“Chaos, Donald Trump Wants Chaos.”

I apologize in advance, dear reader, for bringing politics at length into one of my posts. Most Americans, myself included, are exhausted by recent political and cultural strife. A deeply polarized America is full of contention and division. I don’t wish to contribute to that mess. But politics is important, alas, and so I want to go on the record with my thoughts as the presidential election of 2024 approaches. The prospect of political violence is upon us, or even a civil war, in a crisis which has been a long time coming in the United States. This is how I see things, at least.

For most of my life I have had the luxury of paying only partial attention to politics. For most of our history Americans could say the same: politics was a boring affair mostly dealing with taxes and spending. Politics was pretty dry fare. So most people paid little attention to it. In retrospect, that was a luxury. In many other countries politics and political violence was a brute fact of life which could get you killed, whether you wanted anything to do with it or not. The United States could be approaching such a reality. Politics is nowadays so poisonous in America that only the most hardcore care to immerse themselves in it. Most avoid politics the same way they avoid alley knife fights. Or at least that is how I see it.

How did we get to such a toxic and threatening place? Well, it has building for decades. I think it started in the last decade of the 20th century through the Clinton years and Clinton’s impeachment, as the political tapestry started to fray and come apart. Democrats and Republicans came to see each other not so much as political rivals who could cooperate to the business of the country but as cultural rivals who saw the other as the “enemy” and wanted to drive them into the wilderness. Politics went from becoming relatively unimportant aspect of life to almost a religion which defined a person, and “belonging” to one tribe because a defining aspect of the self. Politics took on a sharp edge it had not had since the 1960s and early 70s.

For example, there were combative Sunday morning talk shows in the late 1990s like “Firing Line,” where liberals and conservatives shouted at each other. Then there was also the rise of Rush Limbaugh and similar combative right-wing talk radio: those were the dogmatic conservatives who wake up in the morning to engage in ideological combat. On the other side of the spectrum, there were lefty corners of academia in “grievance studies” (“ethnic studies,” radical feminism, neo-Marxism, or anti-globalization efforts) where a similar “no prisoners” ideology ran rampant. Critics say young American college students learn to hate their country and its past in the parts of the university which are like this, and they are not wrong in my experience. Anti-American feeling of the left runs rampant in academia, and to say “very liberal college professor” is almost a tautology in American universities, at least in the humanities, in my experience over thirty years in that realm. Strongly “progressive” liberals like you might find in Brooklyn, NY or Berkeley, CA hate conservatives and conservative ideas, and vice versa. (I sometimes think partisans of one party hate the other side more than they like their own.) There was the far Left and the hard Right two decades ago, but they were relatively few as the vast middle held. But the far right and left are larger now, and the middle is smaller: this is polarization. It had been increasing for years.

All this led to Donald Trump in 2016, who sui generis, crystalized these trends of political division and at the same time made them worse. There were his four years as president and his two, almost three, impeachments. There was the COVID pandemic and the George Flloyd protests/riots in 2020. Then there were the riots in the capital on January 6, 2021. The left and the right savaged each other on social media in the most intemperate language. Families were torn apart by political disagreements, and sometimes Americans even moved to locales which were more congenial to their politics. Young people would not date a person from the other political tribe. Trump is running for re-election in 2024, and the polls have him narrowly in the lead. 

This is bad news for the country, to put it mildly. Joe Biden and Donald Trump, two octogenarians, are tooling up for a re-boot of the 2020 election. Nobody seems happy with these choices, but there seem no viable alternatives. Why not?

As for me, I made my mind up back in 2017 about Donald Trump. Everything I saw since then has only confirmed my opinion. I put Trump in a box in the corner of my mind, and I did not pay him too much attention. I saw others loudly enraged by President Donald Trump, and that loud politician consequently lived rent free in their heads ever after. Not me. I could compartmentalize. And I lived in California, so even as I would never vote for Donald Trump I was almost more bothered by his obstreperous opponents. Trumpians or anti-Trumpians? It brought back to me the famous and apt Harry Truman quote from 1941 about the fascists and communists savaging each other during WWII: “If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.. . ” These are fights with no “good guys” to root for. 

