This Week in America - Where Do We Go From Here?

I realized, about halfway through the day after, when I last felt such despair over the fate of the country that I love.

It was on September 11, 2001, and the dark days that followed. We had been attacked from without (although some of those attackers, we would soon learn, had been living within). Thousands of Americans died.

But the world rallied around us--at least for a while. We weren't to blame for that catastrophe. We were its victims.

That perception changed, slowly, and the change accelerated when President Bush somehow decided it was more important to invade Iraq than to focus on the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or the search for Bin Laden. The change became more pronounced when the scandal of Abu Ghraib erupted, and when Gitmo began to fill, and when it was learned that we'd given up our longstanding American abhorrence of torture.

Our moral standing in the world slipped then, and it wasn't reclaimed until after President Obama was elected and, right from the jump, declared that America was not a country that tortured. He made it his mission to end the long wars. But during the wreckage of Iraq, Al Qaeda in Irad had formed, found a foothold, and morphed into ISIS. So in some ways, the wars continue, and they've been brought home again.

This week, America elected the most unqualified person to ever hold the office of president--which, as we're often reminded, is the most powerful position on Earth. Donald Trump holds none of the qualities we would ordinarily look for. He's not intelligent, he's not honest, he's not brave, he's not trustworthy, he's not empathetic. He's cunning, in an animal way, and he has the scruples of a psychopath. He'll tell any lie, then tell the opposite lie thirty seconds later and believe it just as much. He's a bully and a probable sexual predator. He preaches hate. He doesn't believe in science or facts. He's a bigot who's become the hero of the KKK and the neo-Nazis and the--yes, deplorables--who make up the so-called alt-right.

And we elected him.

The only saving grace we can find is that he lost the popular vote, which means more Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than for him. But too many of those Americans live in the same states--the blue states, the sane states--so thanks to the electoral college, their votes weren't weighted as strongly as those in the more sparsely populated states. (In a country as evenly divided as we are, we'll keep seeing a split between the popular vote and the electoral college--and it will keep being that Democrats win the popular vote but not the presidency--unless we can do something about it.)

But he won, and for that, we can, in part, blame the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

This tragedy is worse, though, because we did it to ourselves.

The country has suffered from PTSD ever since. Each new attack, whether in Madrid or Mumbai, London or Paris, or here at home, puts us ever more on edge. What terrorists want is to scare us into changing ourselves, and they succeeded in that. We've become fearful. America's right wing has become ever more radicalized, and that radicalization has found an audience because enough people are afraid that they accept the nonsensical claims of the right--that President Obama might be a secret Muslim, that he's not one of us, that he's letting terrorists into the country. Only Republicans can keep us safe, they tell us, ignoring the inconvenient fact that 9/11 happened on the Republican watch. The terrorists want us to distrust each other, to pull back from engagement with the wider world, to blame all Islam for terrorism so they can frame the fight as one between the West and their religion. They've accomplished those things. With Trump's election, the terrorists have won. 9/11 was only a skirmish, this is victory.

Part of the response to Obama's election was the Tea Party movement, which also pushed Republicans further to the right. With that shift, a big chunk of America's center shifted right as well. Not all of it, obviously, but enough to widen the gap between left and right, to turn it into a nearly unbridgeable chasm. People who used to have differences of opinion can barely see each other anymore--our neighbors are distant, shadowy figures, and slightly suspicious.

Politicians who wanted government to fail, who don't believe it can work, took office and set about making sure it did fail. Many of those failed the most by it are among those who voted for Trump. When, or whether, they'll recognize that he has no interest in helping their lives improve is anybody's guess.

The Tea Party was a largely working-class white movement, with distinctly nationalist undertones. As I've written before, the Republican Party tried to co-opt it but was instead taken over by it. And now, its ideal candidate--fact-free, openly racist and religiously bigoted, actively hostile to Democrats and liberals and elites and science and "political correctness"--which really just means being nice enough and empathetic enough to choose words that don't hurt those they land on--has come along. Inspired, somehow, by his campaign, they came out to vote in the states that mattered. Fewer of them than of those that oppose them but enough.

