by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Well,
it’s finally over. The mountain has moved and brought forth two mice. Two of
the most widely and viscerally hated people in the entire country, Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump, will be the major-party nominees for President of the
United States in the November 8 election. Comedian Mort Sahl used to make a
joke about the so-called “progress” of American politics, changing it only to
update the names in the punchline: “In the 1790’s we were a nation of 30
million people and we had George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison and Benjamin Franklin. Today we’re a nation of 320 million, and
the best we can come up with is Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? Darwin was
wrong!”
The
primary season started out with at least 22 more or less substantial candidates
for President of the United States: 17 Republicans and five Democrats. It also
began with the widespread assumption by the mainstream corporate media and the
Washington punditocracy that the eventual nominees would be Hillary Clinton and
Jeb Bush (remember Jeb Bush — or “Jeb!,” as he futilely tried to restyle
himself?). That would have been an even
bigger snooze-fest than the 1988 Presidential election between Michael Dukakis
and George H. W. Bush, both so bland one Los Angeles Times cartoonist joked, “You wanted a Presidential election
that wouldn’t be about personalities? You just got it.”
The
D.C. “experts” who get paid more money per year than I’ll probably see in a
lifetime just to blather on and on and on
in front of cable-news cameras, and who always remind me of Oscar Wilde’s
marvelous line about the woman who “could state the obvious with a sense of
real discovery,” kept telling us, “Clinton v. Bush, Clinton v. Bush, Clinton v.
Bush,” as if they could hypnotize primary voters into making it so. Meanwhile
millions of Americans thought, “Clinton v. Bush — didn’t we have that election already?”
When
Hillary Clinton was running for the Democratic nomination against Barack Obama
in 2008, I wrote an editorial that said one of the reasons I thought she would
lose was what I called the “Groundhog Day” factor, after the Bill Murray movie
in which he has to keep reliving the same day over and over again. I didn’t
think that many voters would really want
to cast their ballots so the sequence of Presidents from 1988 to 2012 would
read, “Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton.” And quite frankly I’m not that sure all
that many American voters are going to be thrilled about a sequence that reads,
“Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Clinton,” either.
Instead
the Republican primary process was taken over by an orange-haired real-estate
developer and “reality” TV star from New York named Donald J. Trump. He zoomed
to the top of the Republican field from the moment he announced his candidacy
in June 2015, when he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending
the best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re
bringing those problems. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people, but I speak to border
guards and they’re telling us what we’re getting.”
The
pundits told us that America wouldn’t stand for a Presidential candidate who
was not only racist but so blatantly open and seemingly proud of his racism.
They were wrong: Trump zoomed to the top of the polls for the Republican nomination
and never lost his front-runner status. The next month he insulted 2008
Republican Presidential nominee John McCain for having been a prisoner of war
in North Viet Nam. “He’s not a war hero” said Trump. “He’s a ‘war hero’ because
he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Again, pundits said Trump
would get sunk by the military-loving voters of the Republican party for
insulting a man whose courage in the face of imprisonment and torture had
become legendary and inspired millions of Americans, including many who
disagreed with McCain’s politics.
Wrong
again. And the pundits were wrong again when he responded to Fox News debate
anchor Megyn Kelly’s question about his demeaning remarks about women with a
demeaning remark about her as a woman, saying that she had “blood coming out of
her eyes, or her wherever.” Not only did his poll ratings soar, they soared
even higher among Republican women than Republican men. Throughout the
Republican primary campaign, Trump kept spewing out bigoted remark after
bigoted remark, including his demand for a “temporary” ban on Muslims in
America — and his political stock soared ever higher.
Most
recently, he’s attacked the judge in the San Diego fraud case against Trump
University — a crash course in real-estate expertise that’s alleged by the
people suing him to have been a pyramid scheme — saying that because the judge
is “Mexican” (actually he’s the U.S.-born son of Mexican immigrant parents) and
Trump wants to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, he can’t fairly
judge Trump in the case. That’s given cold feet to the Republican Congressional
leaders who had just begrudgingly bowed to the inevitable and endorsed Trump —
House Speaker Paul Ryan called it “textbook racism” (a first for me: I can’t recall
ever having agreed with Paul Ryan
before!) — but it plays just fine to the people who’ve been Trump’s base from
day one of his campaign.
