Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
I’ve loathed
Donald Trump ever since I first heard of him, ever since that smug,
self-satisfied mug started leering at me from the cover of his best-selling
1987 (ghost-written) memoir The Art of the Deal. I hated him every time I saw him give his verdict, “You’re … FIRED!”
on the promos for his “reality” TV series The Apprentice with all the humanity and compassion of Maximilien
Robespierre or Josef Stalin ordering his latest enemy to the guillotine or the gulag. (I only watched the promos; you’d have had to pay
me to sit through the entire show.) And when Trump announced his Presidential
candidacy in June 2015 with his ringing attack on most immigrants from Mexico
as “criminals and rapists” — and he promptly zoomed to the top of the polls in
the Republican primaries, a status he never lost — I simultaneously quaked with
fear and tried to hide my embarrassment and revulsion that at least 40 percent
of my fellow Americans could actually want that thing as their next President.
So it’s much to
my surprise that 16 months later, I’m actually starting to feel sorry for
Donald Trump. No, it’s not that I have any more sympathy for him or his world
view than I did before. I still see him as an ugly, spoiled rich kid with bad
hair who inherited a nice little fortune from his father and built it into an
even bigger one without any hint of conscience or scruples. And I still see his
politics as a contemptible stew of conspiracy-mongering, attempts to appease
the “social conservative” wing of his party — the ones who want to shove women
back into the kitchens and Queer people back into the closet — and an
immigration strategy to restore America’s white majority plus a tax plan to
make himself and his fellow 0.01 percent richer and everyone else poorer. I’m
also repelled — though not really surprised — about all the reports about his
attitude towards women, which is if he finds them attractive to treat them as
animate sex dolls and, if he doesn’t, to insult them with vicious comments
about blood coming out of their eyes, or their wherever.
What I’m
starting to feel sorry for Donald Trump about is the obvious loss of any
pretense towards sanity. At least when Adolf Hitler went crazy — sometime in
1942-43 Hitler switched from being a rational, cunning person pursuing an evil
agenda to someone insane — he did it in the privacy of his various bunkers and
only the highest officials in the Nazi government had to deal with it. Trump is
doing it in the glare of national TV and on Twitter, where he stays up until
the wee hours of the morning and shares with us the ravings previous
generations of madmen either wrote down in incomprehensible journals or
muttered to themselves in the hallways of asylums. When he first announced his
campaign, a lot of people said, “He must be smart — he’s so rich!” Now they’re
wondering, “How did he get to be so rich when he’s so crazy?”
Trump’s public
unraveling began on October 8, when the Washington Post — famous in U.S. political lore as the paper that
brought down Richard Nixon over Watergate — ran a story about a tape recorded
in 2005 in which he spoke to Billy Bush, a distant relative of the Presidents Bush
and then a host for Access Hollywood,
while Trump was on his way to film a cameo appearance on the long-running soap
opera Days of Our Lives. It
apparently started when Trump started celebrating the good looks of Arianne
Zucker, the actress who was to appear with him in the scene — in which,
ironically, she was playing a woman who offered to have sex with Trump in
exchange for a job, which the Trump character virtuously declined.
“I’ve got to use
some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump told Bush. “You know,
I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like
a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do
it. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” I can’t remember when I first
heard the term “pussy” to describe a woman’s sex organs, but I think it was
around age 12 — and I found it offensive then and still do. To me, though, even
more offensive than Trump’s comments to Bush was his approach to Arianne Zucker
once he actually met her. “How about a little hug for The Donald?” he said. So
much for his later denials that he only talks this sort of trash about women and doesn’t actually do it.
The women
started coming forward after the second debate on TV between Trump and his Democratic
opponent, Hillary Clinton, October 9. Inevitably, Trump got asked by debate
co-moderator Anderson Cooper about those remarks. “Yes,
I’m very, very embarrassed by it,” Trump said. “I hate it. But it’s locker-room
talk. But I have tremendous respect for women, and they have respect for me.”