Enough.

We didn't think Americans were that full of hate, that afraid, that bitter. But enough were. So Donald Trump became the president-elect.

What can we expect? Nothing that regular readers of this blog are likely to find reassuring.

With Republican majorities in Congress, we'll get a conservative Supreme Court justice, extending the right wing's 5-4 lock for a generation. If any of the minority justices should die or retire over the next four years, that split will be even more pronounced.

Millions of Americans will lose their health care. Americans will die because of this. The Republicans have had six years to propose an alternative, and they've failed to. But they'll repeal it anyway.

We'll pull out of the Paris climate accord, and we'll loosen restrictions on fossil fuel extraction. Hello, Keystone. Hello, DAPL. If Trump can remember its name, he'll kill the EPA. Our little-and-late efforts to not cook the planet will be derailed, and we'll once again be the world's biggest climate offender. Americans will die.

Trump's economic agenda, combined with that of congressional Republicans, will force us into another recession, and likely a depression. Banks will be deregulated, free to cause chaos like they did in 2008. More of the nation's treasure will shift from the poor and middle classes into the pockets of the wealthy. Millions will be unemployed. We'll become Kansas writ large, which will force us to limit investments in our future. Americans will die.

Social Security? Medicare? House Speaker Paul Ryan has been trying to kill those for years. Now he'll have a president who might well go along with him. Except Ryan's not conservative for Breitbart's Steve Bannon, who's the puppetmaster pulling Trump's policy strings. Trump doesn't know policy, and doesn't care about it. Bannon does. He has an agenda, and that includes replacing Ryan with someone even more extreme. Who knows that that does to Social Security and Medicare? It won't be good, whatever it is. Americans will die.

A free press? Freedom of religion? Say goodbye. Trump has already promised to make it easier for public figures to shut down media outlets that report unflattering things about them. He wants to outlaw people on the basis of their religion. He has no interest in any constitutional amendment but the Second, and the First has been right in his crosshairs for more than a year.

Black and brown Americans will suffer. Muslims and Jews will suffer. Women will suffer. LGBTQ people will suffer. We'll all suffer, but for some the suffering will be worse, because Trump has mainsteamed hate against our fellow Americans based on who they are or what they look like or who they worship or who they love. Americans will die.

We'll lose our status as both a global superpower and a moral authority. Trump has threatened to pull out of existing international agreements, to let NATO flounder, to kill the Iran nuclear deal (thereby allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons). He's not bothered by nuclear proliferation. He's willing to let Russia call the shots in Syria, and probably elsewhere. He's easily baited--what are the chances we won't be at war somewhere within a year or two? Americans will die.

Trump has no interest in the institutions that have kept America what it is for so long. He was elected, in fact, precisely because he promised to destroy them. Whatever anyone thinks might constrain him--Congress, the courts, the press, public opinion--he's already shown he's happy to ignore them, subvert them, or crush them beneath his fascistic bootheel.

There are tiny points of light scattered across the landscape--the defeat of America's Most Corrupt Sheriff^TM, the election to the Senate of Tammy Duckworth and Kamala Harris and Maggie Hassan, and of course, the fact that most American voters chose another candidate--but there aren't enough of them to constitute a silver lining, much less a bright side.

We're in for a dark, dark time, America.

Hold your loved ones close. Walk in nature. Read good books. Listen to good music.

And be ready to work harder than ever, in 2018 and 2020. There's much to be done.

We have a country to save.

Comments

[Alexander Doty]

Jeff - I think that it is no more acceptable to reject this legitimately elected official than it was for others to reject the current legitimately elected official. The connection with 911 is premised upon the veracity of the government's account which, I believe, is no more reliable than was the Warren commision's, in what appears to have been a similar coup d'etat scenario. At the root of both the two-party system and the war on terror is manipulation of the public by unseen yet extraordinarily powerful forces whose agenda appears to be global concentration of economic and military power.