Shoe, meet the other foot
What devil’s bargain would you make in order to watch the political landscape change to your liking?
In a recent Guardian article profiling Trump supporters’ sentiments, now six months into the administration, one interview quote jumped off the page:
“I don’t know what all was done,” said Jack Artley, 43, a machine operator at the Biospectra pharmaceuticals plant in Bangor. “No matter how it comes out, even if it comes out that there was some shady business going on there, I’d rather Trump in there than Clinton. So, whether he had to cheat or not to get in, I’m OK with that.”
And there it is. Cold busted.
Before we dig into that particular assertion, let’s give credit to the entire article, linked below. The Tom McCarthy piece explores Trump voters’ moods from a number of angles, and obtains some fascinatingly candid viewpoints that we’ll also talk about below.
But back to our friend Mr. Artley. The hatred and disdain for Hillary Clinton on the far right and in their favorite conservative media outlets runs deep, that’s well-documented. In fact, Clinton is still more unpopular than Donald Trump overall, with the (ironically) popular vote winner struggling to reach an approval rating as high as the current 39% for the electoral college winner. But Artley’s brutally, staggeringly honest quote actually confirms what I have suspected all along: Trump supporters call the Russian affair a hoax one day and a witch hunt the next, but underneath it all they really don’t care what it is, nor whether it is fake or true. Trump is president now, and more importantly, Obama is gone and Clinton was vanquished—it doesn’t matter how it happened.
Here’s another beauty:
“If they did, I’m actually glad they did,” John Picard, a carpenter, said of alleged Russian tampering in the election. “I feel that you shouldn’t bother somebody else’s country. But the idea that they got all this information and they let it slip out — I’m happy if that’s true. We got some real good documents on some people who were really messed up, so why not?”
In fact, they prove just how much they don’t care about the Russian meddling by simply continuing to obsess over Clinton’s scandals instead. Why let the fun end just because we beat her? MCarthy’s Guardian article explores that aspect of continuing deflection, too — for every defiant Artley and Picard, there’s also a sense of regret and shame percolating under the surface. Oh, how us anti-Trumpers love to devour our own version of “red meat” in quotes like this, straight outta Trump country:
“That’s a hard thing for us as humans to admit that somebody took us over the barrel and we went in there with all the good intentions of changing things, because that’s what this person promised he was going to do … And now we look at it six months later, and we’re no better off six months later than we were when Obama was in office. People do not want to admit that somebody actually fooled them that well.”
Succulent. They don’t care that they may have cheated, and are now realizing they’ve been duped ... but still don’t care. Surely these are the dreggiest dregs of society.
But hold on … Are we standing in a glass house right now?
Meanwhile, in an alternate reality…
Seemingly to commemorate this six-months-of-Trump mark, pollster extraordinaire Nate Silver wrote an amazing piece on his web site FiveThirtyEight.com. His “If Hillary Clinton Won” project is the definitive construction of the “what-if” scenario that we narrowly missed out on. In it, Silver describes an alternate universe that doesn’t look and sound all that different than what we are living through now.
There is still a hated, polarizing figure in the White House. There are still congressional investigations. There is still some nepotism (but not as much). There is still a “base” (but not as loyal). There is still a media feeding frenzy (but it’s all coming from different directions). There is still a dishonest president (but not nearly at a Baghdad-Bob-On-Crack pace). And on Silver’s “Earth 2,” congress is still controlled by the Republicans. Read the piece, but Silver’s nutshell point is that this was truly a lesser-of-two-evils election that the entire country lost the moment those two nominations were secured, and our ugly fate for 2017–2020 was sealed before the conventions began.
But this and the Guardian piece made me think about how Republicans, conservatives and Trumpians would be hurling the same accusations at President Clinton: The Russian meddling favored her; perhaps she won because on Earth 2 Comey held his October Surprise close to the vest, only to reveal that there were more e-mails in December instead. WikiLeaks favored Clinton and got a hold of a few dirty pages of Trump tax returns. Gowdy and Chaffetz would re-open investigations that would begin to gather a little steam, maybe reveal some additional evidence of sloppy incompetence or worse where it came to the private server.
Hillary fires Comey in May! She refuses to release the transcripts of the $200,000 Goldman Sachs speeches (only the media cares about them), even as she appears suspiciously cozy with Wall Street!! It was discovered there was now an eighth person on the Phoenix tarmac!!!