Throughout
the campaign, pundits have been wrong about Trump. They’ve kept saying about
his latest outrageous remark, “This will
be the thing that takes him down” — and instead he’s soared ever higher.
They’ve said he could win Republican primaries but he’d never get more than
about 35 percent of the vote — until his vote totals started reaching 40, 45,
50, 60 percent. Now they’re saying, “O.K., he was able to win Republican
primaries by appealing to the Republican base. But now he’ll be running in a
general election, and he’s going to have to broaden his appeal.” That’s how a
Presidential race usually works — you mobilize your partisan base to win a
primary campaign and then move to the center to convince non-partisan or less
partisan voters to vote for you too — but it’s not how Trump is likely to
campaign, and there are very good reasons for him not to.
Donald
Trump has three things going for him as the general-election campaign begins.
First, he’s built up a reputation for “courage” for saying things other
candidates may believe but don’t dare say — and in the process he’s given a lot
of people, especially older white voters whose incomes have taken a bath as
America has deindustrialized, a sense of pride in bigoted, racist attitudes
they’ve been told by more conventional politicians and the media they ought to
be ashamed of. Second, his policy statements — to the extent he’s made any —
don’t fall along a simple, easy dividing line between “Left” and “Right.” His
racism, sexism and religious bigotry and his overweening pride in himself and
his money mark him as a man of the Right, but he’s also taken positions — like
pledging to preserve Social Security and Medicare, and opposing the so-called
“free trade” agreements that have sucked away America’s once-strong industrial
jobs base — that are generally thought of as Left.
Third,
and most important, Donald Trump is incredibly rich. Just how rich he is remains a matter of dispute; when one of
the major economics magazines aimed at Trump’s fellow 1-percenters estimated
Trump’s net worth at $4 billion, he called to complain and said it should have
been $10 billion. When they asked him where the extra $6 billion came from, he
said, “That’s the value of the Trump name.” But he does have a lot of money — enough to have so many homes
in so many places it’s hard to keep track of him all. My joke about Mitt Romney
in 2012 that he’d be assured of the election if he could only carry all his
home states is true of Trump as well. And unlike the last politically
inexperienced CEO the Republicans nominated for President (Wendell Willkie in
1940), Trump is running in a country brainwashed by decades of conservative
pro-capitalist propaganda to revere money per se.
As
I noted the first time I wrote about Trump in these pages, the cult of the
general in American politics has given way to the cult of the CEO. We haven’t
had a President who was a general since Eisenhower and we haven’t had a
president who served in the military at all since the first Bush. Years of
glorification of CEO’s through memoirs, fawning documentaries and “reality” TV
shows like Trump’s own The Apprentice
have trained many Americans to regard CEO’s as superior individuals whose very
wealth is a sign of their intelligence and sagacity.
It’s
not a new idea. It dates back to John Calvin, the founder of Puritanism, who
believed that only a handful of superior people (the “elect”) were going to
Heaven and God’s way of showing the rest of us who they were was their material
success in this world. But when the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc in
eastern Europe collapsed in the late 1980’s the U.S. Right sold millions of Americans
on the idea that this showed not only the superiority of capitalism, but the
superiority of capitalists. Willkie had
the bad luck to run for President when America was still coming out of the
Great Depression and trust in the U.S. business community was at an all-time
low; Trump has the fabulous luck to be running in an era in which many
Americans equate money with genius and think, “He must know how to run the country — he’s rich!”
There’s one more
thing about Donald Trump that a lot of people don’t realize that makes him an
incredibly strong Presidential contender, especially to the base of disgusted
working-class men, victims of the systematic deindustrialization of America
over the last four decades. He sounds like the voices they already trust to explain
the political world to them: the voices of talk radio. Nation writer David Bromwich argued in a recent review of
Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money (http://www.thenation.com/article/the-soul-of-the-tea-party/?nc=1),
an account of how rich people on the radical Right, David and Charles Koch in
particular, built the Tea Party movement into a massive force that largely took
control of American politics, that her analysis had neglected the importance of
talk radio and Fox News.
I
think Bromwich himself ignored how much the Right’s money had to do with those.
