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| Many thanks to Dumb and Dumber here for posing for the photo |
The United States government as we know it died last Wednesday. It has been dying for a long time, but the acquittal of a criminal President without even the slightest pretense of considering the evidence by a near-unanimous Republican senate makes it official to me.
The political struggle in our country is not about policy or how to move our country forward; it is about whether we will choose to live according to the US Constitution and the rule of law, or whether we will be ruled by Republicans who no longer care about those things. It is important to me to understand just who put us on this path, who the opposition is. In short, who is to blame?
Don't Blame Donald Trump
There will always be horrible people in the world, and sometimes some of them will want to be President. Pat Robertson ran for President before. He would have been terrible. Fortunately, he was not elected. But somehow, Donald Trump was elected. He lied, he had help from Russia, he fooled a lot of people, but in the end, he was only one vote. He needed help from 63 million knuckleheads like the two pictured above to actually get elected. When that many people get together and make an inexcusable decision, it's hard for me to want to blame one guy.
Besides, Trump did not have a vote in the impeachment trial. That wasn't his fault.
Don't Blame Mitch McConnell
Yes, he's a monster, one of the most malignant politicians in US history. But who votes for this guy? McConnell has been a complete ass for decades, but that is what the people of Kentucky want. And who follows him? Republican senators don't have to choose him as senate leader, but he is the one they want. They did not have to agree with Moscow Mitch that the impeachment trial did not require witnesses, or that Trump should not be removed from office, even though he clearly should have been, but they did agree. And millions of voters chose those Republican senators, even though it has been clear for decades that the party was headed off the rails. Those Senators didn't elect themselves.
Don't Blame Fox News
Yes, Fox News sucks. But here's a story about Fox News: long ago, when Fox News was a new thing, before Jackie and I knew anything about them, we had a cable service that only offered one 24-hour cable news station, and it was Fox. So we watched Fox News when we watched news. After two or three days, we realized that something was wrong - it was clear that the station was pushing a conservative agenda rather than just providing the news. So we stopped watching.
People watch Fox because they want to. Everyone knows that there are alternatives, but they do the same thing Jackie and I did, except then they decide Fox is what they like. We tend to get caught in echo chambers, listening to people who agree with us, but we choose our echo chambers. No one has to watch Fox News. No one should.
If you don't believe global warming is caused by human activity because you are caught in a right-wing echo chamber that reinforces your beliefs, right-wing media is not the problem. The problem is that you are an idiot.
Republican Voters Are The Real Problem
Donald Trump is President because of the Electoral College, true, but more so because 63 million Americans chose him to lead the country. Mitch McConnell is the majority leader of the Senate because Republican voters put him in office and put 52 other senators in place. Fox News is divisive and dishonest propaganda because their BS gets good ratings.
If you voted for Trump, you probably either liked his policies, or you liked him personally and wanted to see him lead the country. Based on those criteria, I sort Trump supporters into two categories: horrible people, and morons. Of course there is a lot of overlap.
Addressing the morons first, Trump talked about creating jobs, building a wall and having Mexico pay for it, re-writing trade deals to make them so much better, and more. He also had no experience in government, showed no particular interest in the details of it, lied all the time, and made stupid statements about how we would get tired of winning, that he knew more than the generals, that he was such a super smart guy, and on and on. It was just glaringly obvious that he had no idea what he was talking about most of the time. If you fell for it, if you really believed that he would become President and would be able to deal with the country's problems, you fall squarely into the moron camp.
But to be honest, I do not believe that most Trump supporters were, or are, that stupid. I think that most of them saw the racist, the conspiracy theory chaser, the shockingly prolific liar, the fake Christian, the cheating husband, the sexist, the serial molester, the immigrant hater, the name-calling schoolboy, the braggart, the narcissist, the unhinged loon who went off the rails when anyone - even a gold star father - spoke harshly about him, and they liked him. Not a guy to have a beer with, but someone who could get away with anything and would hate the people they hate.
This is the point we have to acknowledge: the source of our current political state is our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends, our families. Our political goal should not be to work with them or to accommodate them, because we have to reject the vision that they offer. We can try to persuade them, but they resist any kind of logic or facts and cling to dishonesty and imagined conspiracies, so persuasion will come slowly if at all. We have to outnumber them, and if we are to move forward, eventually crush them out of existence in their present form, hopefully to be replaced by something we can work with. That is the only way forward that I can see.