Sound familiar?
Next question: Would you care?
So I thought about the shoe being on the other foot. What if Hillary narrowly won, and some combination of cyber-meddling and Comey’s stomach-ache-and-cold-feet appeared to have possibly helped tip the scales. Would I be glad it prevented Trump from taking the White House? I have to admit, using three distinct words: “I’ll take it” … and I can empathize with the Artleys and the Picards of the world. As I wrote in my Echo Chamber Nation essay on this blog, I never understood how people could hate politicians the way the right hated the Clintons, until I met the Trumps. Would I give just about anything to wake up in the morning and have Trump be just another “analysts and former presidential candidate” alongside Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich, spouting off against Clinton’s every move on (of course) Fox & Friends and Twitter?
Within the realm of politics, yes, just about anything.
And that made me feel the way I did when I wrote Echo Chamber Nation. I was hanging out with the far left, in a bubble, trying to stay as far away from Trump-speak and Trump-talk and Trumpism. And I thought, after the election and inauguration, “man, I gotta get out of here.” At risk of getting all pollyanna-ish: “What have I become?” What has our nation become?
Civil Cold War
The legendary Carl Bernstein was on a panel for CNN’s “Reliable Sources” recently and was asked to reflect on how Trump’s current troubles compare to Nixon’s in the Watergate scandal. Bernstein identified a key difference and coined a brilliant new phrase for the current phenomenon that didn’t exist back then: A “Civil Cold War.” Our nation has become a war-torn society where no bullets are flying, but where two disparate nations with diametrically opposed views on culture and progress have formed. And more importantly, these nations do not trust each other and more or less would like to either rid themselves of each other or flatten the other into submission.
That … sounds like war.
(Here’s a CNN article that features the Berstein segment with Brian Stelter. The discussion and article are both relevant to this post’s topic, as well.)
The Affordable Care Act was passed with no Republican votes in 2009. The Republicans’ 2017 attempt to replace it has no Democratic support, largely because none was sought. Foundational Senate rules had to be changed in order to confirm a conservative Supreme Court justice. The foundational cracks that were already started when the “nuclear option” was invoked in order to appoint liberal federal judges. Nothing is getting done legislatively under Trump, and Silver’s article makes a completely plausible case for the fact that not much would be getting accomplished under HRC either.
I want to be clear, though. The main difference, to my eye, is that our divided and fractured society is increasingly more vulnerable to attacks on our democratic institutions, and to authoritarianism. In Trump, we have someone in the White House now who seems intent on attacking right at the heart of those vulnerabilities. To be fair, President Obama seemed indifferent to healing those emerging fractures, but at least he didn’t perniciously exploit them with a bottomless pit of lies and bogus efforts like “voting integrity commissions.” And as baggage-ridden and dishonest as Hillary and her husband have often proven to be, I believe in that imagined bizarro world, we would have at least avoided this clear-and-present bizarro world we live in now: Where our chief executive stands over the boiling pot of toxic stew that is our society and culture, and rather than turn down the heat, rubs his hands together and stirs, and fuels the fire, and stirs some more.
However at some point, I hope we all take a look at ourselves the way I just did: Is this what we really are? Yes, many of us — admittedly myself included—impulsively would accept anything to have “our” country back. But at what cost? Are we not beginning to recognize that “our country” — America: Great Again!—is never going to materialize? That “our” side will never ultimately, completely win? There will never be such thing as “Sean Hannity’s America” or “Rachel Maddow’s America.”
And if either were to happen, we would cease to be America. For just one example, the Founders favored separation of church and state, precisely to ensure that one never oppressed the other. The Civil Cold War will have taken the same toll that civil wars often do: We’d be a forever-changed nation, something else entirely. And even with that clear-eyed understanding, if both sides still dig in their heels and never work together or understand each other again, then God help us all.
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This article is dedicated with best wishes to John McCain, who has recently been diagnosed with a brain tumor. Below is a poignant Washington Post article about Mr. McCain’s sincere bipartisan friendship with Ted Kennedy, followed by a link to an article I wrote about McCain’s heroic stance at one of his campaign events in ’08. Enjoy, and godspeed, Senator.