Let me explain further my politics at that time.

I am an independent voter who has voted for Democrats and Republicans in the past. I occupy the pragmatic political center. I voted twice for Barack Obama (2008, 2012) without apology. But the optimistic Democratic message of President Obama is a thing of the past. By 2020 Democrats, and Obama himself, had moved from a message of “can do” competency to a harsher one of racial grievance and resentment. Nowadays many Democrats campaign against “white supremacy” with race grifters like Ibram X. Kendi and Dr. Robin DiAngelo as representatives of this new perspective. After Joe Biden was elected in 2020 I remember reading progressive Democrats hoping to bring in Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, getting rid of the Electoral College so as to enshrine a permanent liberal majority, ban the Senate filibuster to pass legislation by a bare majority, while packing the Supreme Court and ensuring permanent single party rule which would moved the country beyond old fashioned views of two party rule. Wow! The country would look something like California with liberal Democrats in charge forever. That didn’t happen. The country continues to be almost evenly divided.

The hubris of the early Biden Administration was off putting. “Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity” were the watchwords of the Democratic Party in the post-Obama era. The Democratic Party, or at least a good chunk of it, had shifted significantly to the left. There was an authoritarian tint from “anti-racist educators” who would engineer through the schools a certain “ethnic studies” ideology built on an appreciation of “intersectional” prejudice. If you were not on board with this new way of thinking in a politicized curriculum, you might very well be denounced. I saw this first hand in my workplace. It was not so much teaching history but how you should feel about history. Yuck. No, thank you. I was an educator. Not an indoctrinator.

But if the Democratic Party had moved much to the left, I was still the same as before. The party of President Joe Biden had moved to a territory of racial and economic grievance I would never inhabit. So I started looking for a tonic on the other side of the political aisle to the right. Or at least I was open to what they might have to say. And I was far from the only voter recoiling from Democratic Party overreach on a whole raft of issues since 2020. Where to look for something else?

Should I look to “the right” to the party of Donald Trump? Whatever grave reservations I might have about the “woke” left, Trump would be even worse, I realized. The cure would be worse than the disease. I was never going to vote for Donald Trump, and I would never support a political party crazy enough to put Donald Trump at its head. It was not hard for me. It did not take much to come to this conclusion, and my thinking did not waver over time. As George Orwell claimed, “To see what is right in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” I could see what was plain: Trump was Trump. A tiger does not change its stripes. Or more accurately: a dog that bites is a dog that bites.

So these were my options? The doddering Joe Biden? Or the bully Donald Trump? If absolutely forced to do so, I would say Biden is better than Trump. With Biden they can get sharp young advisors to manage grandpa in the Oval Office, but you just know the erratic and amateurish Trump won’t listen to experts. Joe Biden is less of a loose canon and liability compared to the Trumpkin alternative. But still. I would hold my nose and vote for an old-school liberal like Joe Biden (Dem.) before I would vote for the newly illiberal GOP led by Donald Trump. Maybe in 2024 I will repeat my 2020 electoral choice and write-in my friend Dan FitzPatrick for POTUS.

I for sure know who I won’t be supporting: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the “Squad,” or Trump and his MAGA cult. The populist left and the populist right are a plague on the land, in my opinion. The polls say that the vast majority of Americans still occupy the political center. Why does it seem like the extremes are in charge? They might be the loudest, but they don’t have the votes, supposedly. Do they have the enthusiasm? Plenty of Americans are willing to vote for a third party who represents the pragmatic middle of the political spectrum. Where is the centrist candidate?

I loved the recent Bill Maher video where he says America “wants its sanity back in 2024” –

– “too many kooks,” Maher claims! Exactly. The convinced Left and the alt Right who refuse to compromise thereby act like toddlers having a temper tantrum. They are less interested in governing than they are in grandstanding. This is all the very definition of “emotional dysregulation,” especially when witnessed on social media.