Fox News is a creation of radical-Right media magnate Rupert Murdoch, who’s
used to using both his money and his media outlets to move politics in his
native Australia, Great Britain and the U.S. dramatically to the Right; and
major talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh stay on the air through the money of
corporations run by radical-Right CEO’s even if more mainstream businesses drop
them. But Bromwich is right about both the rhetorical style and the influence
of talk radio and its hosts on the slice of America that has become Donald
Trump’s political base.
“Many
reversals that have surprised the Democrats in the last seven years would not
have surprised someone who listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck,
Mark Levin, or Michael Savage, and to the people who call their shows begging
for political guidance,” Bromwich writes. “Trump was a favorite golf partner of
Limbaugh’s, who promoted his candidacy with a high good humor that has turned
to serious advocacy — and he was a lively and frequent interviewee for Hannity
on the subject of Obama’s birth certificate.”
One
can hear the voice of talk radio full-blown in Donald Trump, just as one can
hear them in embryo in the surviving recordings of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the
legendary Red-baiter of the early 1950’s: the booming voice, the halting
cadences (just to make sure everyone in the audience “gets” what they’re
saying), the appeals to “common sense” over intellectual complexity (which, in
the talk-radio world, is just a way the bad guys have of confusing people), the
bellicose wise-guy tone, the pride they
take in their racism, sexism and other bigotries, and the Manichean ideology
which not only divides the world into 100 percent good guys and 100 percent bad
guys but assumes that the “truth” of what they’re saying is so obvious no one
could possibly have a good-faith reason for disagreeing with it. Everyone who disputes the gospel according to talk radio must
be part of a vast conspiracy out to destroy America. Donald Trump has the votes
of the up to 30 percent of all Americans Bromwich argues are part of the Tea
Party because he’s the first modern-day Presidential candidate who sounds like
a talk-radio host.
So
don’t automatically assume that Donald Trump can’t win the Presidency. There
may be a limit to the amount of outrageousness he can get away with before it
reaches a critical mass that turns off enough voters so he loses, but he hasn’t
hit it yet and no one knows what it is, or even whether it exists. To people
who tell me they can’t imagine a country like this one electing that
orange-haired thug, I say, “I’m sure there were a lot of similar conversations
in Germany in the early 1930’s: ‘We’re a civilized country. We’d never let a
freak like Hitler come to power.’”
Bernie Sanders and His “Army”
Meanwhile,
on the Democratic side, an unlikely challenger emerged to the supposedly
inevitable “coronation” of Hillary Clinton as the nominee. Through much of 2015
the group of activist Democrats that variously describes itself as the “Left,”
“Progressive” and “Democratic” wing of the Democratic Party had been putting
intense pressure on Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren to run for
President. When she decided not to, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders stepped into
the race. His first campaign appearances had the air of an understudy taking
over a role from an indisposed star — “Senator Elizabeth Warren will not appear
this evening. Her part will be played by Senator Bernie Sanders” — and that
wasn’t the only, or even the biggest, strike against him.
First,
Bernie Sanders had never run for office before as a Democrat. He’d spent 30
years in elective office — first as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest
city; then as Vermont’s sole member of the House of Representatives (since it
isn’t big enough to have more than one); then as a U.S. Senator — but he’d
always run as an independent. Indeed, a number of Democrats were making a to-do
about Sanders never having registered to vote as a Democrat — until it came out
that Vermont’s election law doesn’t contain party affiliation: everyone who registers to vote in Vermont does so as a
non-partisan.
Second,
Sanders proclaimed himself a “democratic socialist” in a country in which that
very combination of words has long since seemed oxymoronic. Both the sorry
examples of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and the self-styled “people’s
democracies” of Eastern Europe — the repression, the terror, the Gulags — and
the way Right-wingers had exploited them for propaganda had convinced most
Americans that socialism is automatically tyranny. As things turned out,
though, Right-wingers have so overdone their anti-socialist propaganda that the
word “socialist,” though still negative, has lost the kiss-of-death status it
once had in this country. From day one of Barack Obama’s presidency,
Republicans have been denouncing him and everything he stood for as “socialist”
— which I suspect led a lot of people, especially young voters who’d supported
him, to think, “Hey, I like Obama, so if Obama’s a socialist, I must be a
socialist too.”