When Cooper asked him point-blank if he had ever actually approached women in
the ways he’d talked about with Bush, Trump flat-out denied it — “No, I have
not” — and then added what he thought was a sure-fire zinger against his
rival’s husband: “If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse. Mine was words, and
his was action.”
In the next 10 days at least 10 women who’d had
professional or personal interactions with Trump started saying publicly that
he had approached women in workplaces
or in public and done at least some of the things he boasted about with Bush,
including putting his hands on them (one woman said he was “like an octopus”),
backing them into corners and trying to kiss them. One was a reporter for People magazine who said it had happened to her when she was on
assignment from People to interview
Trump. With his usual tone-deafness to complaints from women about virtually
anything, Trump said that at least two of the women accusing him, including the
People reporter, were too unattractive
physically for him to have wanted to
harass them.
As more and more women came forward to accuse him, Trump’s
behavior in response went further off the rails. He accused the Democrats,
Hillary Clinton and the media of being in a grand conspiracy to derail his
Presidential bid. This conspiracy, he said, including getting these women to
lie about him. Later he started saying that the conspiracy was really
controlled and financed by “global bankers” — a term that’s been code for
anti-Jewish attacks since well before the Rothschilds came out of the European
ghettoes at the end of the 18th century and started an international
banking empire that still is a major force in the world economy. That’s one
Trump characteristic that fits the standard clinical definition of paranoia: everything bad that happens to him is the doing of a sinister
conspiracy out to get him.
And Trump has usually been very good at getting other
people to take the fall for him. Not only is he on his third campaign manager
(as well as his third wife), but Billy Bush has already lost his job at NBC.
Technically Bush is on “suspension” but network executives admit they’re highly
unlikely to hire him back because they think women would be upset to see him on
shows like Today with a big female
audience. That’s one reason Trump really thought he could get the Mexican
government to pay for his Great Wall — that and, as a real-estate developer,
he’s always played with other people’s
money and got them to front his capital costs. More recently, he’s said that
Hillary Clinton should take a drug test before the next (and, thankfully, last)
debate between them October 19 because she seemed “pumped up” — even though it
was Trump, not Clinton, who sniffled so often and so loudly during the first
two debates that some people have suggested he’s the one on drugs.
And that doesn’t even begin to address what Trump has been
saying to the legislators and other leaders in his own party who’ve been
questioning whether his nomination is such a great thing for their own
political careers. When House Speaker Paul Ryan, the highest-ranking Republican
officeholder in the country, said he was no longer going to defend Trump or
campaign with him (though he was very careful not to dis-endorse Trump), Trump responded in typical fashion
with a tweet saying that mainstream Republicans don’t know how to win, but “I
will teach them!” There’s been so much public bad blood between Trump and the
Republican party leaders that political analysts are once again talking about a
civil war within the party and perhaps even the collapse of the two-party
system as we know it. (Don’t hold your breath; the Republicans were supposed to
have been dead in the water after Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss in 1964, and
they won the Presidency the next time. Likewise the Democrats in 1976 after
George McGovern’s defeat in 1972.)
In one thing Trump is right. We have had sexual predators in the White House before. There are
enough stories about Bill Clinton acting similarly pushy around women, if not
actually raping them (as Juanita Broaddrick, one of the bedraggled ex-Clinton
paramours Trump dragged to the second debate somehow hoping they would help
make his case against Hillary, has always claimed), that we can readily believe
them. And, if anything, John F. Kennedy of sainted memory was even worse; if
you want to read the whole sordid story, pick up The Dark Side of Camelot by Seymour Hersh (an investigative reporter most famous
for breaking the My Lai scandal during the Viet Nam war), who not only reported
all the gory details of Kennedy’s meat-rack treatment of women but suggested
that he would have lost the 1964 election if he’d lived because Republicans had
enough evidence against him to break the code of omertà that kept the media from reporting about Kennedy’s sex
life during his lifetime.