These populist hucksters wearing a MAGA hat applauding the show at a Donald Trump rally on a Saturday night reminds me for all the world of another demagogue in American history similarly compemptuous of the democratic process while riling up the angry working class to do whatever he wanted in similarly raucous mass rallies: Huey Long. The “Kingfish” from Louisiana would whip up the crowd and could be colorful and entertaining in his speech. Trump is the same. But their politics are a simplistic fare which won’t answer to the complexities of the real world. What they really want is power for themselves, and in this Huey Long and Donald Trump are the very definition of a demagogue: “I will fix everything. I am the solution. Just give me power. All the power.” Adolf Hitler made a similar argument in Germany when he ran for chancellor in 1933. We seem to live in a similar time now of emboldened authoritarians from the left and right on the march both at home and abroad. The center struggles to hold it together.

The extreme ends of the left and right begin to resemble each other in their desire to burn it all down. They are not really interested in the often boring work of compromise and actually being in charge responsibly. The culture warriors want to fight culture wars. They want their way. They want to destroy the other, or at least cast them into the political wilderness, as if they had that power. The results on the ground are predictable. For all the world it reminds me of being 13-years old watching scratchy black and white videos of communists and fascists fist fighting in the streets of Weimar Germany during the 1930s. It reminds me of this uncomfortable truth: any idiot can burn a barn down. But it takes skill and patience to build a barn. America is currently in the arson era of politics. Not the building stage.

A person can most vividly see this in the House of Representatives lately. Ranking members of the Senate recently spent weeks negotiating a compromise over a proposed bill which would provide increased border security with Mexico while freeing up aid to our allies Israel and Ukraine. Kristen Sinema (Dem-AZ), Chris Murphy (Dem-CT), and James Lankford (Rep-OK) labored for weeks to cobble together a bill in a bipartisan effort they all hoped the rest of the Senate could live with. But Donald Trump stepped in and said “no way” and used his clout with the MAGA contingent, and any possibility of a compromise bill disappeared. So the border would get no increased funding, and our allies no financial aid; the idea of compromise was not on the agenda, so Congress passed no legislation. It was deadlocked. Since there would be no compromise, there would be no bill passed at all. Compromise usually means everyone gets some, if not all, of what they want in legislation. What happened yesterday with no compromise is nobody got anything. 

And that same day the House held a vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. It also did not pass the House, because three Republicans voted against it. Trump and the MAGA Republicans railed against these RINO “traitors” who did not toe the line Trump proscribed. Impeachment, as I see it, is a final extreme measure to remove public officers for egregious crimes, and Mayorkas did not deserve it. But impeachment is becoming the preferred tool in the House of attacking your political opponents. So if I would be anything, I would be a RINO voting against the Trump line. I thought those three Republicans who voted against the impeachment of Mayorkas were heroes. Is the Republican Party a protest movement led by caudillo Donald Trump? The strongman cracks the whip, and everyone bends the knee? Is that how it goes? I’m sure that is the way Trump would like it. “What is the point of being a senator if you let Donald Trump make all of the decisions for you?” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington asked. It is a good question. Yesterday Trump threatened Rep. James Lankford who worked with Democrats to find a compromise immigration bill by warning the following: “This is a very bad bill for his career.” The balls!

The problem is the Congress is almost evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and it seems it will be that way indefinitely; so there must be compromise, therefore, if anything is to get done. Democrats have a tenuous hold on the Senate 51-49, and Republicans barely hold the House of Representatives with a razor thin margin at a 216-214 majority. So in this environment the “Freedom Block” was able to get rid of a too moderate Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House, even as there was no clear alternative or real point to it. It was the Republican Party kicking itself in the balls. The new Speaker, Mike Johnson, is similarly threatened by a handful of MAGA Republicans. He does not have the power to broker compromises and pass legislation, which is his job, because of a few far right opponents. This handful of far right legislators cannot hope to pass any legislation, but they can torpedo it. They are vandals. They are obstructionists. What are they not? Responsible politicians who can cobble together viable majorities to pass legislation which is the result of compromise. Almost no legislation in the American political system will pass without compromising. In all the Trump fueled obstruction in the House of Representatives yesterday, they did nothing they set out to do: they neither impeached Secretary Mayorkas, nor gave more resources or authority to police the border, nor gave assistance to our allies under duress Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. At the end of the day it was a lot of noise and sound signifying nothing. Again, it was the Republican Party kicking itself in the balls, and the whole country suffered. In the Bill Maher video I previously referenced: “Congress isn’t a deliberative body anymore. It’s a rave without a permit in a burning paint warehouse.” The result is legislative chaos and government dysfunction. And the whole country suffers from that. As Mitt Romney described Congress yesterday, “Politics used to be the art of the possible. Now it’s the art of the impossible.” This is the result of human choices. It does not have to be this way.