Sanders,
it turned out, had a lot going for him
that virtually nobody in the media or the punditocracy realized. First, he’s an
infectiously energetic campaigner. Second, he became one of those unlikely
older figures that inspires young people, His attacks on the corporate
aristocracy that really rules America no matter who gets elected to political
office, his demand to smash the power of organized money over the political
system and his holding up Hillary Clinton, with her six-figure speaking fees to
Goldman Sachs and the potential conflicts of interest between her role as
Secretary of State in the first Obama term and the Clinton Foundation,
resonated less than what he specifically proposed to do. To young people stuck
living with their parents so they can take advantage of the provision of
Obamacare that they can stay on their parents’ health plan until they’re 26,
and even more concerned about spending their entire adult lives paying off a
six-figure student loan debt, Sanders’ calls for universal health care and free
public-college tuition resonated because those were things that would
immediately benefit them.
But
Sanders, with his foxy Jewish-grandpa persona (he got compared so often to comedian and Seinfeld creator Larry David that when Saturday
Night Live started parodying him they hired
David to play him), offered young people more than just a few tangible benefits
like access to health care and free college. He also offered them a sense of
hope, a sense that there’s a way out of the horrible mess they’ve been born
into. Before young people embraced Sanders en masse, I had thought the overwhelming majority of
America’s youth thought about politics pretty much along the lines of The
Hunger Games. In Suzanne Collins’ trilogy,
the existing system sucks, the one the so-called “revolutionaries” want to
create sucks almost as much — maybe a little bit more — and the only healthy alternative
for people who want to live a decent life is to drop out altogether, live as
individuals, have as little to do with politics as possible and literally cultivate their gardens.
Like
Occupy Wall Street five years ago, the Sanders campaign pulled back the curtain
and showed America’s young people a glimpse not only of a better future but a
way to get there. My hope is that they will continue to build the “political
revolution” Sanders called for and build a progressive electoral movement,
within but not of the Democratic Party,
that will contest elections at all level — and simultaneously build a Tea Party of the Left, an
organized movement outside the
electoral system and put pressure on elected officials, especially Democrats,
to keep their promises to the people who elected them to pursue a progressive
agenda instead of doing what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did — and what,
absent this kind of pressure, Hillary Clinton is likely to do as well if
elected — which is gravitate towards the center and pursue only as much
“change” as the 1 percent will permit.
My
fear is that the young who turned out in droves to support Sanders will slink
back into their closets, just as many of them did after the Occupy camps were
closed down (the few Occupy movements that remain viable, like Women Occupy San
Diego, were the ones made up mostly of older people). Unable to make political
change in the first electoral campaign they tried it in, a lot of the Sandersistas might just give up on the system altogether and revert
to the view that both big parties are corrupt and therefore we shouldn’t have
anything to do with something as dirty, messy and slimy as (ugh) politics. Indeed, one of my biggest disenchantments with the
Hillary supporters is they are pissing away the energies of the young people
they need to rebuild not only the Democratic party but the progressive movement
as a whole.
Instead,
they’re backing an old Establishment war horse whose supporters keep telling
America she’s the “most qualified” candidate ever to run for President. And
Clinton herself, putting forward her experience and her résumé as the big
reasons we should vote for her, seems clueless about how much the American
political landscape has changed, to the point where experience seems to be a negative in the minds of many voters on both Left and Right
today. If I were Hillary Clinton about the last thing I’d want (or want my surrogates) to do is
prattle on about my “experience” and how it makes me “qualified.” By those
standards, probably the most “qualified” President in U.S. history was William
Howard Taft — who made such a hash of his one term that when he ran for
re-election in 1912, he placed third. And one of the least “qualified”
Presidents, Abraham Lincoln —
whose whole political experience before 1860 was three terms in the Illinois
state legislature and one term in Congress — did a pretty good job defeating
the racist, slaveholding South and holding the country together.
How Trump Could Win
I
actually started writing the above a month ago, after the primary season was
more or less over and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had emerged as the
presumptive major-party nominees. I wrote most of what you’ve just read before
the galvanic events of the past month: before the massacre of 49 patrons of the
Pulse Gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida by a screwed up young Afghan-American
who claimed “allegiance” to ISIS (and to al-Qaeda, and to a martyr who belonged
to al-Nusra — three groups that hate each other almost as much as they hate
“infidels”). Before subsequent terror attacks in Turkey and Saudi Arabia —
including a suicide bombing in Medina, Islam’s second holiest city, of pilgrims
on the most sacred Muslim rite, the hajj
— which makes one wonder why these supposedly super-devout Muslims are so
outrageously flouting Muhammad’s injunction in the Quran that Muslims must
never kill other Muslims.