But Donald Trump isn’t running for President against Bill Clinton. At one point right after the second debate he
said that he and his campaign team would “turn Bill Clinton into Bill Cosby” —
the once beloved, now reviled comedian whose schtick seems to have been to drug women into unconsciousness and then have sex with them — which is just another example of
Trump’s craziness. Whenever a prominent man is revealed as a sexual abuser of
women, or even when it’s revealed that he’s been having a consensual affair,
most people think of his wife as a victim.
Hillary Clinton’s poll approval ratings were never higher than in 1998-1999,
when her husband was impeached and threatened with removal from office over his
affair with Monica Lewinsky. Indeed, one of the biggest beefs the Right seems
to have against her is that, by so publicly standing by her man, she got a lot
of people to think, “Well, if Bill Clinton cheated, the only truly aggrieved party
is Hillary Clinton — and if she’s
willing to forgive him, the rest of us should, too.”
Just how Bill Clinton’s sexual abuse of women is supposed
to be Hillary Clinton’s fault is something Donald Trump has never quite
explained. At some points he’s called her an “enabler” — a term that got coined
in the treatment of alcohol and drug addictions, which Merriam-Webster’s
Online Dictionary defines as “one
that enables
another to achieve an end; especially:
one who enables another to persist in self-destructive behavior ([such] as
substance abuse) by providing excuses or by making it possible to avoid the
consequences of such behavior.” At other points he’s argued that Hillary
Clinton publicly attacked the women who claimed Bill Clinton had abused them,
and that’s what supposedly makes her as
guilty as he. The fact that most Americans aren’t buying it — even people who
wouldn’t vote for her if it would make hurricanes stop coming and Jesus return
still don’t blame her for her husband’s roving eyes, hands or (to use a
Trump-style term) whatever — seems just to be driving Trump crazier.
The Discussion
It’s no surprise
that some writers, trying to look somewhere
for a silver lining in the dark cloud that a U.S. Presidential election has
become consumed by which person has the more sordid past in their dealings with
women — one candidate or the other candidate’s husband — have said that at
least the allegations against Trump will open a “discussion” about how men
treat women generally and in particular how certain powerful men think they can
get away with treating women the way Trump told Billy Bush a “star” could get
away with. Like the “discussions” we keep having in this country about race, most
recently about the persistence of racism in general and unpunished shootings of
unarmed Black men by white police officers in particular, these “discussions”
about how men ought to behave around women and how women should deal with men
who “cross the line” — wherever “the line” is — never seem to solve anything.
They just leave their participants with the glowing, albeit short-lived, illusion that these problems are being addressed.
The facts are
that, as John Gray argued in his best-selling Men Are From Mars, Women Are
From Venus, men and women approach sex very
differently. Men are more likely to detach sex from “love,” whatever that means
in this context. Men are more likely to want — and, if they can find a willing
partner, to get — sex they desire and experience as pure physical sensation,
unencumbered by and untethered to any actual or potential emotional
relationship. As a Gay man, I was always surprised that Gray and other writers
never did the obvious scientific practice called “isolating the variable.” If
your thesis is that men and women have different drives and needs regarding
sex, and that affects and largely determines how they behave sexually, the
logical way to test it is to look at people who don’t need to take into account
the needs, desires and demands of the other gender: totally Gay men and totally
Lesbian women.
I can’t comment
about Lesbians since I’m not one and I’ve deliberately avoided questioning my
Lesbian friends about how they manage their sexuality. But after having lived
as an openly Gay man for 34 years, sometimes single, sometimes partnered and
now legally married, I think I can comment with some degree of authority on how
men manage their sexuality when they don’t have to deal with women. In general
(and one rule about these sweeping generalizations about human behavior is you
can always find individuals who don’t behave the way the generalizations
predict), men do detach sex from emotion
more readily than women. As I’ve told women friends, if you’re a man and just
want a sexual experience for the physical joy of it, with no emotional
encumbrances, you’re more likely to find a willing partner if you’re Gay than
if you’re straight.