Maybe this is the real problem from which everything else stems: In an America where culture wars reign and one side of America sees the other as a mortal threat, fewer people are willing to compromise. One half of the country looks at the other as the enemy. Everyone wants their own way and nobody is interested in compromising. The United States today has a definite 1859 feel to it. Does the quote from Henry Clay at the end of the following video not sound familiar? Check it out:

It is all highly worrisome.

The “progressive” left is horrible. But then the MAGA right seems maybe more horrible – and that is saying something. Which is worse? Ayanna Pressley? Or Lauren Boebert? The Soviet Union or Nazi Germany? A heart attack or a stroke? Rashida Tlaib? Or Kari Lake? Jamaal Bowman? Or Matt Gaetz? Are you kidding me?!?

Regardless, the idea of Donald Trump as President of the United States again strikes me as wild. After all that has happened with him, that a huge chunk of this country thinks this is the guy to lead the country… that is wild. I agree with Bill Maher when he said it seems hard to believe that Trump “is going to be president again. It feels surreal that we’re in court every day trying to prove Trump wanted to overturn the election, while he’s on the campaign trail everyday telling everyone they should have overturned the election. It also strikes normal people as insane the Trump fans are perfectly okay with the fact that he was recently asked if he wanted to be a dictator. And he did not say no. Neither did his lawyer say no.” Columnist Bret Stephens wondered if “the cult of Trump is in charge of the party of Lincoln.” If so, I am out. The GOP will have at its head the sort of populist demagogue the Founding Fathers always feared. There is a reason, after all, for those complicated “checks and balances” in American government.

As Bill Maher said about the upcoming election year of 2024, the fight for America “isn’t right or left, it’s normal vs. crazy.”

Amen.

I thought the AP described the chaos in Congress today well: “It shows how deeply the Republican Party, under Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, is by choice or by force, turning away from its traditional role as a working partner in the U.S.’s two-party system to a new one that is rooted in Donald Trump’s vision of the GOP.” That about sums it up.

As an American I have more self-respect than to give any support to that demagogue wannabe autocrat Donald Trump. That is the right wing of the political spectrum, supposedly. The left is no better. I look around at too many American universities and see young people wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh while angrily decrying the United States as a “white supremacist” nation built on “settler colonialism.” Maybe this is the “horseshoe” nature of the American political spectrum: the far right and the far left both hate America as it is. They want to burn it down. In that important way the far right and far left resemble each other. Combine all this with social media and

I wished there were more signs of sanity – the political middle – which could make its presence felt electorally.

We have the numbers, the polls say. Why do the extremes seem to have the initiative?

They say that in a democracy the people get the government they deserve.

Maybe that is the truth.

Perhaps the problem lies not with irresponsible politicians indulging their id in Congress. Maybe the problem is with the rest of American doing that everywhere else.

 Maybe we voters get what we deserve.

Marjorie Taylor Greene? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Or Donald Trump?

Are you kidding me?

I was happy to see that on the next day, February 8, 2024, the Senate did get 67 votes to 32 to pass a bill for aid to Ukraine and Israel divorced from any hot-button immigration component. The legislation would provide $60.1 billion for Ukraine, $14.1 billion for Israel and $10 billion in humanitarian support for civilians in other conflicts around the world. There were 17 brave Republicans who broke with the Trump “no deal with Democrats” block. They needed 60 votes, and with most Democrats and Republicans voting for the bill it passed easily. Hurrah for constructive bipartisanship! I was especially happy to see my second cousin Dan Sullivan, Republican Senator from Alaska, show a spine and defy the Trumpians in his party. Who were the other Republican Senators today who defied Trump in the foreign aid bill? Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, John Cornyn of Texas, Joni Ernst of Iowa, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, John Thune of South Dakota, Roger Wicker of Mississippi, and Todd Young of Indiana. Good for them! They will now be targeted by the Trumpians. Will they show some spine? Will voters throw them out of office if Trump decries them? Trump is the epitome of the blustering bully, vengeful and mean. But what happens when you tell a bully to go fuck off?

