Andrew Sullivan dares to voice public optimism in the second entry of his weekly tripartite diary:
The dream is that a clear and decisive defeat for the GOP in November can help shift the narrative set in 2016 so that history records Trump and his enablers as an outlier in corruption, incompetence, and insanity and we are able to cauterize this hideously illiberal period in American history. That was my hope in the first six months of this nightmare, until I began to despair at the resilience of Trump’s support. Now, suddenly, we have a chance to bring it to fruition.
For America’s sake and the world’s, we need to draw a hard line under this presidency — and we now have an unexpected chance to do exactly that. You can almost taste the prospect of a post-Trump America in the air these days. Let’s keep our focus on this simple task and vote in such numbers that even he cannot dispute his utter rejection by the American people. Know hope.
The trick will be to recognize a President as dangerous as this one had to have supporters and enablers, and they need to be recognized and removed from office as well. I don’t mean the early ones who have since repented, because one of America’s great themes is redemption, and repentance is the first step down that rocky path. But just a few months ago, the Senate had its chance to eject the President from the Oval Office, and slept its way, sometimes literally, through the case presented by the House of Representatives’ case managers. Those Republican Senators, with the notable exception of Senator Romney (R-UT), who voted for conviction, should be ejected from their seats. As an independent, I don’t necessarily think their replacement with what I will call a Reformation Republican is a bad thing, but such persons should be closely examined by voters for their positions, with such thoughts as leaving the United Nations or other honored international organizations considered disqualifying.
Even more importantly, this experiment in amateur-hour, in letting barroom blowhards and adherents of bizarre right-fringe policies take respected positions in government, should be discussed at length in public forums, and questions raised about how to better ensure the suitability of future candidates. I will beat my traditional drums:
- I want to see competency as well as ideology discussed and taken into account.
- I desperately want the public to realize that expertise in one sector of society, such as the CEO of a company, has little relevance to government. Remember Governor Ventura (I-MN)? For all that he displayed the outsized personality he’d created for his pro wrestling career, he took his position seriously, not only during his one term tenure (he did not run for reelection), but prior to the election: he was mayor of Brooklyn Park, MN. Donald Trump? He did nothing more than express opinions and make predictions, almost all of them wrong.
- Any calls for party-line voting for the sake of the party should be dismissed as damaging to the party and the country, for reasons I’ve discussed here.
- Micro-targeting should be disowned by all candidates. It may be un-Constitutional to pass a law against it on First Amendment grounds, but there’s nothing wrong with a voter making it a personal requirement that candidates disown that particular communications strategy. Public political messaging only, please. And we use please merely to be polite.
- Speaking of communications strategies, I desire voters to learn about communications strategies used to manipulate them. From abortion to subtly racist email that use the words socialism and communism and gun control on the right, and a few more on the left[0], I hope voters will learn that, if you’re breathing heavily by the time you’ve heard or read the message, if you’re roiling with emotion, maybe you should sit back and consider exactly what has been said.
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A -15+ gap in Trump’s approval numbers is hard to ignore.
Respect each other. Too often, we hear of libtards and woketards and snowflakes and wingnuts. It’s a tradition in American politics to hate on your political opponents, but we also have a tradition of discarding that hate and coming together to realize that no one has a monopoly on good ideas – or just what defines an American, either. This often happens in moments of national distress, and as the Republicans refuse to do more than wheeze about fake pandemics and hail Trump ego-rallies, our distress only deepens. I don’t expect the current Republican leadership to be part of a rapprochement, but I do expect that some of the Republican base, especially the moderates, to take part. We’ve seen the moderate Republicans in Kansas kick out some of the extremists when it came to Kansas getting into trouble over the Laffer Curve religious tenet of Governor Brownback; I think we may be seeing the start of this as a national trend.
- Speaking of that Laffer Curve, get rid of any allegiance to it; it has proven to be a failure, both at the state and national levels. Learn the lesson: taxes can be good when used, competently, for good ends. Incompetence makes taxes bad.
I could go on for a while, but I’ll spare the prescriptions. Sullivan has been fairly dark ever since before Trump was elected, a veritable bellwether. That he’s turning positive on this front, even if he’s dour concerning wokeness (the first part of that same diary), suggests that maybe we’re moving away from the magnetism of far right politics (lower taxes, we don’t need to change, God loves us) and charisma[1] to a more rational approach, where expertise is appreciated. There’ll always be a few folks who worship the “strong leader” who just talks tough; real strong leaders in democracies know how to engage with their colleagues to craft strong legislation, address injustice, and improve the lot of those who need improving the most.
And that’s what we need now, more than ever.
0 For all that I get swamped in Democratic mailings, I read virtually none of it. They seem less willing to use trigger words, but they will evoke certain images: destroying the Post Office, or relatively safe electoral seats being in danger.
1 Yeah, I’m told Trump is charismatic. I don’t get it. Then again, I’m told Bill Clinton was charismatic and even sexy, back in the day. He made my skin crawl even as I voted for him.