I
also wrote it before the so-called “Brexit,” the vote in Great Britain — well,
England (aside from London) and Wales, anyway — to leave the European Union
(EU), and the virtually complete meltdown in British politics that resulted.
When I heard about the fallout from “Brexit” — the resignation of pro-EU
Conservative Party prime minister David Cameron; the sudden withdrawal of the
person who seemed like his likely successor (pro-“Brexit” Conservative Boris
Johnson); the resignation of Nigel Farage, the closest thing to a British
Trump, from the leadership of the openly racist and xenophobic UK Independence
Party; and the effort of leaders in the Labour Party to unseat their party chair, Jeremy Corbyn (essentially the British
Bernie Sanders) — I started joking that if things kept going that way, Queen
Elizabeth II might have to pull rank on everybody, declare the British
electoral system a failure, and rule not as a “constitutional” monarch but a
real one.
And
I wrote it before the bizarre mixed verdict from FBI director James Comey after
the year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server
to conduct government business while Secretary of State, and whether she broke
the laws regarding release of classified information. Comey’s report offered
balm for both Republicans and Democrats; he called Clinton’s practices in
particular (and the State Department’s in general) “extremely careless” and
discovered 110 out of 30,000 e-mails that had been marked at some level of
classification while Hillary Clinton sent, forwarded or attached them. (He also
found 2,000 e-mails that weren’t classified when sent but were classified
later.) But he also said there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute Clinton
because there was no showing that she intended the unauthorized release of classified material.
The
terror assaults and the “Brexit” vote don’t guarantee Trump the Presidency, but
they do make his election quite a bit more possible. “Brexit” indicates that a
modern-day electorate in a cosmopolitan country can be swayed to vote against
their interests by an openly racist appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment and a
factually false but emotionally appealing argument that “foreigners” are taking
money that could be spent to help “real”
Americans/Britons/Germans/Austrians/French/whomever. Also, the more people are
scared by terrorists in general and ISIS in particular, the more they’re going
to vote for the strong man (emphasis here on man) and against the woman who’s pledging to continue the policies of
President Obama, whose measured, nuanced responses to terrorism and political
turmoil in the Middle East and the Muslim world in general just make him seem
“weak.”
In
this, as in so much else, Hillary Clinton is following the blueprint of the
women who ran for head of state in various countries in the 1960’s and 1970’s —
Indira Gandhi in India, Golda Meir in Israel, Margaret Thatcher in Britain —
who were obsessed with the idea that they could be just as “tough,” just as
butch, just as warlike as the men who’d run their countries before them. She’s
running as Obama’s political and ideological successor but also on the
historical record that when she was Secretary of State there were a lot of
opportunities to put American troops into harm’s way in the Middle East and
elsewhere that she wanted to grab — and Obama wouldn’t let her.
The
fact that there’s another way for a woman to run for head of state and succeed
escapes Hillary Clinton. The currently most powerful woman in the world, German
chancellor Angela Merkel, has emphasized consensus and “soft power,” and
presented herself not as an ardent anti-terror warrior (given Germany’s
history, that sort of thing from a German politician scares a lot of people,
including a lot of Germans) but as a rather colorless technocrat. Indeed, one
could argue that Merkel has pulled off by purely economic means what Otto von
Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Adolf Hitler failed to achieve by force of arms
— to make Germany ruler of Europe — and she’s done it without either the machismo posturing of German-descended Donald Trump or the
just-because-I-don’t-have-a-dick-don’t-think-I-can’t-fuck-you attitude of
Hillary Clinton.
Trump
could very will win the election on three issues: his pledge to do anything, regardless of international law, to rid the world
of ISIS and its ilk (down to restoring waterboarding and killing their members’
families); his promise to restore America’s industrial base and bring back the
good-paying blue-collar jobs that allowed white ethnics to rise and become
middle-class in the 1940’s and 1950’s; and his pledge to preserve Social
Security and Medicare for “real” (i.e., white) Americans by shutting the
borders and building walls to keep out Mexicans and Muslims. The Republican
Party in general isn’t worried about the so-called demographic shift of the
country — the growing numbers of poor people, young people and people of color
— because they hold control of so many state legislatures, where the rules of
how America’s elections are win are set, they can pass so-called “voter fraud”
laws that make it impossible for people who’d vote against them to vote at all.