One reason I
find it weird reading about what Donald Trump allegedly did to women is that
I’ve been in plenty of Gay social settings, mostly at parties with only Gay men
as guests, where hugging, kissing and even groping people you’ve never met
before isn’t considered such a big deal. If you start doing that to someone who
doesn’t want you to, either he’ll signal his disapproval by tensing up or
quietly, politely, ask you to stop and take your attentions somewhere else. And
yet the same Gay men who feel comfortable being at a party like that, letting
their hair down and engaging in intense physical behavior with strangers would
be appalled if someone did that to them in a workplace or a formal professional
setting, the way Trump is alleged to have done with the women who have come
forward against him.
There’s a part
of me that’s always been appalled at how much of the interaction between men
and women is based, at least from the male perspective, on lying and cheating.
I remember in the 1960’s, when I was a teenager and just starting to deal with
puberty and the burgeoning of my own sexuality, seeing ads for a book called How
to Pick Up Girls. Judging from the ads,
this book — which I’ve never read — was based on the premise that women are
fiercely protective of their sexuality and therefore men who want to get laid
can only do it by tricking women into giving it up for them. I also remember a
book by Dan Greenburg called Scoring,
whose cover depicted a woman’s body as a pinball table, with various scores
over sexually significant areas like mouth and breasts and the highest score,
of course, over the crotch.
This so-called
“pick-up culture” was supposed to have been killed by the sexual revolution of
the 1960’s (though for all too many women the “sexual revolution” became just
another way for men to manipulate and guilt-trip them into having sex they
didn’t really want), but it’s made a stunning comeback in recent years. Elliot
Rodger, the alleged mass murderer in Santa Barbara in May 2014, read
extensively in the modern-day online equivalents of How to Pick Up Girls and targeted both women he thought were harming him
by not having sex with him, and men who were more attractive and luckier in the
seduction department than he. In his lengthy manifestos explaining why he
killed, Rodger described himself as an “incel” — short for “involuntarily
celibate” — and said his killings were “retribution” for those who had put him
in that status.
Another
unhealthy thing about men in general is their tendency to use sex as a weapon
for subjugation. Ever since men have been fighting wars, they’ve regarded women
as one of the prizes of victory and rape as the conqueror’s due. Susan
Brownmiller’s pioneering book from 1975, Against Our Will: Men, Women and
Rape, argued that rapists were “the shock
troops of the patriarchy,” the enforcement arm that told women there were
limits on where they could go, when they could go there, and what they could
wear. No matter how often both women and sympathetic men tell rape victims that
having been raped wasn’t their fault, the social programming that says, “If you
hadn’t gone out at night … if you hadn’t gone out alone … if you hadn’t worn
such ‘provocative’ clothing … ,” never seems to let up — and sometimes judges
in rape cases explicitly blame the victim for her rape.
There are too
many examples of people in public office or high-status private careers who
push women around and try to force themselves on them in the ways that have
been alleged against Donald Trump. What’s more, they don’t necessarily align
where you’d expect them to along the partisan Democratic/Republican or
ideologically progressive/conservative line. It seems that for every Donald
Trump or former Fox News chief Roger Ailes, who just a month before the Trump
scandals broke lost his job over his alleged harassment of women (including
highly-paid women anchors on the network), there’s a former San Diego Mayor Bob
Filner, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, former Congressmember Anthony
Wiener, or former Presidents Kennedy and Clinton, who also treat women like
meat. For years Filner kept his seat in Congress with the support of women’s
organizations — he regularly scored 100 percent on the National Organization
for Women’s and National Abortion Rights Action League’s ratings — only to be
revealed as a serial abuser of women when he catapulted himself from the
relative obscurity of a minority-party Congressmember to the heavy media
attention of being mayor of a major American city.
