There are, in these extraordinarily odd times, some posts on politics here, but then there always has been.
One thing I keep noting is that you can't read any of the entries here and presume to know how I voted. You'll be wrong. But you can presume that I'm extraordinarily concerned about what's going on with the country right now.
A friend of mine, who is clearly a Trump fan, posted a long post that he picked up from somebody else regarding Donald Trump's accomplishments in office. And while I disagree with him that its "well written" (it isn't), the post does have some points. President Trump has some real accomplishments.
Indeed, Trump recently noted, and I think correctly, that the opposition to Trump, is due to Trump. That is, he doesn't get credit for his accomplishments due to people disliking him personally.
Now, contrary to what people like to argue, I haven't seen a President during my entire lifetime that people generally "opposed but respected". Detesting a President has been the national norm since there was a President. But there's no denying that the last twelve years have been unique in this regard, and there's also no denying that Trump has brought much of this upon himself.
It's also the case, however, that he has given voice and action to the concerns of a lot of people. Many of these people probably would express themselves the same way that Trump has, but that doesn't mean that their concerns aren't real and their points aren't valid, as we've noted in prior posts.
For example, up until the Coronavirus pandemic the economy was doing well. Trump did not cause the nation to engage in any new wars, which has not been the case for recent Presidents (although things were dicey with Iran from time to time, so this nearly wasn't true to some degree. Trump has brought troops home, which is something that Americans have long claimed they desired. Conservative judges were appointed, which is something that was massively overdue and a huge accomplishment. The balance of trade hasn't been fully corrected but there was a lot of progress on this score. For social conservatives, who have been pretty much ignored for decades, policies somewhat came in that favored their views, although not universally so.
Some of this, right from the onset, is what caused liberals, who have rebranded themselves as "progressives", to scream and oppose him, and indeed "resist", from day one.
But here's the things.
These feelings, i.e., the ones by an ignored demographic, are being used now by Trump in a them against us effort. And that's anti democratic.
Lots of nations have gone through a period of time in which a large demographic had a series of real points and then came to the conclusion that the them vs. us element of was so strong, democracy didn't matter, or if it did, the other side didn't count. And that's right where we seem to be now.
Liberals deserve some of the blame here in that their words that they would "resist" fueled the them vs. us aspect of it. Trump diehards who point out that the Progressives didn't acquiesce to the election results have a point, although the counter point is being over used.
But at the end of the day there's always one question in a democracy. And that is, do you respect the democratic process or not?
If you don't, there's no point in pretending that anything is really about elections. It's about power.
If you do, you have to accept that there's absolutely no earthly way that those in power are always going to be the people you'd like to have there. But they'll cycle over one day.
You also have to accept that the country will never be exactly the way you want it to be. But the contrary is that if its exactly the way some people want it to be its exactly the opposite of what other people want it to be, and there's no argument that it shouldn't be that way. I.e., people who voted for Communist candidates in various countries that went for fascism, can't really complaint about it, or vice versa, as their concept of power is the same.
Which brings us to this.
If we support democracy, we support it, and contesting democracy is subverting it. When our views are subverted in that case, we really have no complaint. We agreed, through our view of the process, that this was okay.
When people fall into arguing their side must prevail, over everything else, there's always an excuse for it. Our side isn't as bad as theirs and there is no middle. Their side is evil. The election must have been corrupt, or people would have voted the way I did, as I'm surely right and they are wrong. But the excuses tend to be dishonest. The real view is that might makes right. I should win, because I'm right and you are wrong and that's all that matters. And if I lose in that atmosphere. . .well that doesn't really matter as I've established the nature of power and who gets to exercise it.
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*This was written prior to the news story on the Trump effort to get Georgia officials to find an additional more or less 12,000 votes.
That effort is disturbing in the extreme and really should be measured by those in the Senate who are going to go along with Ted Cruz's efforts to challenge the electoral vote. Indeed, Senator Cruz really ought to reconsider it himself.
It appears to have dawned on Cruz and his confederates that things have quit looking good on this effort and there's beginning to be a real backlash. In spite of his boldness on Trump election matters, Cruz's margin against Beto O'Rourke in 2018 was only a little over 2% of the vote. It's widely speculated that Cruz is aiming for the Oval Office now himself which will be a mistake if true as he's widely detested in much of the country and was so detested prior to this event. Cruz has a good grasp on his base in Texas but not elsewhere and is strong outside of Texas only in the Trump base. Therefore it's been speculated that his effort here was in order to curry favor with that base in the belief that Trump won't run in 2024.
He may have overcalculated as of the date of writing this, the morning of January 4, 2021, more Republicans are feeling free to leave the Trump orbit and strike out back towards the establishment GOP. Indeed, the establishment GOP, lead right now by Mitch McConnell, is striking out and away from Trump. Guesses on where the Trump base will be in 2024 are just that, guesses, but they may not be around at all. The most recent revelations are going to shrink it at least a little and that will hurt figures like Cruz no matter what. Indeed, on This Week it was noted how poor the Ivy League schools are looking now due to the participation of their graduates in this effort.
Cruz seems to know this as the most recent position of his camp is that they aren't challenging the election at all, they're merely arguing for a process that will make it certain that when Joe Biden takes office everyone will respect the election that put him there. As Cruz earlier volunteered his service to argue one of the Trump lawsuits at the Supreme Court level, another act that has to be regarded as self serving (why would they want him to argue it?). This same argument has been picked up by his confederates who obviously all agreed on the line. It was that line that fell flat with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press when he accused Senator Johnson of being the arsonist who is now calling to put out the fire.
It's too early to tell where all of this will be going, and predictions on matters like this are notoriously inaccurate, but looking at the early signs, there's going to be a split in the GOP that will be a wide fissure. The question at this point is whether it will be two parties, or one.
If its one, it's going to resemble the Democratic Party in the 1865 to 1965 period in which it was effectively two parties, one liberal Northern Party and one conservative, and racist, Southern Party. The Southern party effectively died in the 1970s and 80s and its members largely moved over to the Republican Party except, ironically, for its black members who remained in it. The thing to note about that is that the Democratic Party of the Solid South was really rarely given voice outside of the South. If that becomes the model, what will occur is that the GOP in the rural West will be a Trumpite Populist Party and the GOP everywhere else will be more or less the pre Trump party. It will also mean that the Trump wing of the party will be influential only in its own region.
If it splits into two parties, and there's a real chance it will if what we see going on now continues to develop, there will be the old Republican Party and the Trumpite Party. The Trump Party will be like the Progressive Party of little over a century ago. It'll be successful regionally for an election cycle and then rapidly fade as its members rejoin the old party.
A third possibility exists that the GOP will split and both parties will die as neither will be large enough to sustain itself. This has happened with American political parties before, and its worth remembering that the Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the world, which is something notable as it isn't that old. The GOP is a minority party as it is, something that's easy to forget in the West where it predominates outside of urban areas. If it splits in two that basically yields national politics to the Democrats and what could ultimately occur is that a new conservative party would emerge. Some conservative commentators have been urging this since 2016.
If that becomes the case the new party will have no real influence in the country for at least a decade or more. The irony of that would therefore be that a long lasting legacy of the Trump Administration was that its final days converted the politics of the country permanently to a more left leaning one. A conservative party that reemerged following a GOP breakup would find itself in the same world that the Conservative Party of Canada, or the Conservatives in the UK, or the European conservative parties find themselves in, a place where being "center right" means you are to the left of any existing American party.
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