There
are other weapons, secret and not-so-secret, Trump has going for him. In
virtually all the Republican primaries he did better than the polls said he
would, which suggests there’s a kind of reverse version of the “Bradley factor”
working for him. The “Bradley factor” was a phrase coined when Los Angeles Mayor
Tom Bradley, an African-American, lost an election for governor of California
by 2 ½ points when the final polls said he’d been ahead by that much. Political experts realized that about
5 percent of the people polled were too racist to vote for a Black candidate —
but too ashamed of their racism to tell a pollster that they wouldn’t. I
suspect that Trump has a “Bradley factor” of his own working for him — a lot of
people who are going to vote for him but realize that’s not the “politically
correct” thing to say to a pollster — and he’s likely to do about 5 percent
better in the actual election than he is in the polls.
But
the biggest factor Trump has going for him is the creaky way America elects its
presidents. The people don’t elect a President; according to the Constitution,
that’s done by something called the Electoral College, which consists of 538
people — the number of each state’s members of the House of Representatives and
Senate, plus three to represent the District of Columbia, which didn’t have the
right to vote in Presidential elections until the early 1960’s and still isn’t
represented in Congress. Since Electoral College votes are winner-take-all by
state, Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote but Donald Trump could win
the election. How could that happen? Hillary racks up large vote margins in big
“blue” states like California and New York, but Trump ekes out narrow victories
in the Rust Belt states and places like Pennsylvania that have been hit
especially hard by America’s systematic deindustrialization.
Why
You MUST Vote for Hillary Clinton
The
simple fact is, given the way American politics is structured, with virtually
all offices elected on a winner-take-all basis by district, there is no room
for alternative political parties. Organizing the Green Party made sense in its
original home, Germany, where if you get 5 percent or more of the national vote
you get that percentage of seats in the national legislature. It did not — and still does not — make sense to set up a Green
Party in the U.S., where aside from a few local offices that are officially
“nonpartisan,” alternative parties are blocked out from actually electing
anybody by both law and custom. So anyone who, under some sort of twisted
conception of political or moral “virtue,” rejects the Clinton vs. Trump choice
and casts a ballot for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, Dr. Jill Stein of
the Green Party or any of the myriad of other nominal Presidential candidates
of alternative parties, Left or Right, might as well not vote at all.
And
the biggest reason to vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump is that if
Hillary Clinton wins in 2016 there will be another Presidential election in
2020. If Donald Trump wins, that is far from certain. It is quite likely,
knowing what we know of Trump — that he’s a vengeful paranoiac with a sense
he’s been eternally persecuted and a determination to lash back at his enemies
even when he’d be better off rolling with the punches and leaving them alone —
that he simply will not take no for an answer. If Congress doesn’t give him
what he wants, he’ll simply rule by executive fiat (as some Republicans already
accuse Obama of doing). If there’s another terrorist attack in the U.S. on the
scale of 9/11 or the November 2015 attacks in Paris, I suspect Trump will call
a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and, if they sign on and thereby put the
power of the U.S. military at his sole disposal, he will simply suspend the
Constitution and become a dictator, ruling by decree.
And
if no terrorist attack actually happens, I wouldn’t put it past Trump to stage
one. I never believed the 9/11 conspiracy theories — the idea that the George
W. Bush administration staged the attacks to justify asaults on civil liberties
like the USA PATRIOT Act and foreign policy adventures like the war in Iraq —
because they seemed too much like Left-wing versions of the “birther” myth
(that Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to be President) Trump
did so much to propagate. But though I never believed that George W. Bush was
capable, either morally or intellectually, of ordering a phony terrorist attack
to justify moving his political agenda in authoritarian ways, I would have no
problem believing that of Donald Trump.
