NOVEMBER 13, 2019 – My friends who support Trump offer the following reasons:
- Tax cuts;
- Deregulation;
- Court appointees;
- Attempted invasion by illegal immigrants;
- Democrats are so corrupt.
Among my Trumpster friends, their pick of the foregoing reasons outweighs Trump’s “unlikability.”
Meanwhile, friends who share my disdain for Trump struggle to explain his support. The most proffered explanations:
- He’s actually not that popular and will lose in 2020;
- He represents lots who are “left behind”;
- He represents lots who are “just plain stupid”;
- He’s part of a much larger, global populist movement;
- He’s the tool of Putin, supremacists and/or the fossil fuel industry.
My friends in this camp think we’re living in the final chapter of the “American Experiment.”
I have many observations about all this. None is sanguine. And each produces the same feeling I experience when driving with high beams into a dense fog. That is, the brighter the light (scrutiny), it seems, the more frightening the fog.
With high beams off and fog lights on, I narrow my thoughts to three:
OBSERVATION #1: As it is said, “We’ve been down this road before.” None of us alive today has actually driven any stretch of “this road,” but many of us with a mild-to-middling sense of history have been vicarious passengers through the fire and brimstone of our nation’s past. I refer the reader to . . . the Civil War (1861 – 1865), followed by the years from 1865 to 1900. The same hazards that lined that period threaten our own, to-wit:
- Corruption at the highest levels of government;
- Concentration of wealth, accompanied (“wrought”?) by unbridled avarice;
- Racial injustice of the first order;
- Immigration and anti-immigration backlash;
- Technological progress and destruction of the environment.
At many junctures between 1865 and 1900, an observer could’ve concluded, “The country’s a mess, the experiment a failure.”
OBSERVATION #2: The country has long been split three ways: 1. Those who see the light; 2. Those who embrace darkness; and 3. Those who care about neither light nor darkness but strive for daily bread (and grog?). The forces of light and darkness are in constant contest as to which is which. The “Bread ’n Grog” folks, meanwhile, take what they can get. Thus, the race has no winner—just light vs. dark and spectators, first with light in the lead, then darkness overtaking, next light again, then darkness on the inside lane. After the Civil War (a massive, deadly pileup)—a race riot here, a labor riot there; we’ve grown too big, too pluralistic, too much of everything to be revolutionary. Society will lurch and lumber along while the road is controlled by the daring, the visionaries, and the masters of technology.
OBSERVATION #3: An inexorable game-changer now appears through the fog. According to a recent poll by a credible institution, only 17% of Americans see the threat—fewer than one in five. Liberal, conservative, or undeclared, are you among the “ones” who see the obstacle or of the other “four” riding fast without fog lights?
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© 2019 Eric Nilsson