Donald Trump
strikes me as a man who for all his surface bluster is incredibly anxious about
his own sexuality. He’s gone through three wives (so far), all of them
supermodels, and he’s dumped the first two as if they were simply worn-out
commodities, the way other men discard a now-dull razor. He’s publicly stated
that he’s sexually turned off by a woman who’s over 35 or a woman who’s given
birth. His obsession with building the biggest, grandest buildings possible and
putting his name on them in the hugest letters he can manage sounds like
classic Freudian projection. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he has a pretty
small cock and feels he has to make up for that by building those huge
erections and acting like a swaggering boor. When he went into that bizarre
riff in one of the Republican debates and challenged Marco Rubio over the size
of their respective “hands,” I couldn’t help but joke, “This is the best
argument for Hillary I’ve heard yet. If this is how people with dicks behave
when they campaign for the Presidency, maybe it’s about time we had a President
who doesn’t have one.”
The Alternative
Meanwhile, this
was supposed to be the week that Hillary Clinton was to be done in by the
latest passel of leaked e-mails from WikiLeaks — whose founder, Julian Assange,
became a hero in progressive circles by publishing Edward Snowden’s information
and then turned out to have at least two open rape charges against him. They
include excerpts from some of her secret speeches to Goldman Sachs and/or other
financial firms and charter members of the 0.01 percent. These may or may not
have been the speeches her primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, was after her
to release, but as Doyle McManus noted in his Los Angeles Times column October 16 (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mcmanus-wikileaks-clinton-revelations-20161016-snap-story.html),
the real news story is how unenlightening they are.
“Take a deep
dive into the more than 10,000 Clinton
campaign e-mails published by WikiLeaks, and here’s what you’ll learn,” McManus
wrote: “Hillary Clinton is a careful, methodical, tightly-controlled
politician. Her jokes, her tweets and even her purported ad libs are often
scripted by aides. She hates to apologize, even when she admits she’s done
something wrong, like keeping e-mails on a home server. She’s a progressive,
but not an ideologue; she yearns for ‘rational, moderate voices’ on both sides.
Above all, she’s a pragmatist who’s willing to compromise — and to have
‘both a public and a private position’ if that’s what it takes to make a deal.
… In other words, she’s a Clinton — a Democrat who believes in progressive
goals, but who’s willing to trim them, postpone them, even throw them under a
bus (temporarily, anyway) when practical politics requires.”
When Clinton got
called on that bit about having “both a public and a private position” on an
issue during the October 9 debate, she invoked President Abraham Lincoln as he
was depicted in Steven Spielberg’s 2012 biopic Lincoln. The movie focused exclusively on the deal-making
needed to get a lame-duck Congress to pass the 13th Amendment, which
abolished slavery, in the early months of 1865 when Lincoln’s Republican Party
had a majority in Congress but not the two-thirds needed to pass a
Constitutional amendment and send it to the states for ratification. As I wrote
about Spielberg’s Lincoln on my
movie blog, http://moviemagg.blogspot.com:
Lincoln is a film mainly about the political compromises
that had to be made to get the Thirteenth Amendment passed, and in particular
the outright corruption involved in securing the 20 Democratic votes needed:
Lincoln and Seward hired a man named W. N. Bilbo (James Spader) — apparently a
composite of several real historical figures rather than a really existing
person of the period — to offer lame-duck Democrats patronage jobs in exchange
for their “yes” votes on the Amendment. The offers shade over into outright
bribery at times — Lincoln and Seward had given Bilbo and his two associates a
kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink indication that offering cash bribes was not
O.K. but offering jobs was — something Lincoln would have been all too familiar
with because he got the Republican Presidential nomination in the first place
through a similarly corrupt deal.