There are other
more logical, less speculative reasons to prefer Clinton over Trump as
President. One big one is the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court. There already
is a vacancy on the Court — thanks to the Senate Republicans’ refusal even to consider an appointment made by President Obama — and there
are likely to be at least two more in the next Presidential term. Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg is in her eighties and in poor health, and Justice Anthony
Kennedy — normally a hard-line Right-winger (he wrote the second most loathsome
Supreme Court decision in U.S. history, Citizens United) but one who departs from the Right-wing reservation
on juvenile justice and Queer rights, and recently provided key votes to
sustain affirmative action and women’s right to reproductive choice — is also
getting up there.
Trump has
already released his short list of 11 potential appointees to the Court (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/us/politics/donald-trump-supreme-court-nominees.html?_r=0)
and challenged Hillary Clinton to do the same. Among the names on his list are
Texas Supreme Court Justice Don Willett, who according to the New York Times
article by Alan Rappeport and Charlie
Savage cited above “previously worked for the Bush White House’s office of
faith-based initiatives and later in Texas government, where he pushed to keep
a monument of the Ten Commandments on public property and the words ‘under God’
in the Pledge of Allegiance, issues he has promoted on his Facebook page.”
Another is 11th Circuit federal appeals judge William H. Pryor, Jr., “whose
appointment Senate Democrats had tried to block,” wrote Rappeport and Savage,
“in part because, in his previous role as Alabama attorney general, he
denounced Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right
to abortion, as having manufactured ‘a constitutional right to murder an unborn
child.’”
So if Trump gets elected, goodbye to religious freedom in
the U.S. for anyone who isn’t Christian or Jewish. Goodbye to women’s right to
reproductive choice. Goodbye — especially if he gets to replace Anthony
Kennedy, who’s written all the Court’s opinions expanding Queer rights — to any
legal protections for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender people, and hello
to sodomy laws, police raids on Gay bars and a legal definition of marriage as
the union of one man and one woman (period). And goodbye to any meaningful
attempt by the judiciary to rein in Trump’s excesses or to protect the
due-process rights of detainees in the “war on terror.”
On issue after issue, the Democrats aren’t as progressive
as they should be, but compared to Trump they’re infinitely preferable. The
Democrats acknowledge that human beings are causing climate change — though
their proposed actions hardly match the magnitude of the potential crisis — but
Trump thinks human-caused climate change is a hoax invented by Chinese
propagandists. (I’m not making this up, you know.) Hillary Clinton and Bernie
Sanders spent a lot of time in the primary debates arguing over whether the
U.S. minimum wage should be raised to $12 or $15 per hour; Trump said during a
Republican debate that U.S. workers are overpaid and need to make less so they
can compete with workers making the starvation wages employers pay in China, Viet
Nam or Bangladesh.
It’s time for all those people who still repeat,
mantra-like, that there is no difference between the Republican and Democratic
parties to wake up and smell the bitter stench of reality. The Democrats are
hardly as progressive as they should be (if they were, we would be writing
“presumptive Democratic nominee Bernie Sanders”), but the Republicans are an
ideologically libertarian party dedicated to eliminating all social programs, all workers’ rights (including the
minimum wage as well as occupational health and safety), all labor unions, all
public education, all regulation of businesses, all environmental protections
and all limits on the “right” of corporations and wealthy individuals to buy
elections. If you don’t believe me, look at what they’ve done in state after
state — Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, North Carolina and others — where
Republicans control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature.
If you still believe there’s “no difference” between the Republican and
Democratic parties, I’ve got a bottle of contaminated water from Flint,
Michigan to sell you.
The bottom line is that if we want to preserve any hope of
a progressive America in the future, we need to elect Hillary Clinton
President in 2016 and we need to return Congress to Democratic control. We also need to be
in the streets constantly to push her to honor all the progressive promises she
made in the primary campaign, and to do the same with other elected Democrats.
The electoral Republicans and the Tea
Party activists have worked together brilliantly to move the center of gravity
of American politics quite far to the Right. We need to do the same. We need both an electoral movement and a street protest movement to bring it back again and take
America forward instead of letting it revert to the past when Donald Trump says
it was “great” — when African-Americans and other people of color were still on
the back of the bus, women were still in the kitchen, Queers were still in the
closet and the richest Americans’ rule was absolute and unchallengeable.
I’ll end this long article with a quote from my long-time
hero and my first choice for President this year, Bernie Sanders: “Hillary
Clinton on her worst day would be a better President than any of the Republicans
on their best day.” He said that in at least two Democratic primary debates,
and he clearly believes it. So do I.
