsome shadows of our national rascist, isolationist, anti-science past stalking confidently out into daylight, certain of their welcome.
We have the roots of an ISIS-style Christian regime trying to organize out of Tea Party groups, neo-Nazi militias, gun-rights lobbyists, televangelists’ flocks, and disaffected independents who would rather vote for anarchy than workable solutions. (They’ll disavow it, act like victims, and cry slander, but really? If they think they can get away with it, they’ll try. That kind of mindset is about control, not compromise.) Think it can’t happen here? Syria wasn’t a failed state 15 years ago. We need to take a hard look at Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
That’s us, right now.
In Donald Drumpf we now have the perfectly logical end result of all those forces coming together. The Republicans finally have the candidate they deserve, the one they’ve wanted for at least 50 years. The one they made.
He’s not a joke. He’s deadly serious about running for the Presidency, since it seems a fleet of sports cars, trophy wives, business and property acquisitions, and essentially free media publicity all his life have not soothed his rampaging inner drive for validation. I honestly don’t know if he’s got the same crippling Daddy-issues that George W Bush has…or if Drumpf really is the brash buffoon he plays. It’s as if someone shopped a comedy script about a Rodney Dangerfield Presidency, only a conservative think tank decided it was a political mandate. He won’t be as easily controlled as Dubya, though, and his alleged ‘better’ business instincts won’t help him actually govern. If he’s really, truly smart, he’ll be playing to lose. He gains everything that way and doesn’t risk shattering his ‘business genius’ reputation beyond all repair.
I’m an Independent. I can’t vote today in Arizona’s primary. I have complaints and doubts about all the candidates on all sides…but I have no doubt that The Donald is absolutely the worst political choice we could make at this time in our history. The best thing I can hope about him, is that he knows it, too.