Let us begin by stipulating that Donald Trump is the most astoundingly ignorant and unqualified person to be nominated for president in our lifetime. On the surface, he is a man who seems to have no redeeming qualities, but if you scratch the surface you’ll find that he is a man with no redeeming qualities. If we were voting for Bullshitter in Chief, he would win in a landslide of historic proportions.
And yet (hear me out now), there is a case to be made that a Trump presidency might have a liberating effect on our political system. In somewhat the spirit of even Charlie Manson deserves a defense, the argument goes like this.
The American political system is broken beyond repair and has simply ceased to work for millions of people. The success of both Trump and Bernie Sanders in the primaries exposed an enormous fault line on both sides of the two-party divide. Republicans and Democrats are equally complicit in creating a political system that favors corporations, banks and the wealthy over the poor and middle-class.
Progressives believe that mainstream Democrats are far too cozy with Wall Street and do far too little for working families, students, the elderly and minorities. The government needs to play a bigger role in creating new jobs, pressing for racial justice, and narrowing the income gap between rich and poor. Not just lip service, but real action like raising the minimum wage and making college education debt-free.
Thanks largely to the popularity of Bernie’s agenda, Hillary Clinton has adopted many of these proposals. But will she stick to them if she is elected? It’s more likely, she will resort to the same kind of center-right “triangulation” strategies that her husband used successfully to stymie Republicans in the 1990s. When Democrats say they don’t trust Hillary, this is what they fear most. And, anyway, what kind of progressive can’t be unequivocally against the death penalty at this late stage?
The unlikely success of Donald Trump has forced leading Conservative Republicans like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to confront the reality that the working class voters they depend upon to win statewide and Congressional elections don’t really give a rat’s ass about tax cuts for corporations or balancing budgets or cutting Social Security and Medicare. What they want is a party that will keep the immigrants out, deport the ones who are here, bring back the age before automation when work was labor-intensive, and make America white and Christian-dominated again. That is what Donald Trump is promising to do and the fact that Jesus, himself, couldn’t do it is apparently not a deal-breaker. The only thing that would convince his supporters otherwise is four years of an unhinged maniac flailing at windmills and blaming everyone else for his inability to get anything done.
As the establishment Republicans surely know by now, the best outcome for them in November is for Hillary to win and then make sure she doesn’t achieve much in the first four years. It’s the same strategy they’ve been using without much success with Obama since day one, but new ideas are not a Republican thing apparently.
In 2020, Paul Ryan can drag his little mean-spirited, granny-starving Power Points out again, the establishment can figure out how to rig the primaries so another lunatic doesn’t get chosen, and he and McConnell can get back to the serious business of deciding which Puligny Montrachet to have at a lobbyist-paid lunch at The Capitol Grille.
So what you have this November is a centrist Democrat who isn’t really going to rock the boat much and a GOP just waiting to reclaim its nasty trickle-down corporate-loving agenda in four years.
Or you can vote for the lunatic, narcissist who will burn both political parties to the ground. You’ve got to admit it’s not an unappealing thought.
Before You Go