On
the first ballot at the 1860 convention Seward placed first, Lincoln second and
Simon Cameron third; then Cameron offered to withdraw and throw his votes to
Lincoln but only if Lincoln appointed him Secretary of War — and Cameron
immediately used the War Department to reward his friends in the business
community with fat contracts and ran such a lousy operation that in early 1862
Lincoln fired him and replaced him with Stanton. Stanton did such a great job
cleaning house at the War Department and making sure the Union armies actually
got the supplies the government was paying for that quite a few people at the
time believed that he had been the
decisive leader in winning the war — which explains the near-religious fervor
with which Congressional Republicans defended him when Andrew Johnson tried to
fire him in 1868, leading to Johnson’s impeachment and near-removal from
office.
Trump, of
course, responded by invoking the myth of “Honest Abe” and expressing (or
feigning) shock that Clinton would cite the man who never lied as her defense
against the charge that she never told the truth. Ironically, in the February
2013 issue of Harper’s Magazine
progressive journalist and editor Thomas Frank criticized Spielberg’s Lincoln for the same reason Hillary Clinton praised it (http://harpers.org/archive/2013/02/team-america/):
Lincoln
and his men, as they are depicted here, do not merely buttonhole and persuade
and deceive. They buy votes outright with promises of patronage jobs and (it is
strongly suggested) cash bribes. The noblest law imaginable is put over by the
most degraded means. As the real-life Thaddeus Stevens, leader of the Radical
Republicans in the House of Representatives, is credited with having said after
the amendment was finally approved: “The greatest measure of the nineteenth
century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in
America.” The movie is fairly hard on crusading reformers like Stevens. The
great lesson we are meant to take from his career is that idealists must learn
to lie and to keep their mouths shut at critical moments if they wish to be
effective. Lobbyists, on the other hand, are a class of people the movie seems
at pains to rehabilitate. Spielberg gives us a raffish trio of such men, hired
for the occasion by William Seward, and they get the legislative job done by
throwing money around, buying off loose votes — the usual.
If this sounds
familiar, it’s the lesson Hillary Clinton tried to teach the American Left
during her primary campaign, when she came close to losing the nomination
thanks to the votes of a lot of young people dubious about working within the
Democratic Party at all but, like Bernie Sanders, willing to give it a chance.
She called herself “a progressive who gets things done” and basically suggested
that her willingness to make deals with the devil was key to her ability to get
things done. One passage in one of the leaked e-mails (http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/07/leaked-hillary-clinton-speech-to-foreign-bank-my-dream-is-a-hemispheric-common-market-with-open-trade-and-open-borders/)
is certainly wince-inducing to those progressives (like me) who have
reluctantly reconciled ourselves to Hillary Clinton as the only person who can
stop Donald Trump from becoming President.
In a speech to officials of Banco Itaú, which is based in
São Paulo, Brazil, Hillary Clinton said, “My dream is a hemispheric common
market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy
that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and
opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” Donald Trump and his
supporters at the Right-wing Web site Breitbart News have seized on the words “open
borders” as evidence that Clinton wants to throw the U.S.-Mexico border wide
open and let all those criminals, rapists and maybe some good people flood into
the U.S., take what few jobs are left here for people without college degrees,
degrade our standard of living and turn the U.S. into a Third World country.
Its real meaning is less intimidating but more sinister
than that. The “hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders” is
a reference to the worldwide capitalist dream of a world in which every country
is linked to every other country by one or more so-called “free trade”
agreements on the model of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA),
negotiated by the George H. W. Bush administration in the early 1990’s and
pushed through Congress by President Bill Clinton in 1994. The idea behind
these “trade” agreements is basically to take governance of the world economy
away from nation-states and give it to private corporations.
According to the terms of NAFTA and most, if not all, of
the treaties since that have been modeled on it, corporations which decide that
national laws protecting the environment or the health and safety of workers
would cost them money can appeal, under so-called “investor-to-state dispute
settlement” (ISDS) provisions, to private, secret, corporate-dominated
tribunals. When these tribunals rule in favor of the corporations — as they
almost always do — the governments have three choices: either get rid of the
offending laws aimed at protecting their workers or their environment, pay
enormous fines to the corporations that brought the actions, or risk being
locked out of the global economy altogether.
What Clinton’s expressed dream of a “hemispheric common
market” means in practice is that the government of the Americas — and, soon,
the rest of the world — will be sub-contracted to giant corporations whose
demand for ever-higher profits will overrule any local protections for workers,
consumers or the environment. It’s a system the corporate elites that really rule
the world are determined to impose on us all, and — as voters in Greece, Spain,
Italy and elsewhere have already learned — they are too determined to push this
vision through to let little impediments like democracy and elections stand in
their way.
During the Democratic primary campaign, Clinton was forced
by the pincer movement of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both of whom
vehemently denounced the “free trade” agenda of the corporate elites for the
job-killing, environment-destroying fraud it is, to back away from what was
supposed to be the crown jewel of the “free trade” agenda, the Trans-Pacific
Partnership (TPP) between the U.S. and 28 Pacific Rim nations. But the
WikiLeaks documents indicate that Clinton remains a free-trader at heart.
McManus quotes a leaked e-mail from one of Clinton’s speechwriters who had to
draft a speech in which she’d come out against TPP. “This is indeed a hard
balance to strike, since we don’t want to invite mockery for being too
enthusiastically opposed to a deal she once championed,” the writer said.
So if, with or without the aid of progressives and Leftists
reluctantly settling for her as the lesser evil against Donald Trump, Hillary
Clinton is elected to the White House, she’ll be … another President Clinton,
figuratively as well as literally. We’ll have to do a lot of street protesting
and disrupting to push her as far Left in office as we pushed her during the
campaign, especially since there’ll be a whole network of corporate leaders and
wealthy individuals pushing her in the opposite direction. And yet voting for
Hillary Clinton for President in 2016 is essential because the alternative is
Donald Trump, who — as much as the Republican establishment hates him — has
throughout his campaign promoted a hard-Right agenda including massive tax
giveaways to the rich, packing the U.S. courts (not just the Supreme Court!)
with anti-choice and anti-Queer judges, locking the doors of the U.S. to
Mexicans and Muslims and cranking up the “war on terror” to include out-and-out
war crimes.
It is, of course, the structure of the American political
system that forces such hard choices on us. America’s single-member
winner-take-all legislative districts (mandated not by the Constitution but a law passed by Congress in 1842)
and the separation-of-powers system that elects the President separately from
the legislative leadership makes it impossible for voters to register their
discontent by electing people from alternative political parties. It made sense
to organize the Green Party in Germany, where the movement started, because
once you get 5 percent or more of the vote nationwide you get that percentage
of seats in the national legislature. It made no sense to organize a Green
Party in the U.S. because those who did so — and those who vote for it — have
essentially consigned themselves to political oblivion.
This year I’ve done a lot of reflecting on the irony that
I’ve seized on Germany, of all countries — the nation that in the first half of
the 20th century sparked two world wars and carried out the
Holocaust — as a nation that does democracy better than we do and one we’d do
well to use as a model. And Germany is a model for the U.S. in another way,
too; their system allowed a woman, Angela Merkel, to rise to head one of their
two largest political parties and thereby, when that party won enough seats to
lead the country, to become their head of state without it being any big deal.
A far cry from the bizarre stew of sexual politics our own
election has become this year — though, as tough and unpleasant a choice as
this year’s Presidential vote is, it does my heart good to see a man with such
horrible attitudes towards women as Donald Trump facing, as the last person
standing between him and his heart’s desire … a woman. And a capable, intelligent,
professionally and personally competent woman at that, a polar opposite from
the successive bimbos that have shared Donald Trump’s bed!