And what will happen when this Senate bill arrives to the House of Representatives? Will Speaker of the House Mike Johnson show similar constructive bipartisanship in passing this bill to aid our allies? That is yet to be seen, but I hope so. Johnson will have to face down the “Freedom Caucus” of angry Trumpians. He could easily do so, just by accepting even a small number of votes from centrist Democrats in the House. But that will make him a target to the far right. So is Mike Johnson the Speaker of the House? Or not? Does he take his marching orders from Donald Trump? Or is he his own man? We shall see in the next few weeks and months.

So who objects to a bill for American military aid for our allies in Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan? Well, the hard Left objects to any use of our power overseas under the usual complaints of anti-American anti-imperialism. “America is always wrong. We are the villain of this story.” Predictable. Yawn. But the Trumpian right objects because…. they are fans of Vladimir Putin and his aggressive war in Ukraine? Or fans of Hamas and Iran? Or they are newly neo-isolationist in a posture which would make Republican Ronald Reagan, who helped so much to bring an end to the Soviet Union, spin in his grave? The extreme left and the extreme right are the political poles which oppose this foreign aid bill. The larger middle of the electorate very much supports it. Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan have solid majorities supporting their cause in the American electorate. Why cannot Congress translate that support into successful legislation? What is so hard about bipartisan compromise? I think the answer is in one word: polarization. And that is bad for the country, or maybe even worse than “bad.”

We shall see. But I am hopeful for a bipartisan deal between mainstream Democrats and Republicans which should be easily able to cobble together the votes to pass the legislation.

But such a bill passing both houses of Congress is far from certain. Might aggressive minorities of far left Democrats (the “Squad”) or Trumpian Republicans (the “Freedom Caucus”) torpedo the deal in an almost evenly divided Congress? Will the obstructionists block any legislation from advancing to the president’s desk? It boggles the mind that Congress will not do its job. There is plenty of blame to go around, but I blame Donald Trump more than anyone else. He is far from being the only angry blowhard who wants to burn the place down to save it, supposedly. But he is the worst. And Trump the populist has plenty of devout followers all over the country, difficult as that is for me to believe or understand. It is worrisome. 

No, it is worse than worrisome. It is scary. It is also disappointing. Highly disappointing. I would have thought millions of my fellow Americans would know better than to fall into some cult of the authoritian. In retrospect, I suspect it all comes back to the bitter tribalism and fierce resentment running rampant in the land which results in an inveterate hatred of the other. The far left and the far right in this way are very similar: they are the flip sides of the same coin. They feed on tribalism, resentment, and the resulting hatred. Obstructionism and chaos are the result, and violence might not be far off. In American politics it are the poles and polarization which seem to be in the ascendant. The arsons have their bonfires prepared. I hope I am wrong, but I don’t think I am.

I apologize for talking about American politics at such length, dear reader. It exhausts and frustrates me, too. I am semi-embarrassed to having written this long essay. So now that I have said my piece, I hope not to post anything about politics for the next several months. I have always kept politics as a strictly subordinate topic which occupies only a relatively small part of my attention and time. I hope to keep it that way. But I fear politics will not leave me alone. It might take more of me going forward. I might not have any choice in the matter. If reasonable people in the political middle don’t speak up, you cede the conversation to the crazy zealots at the extremes. It seems that already is the case?

God help the United States in this election year of 2024.

It smells more than a little like 1859.

True, there is no special catalyst like slavery to crystallize and ignite the anger “blue” and “red” America feel towards each other. But the present hostility has been building for so long, and has reached into so many places in the United States, dividing families and workplaces and almost everything, and is so intensely felt, that the country is a powder keg. Any unexpected spark might set off an explosion.

Or maybe even an “expected spark” would suffice – such as a contested presidential election in November of 2024.

I am worried, to put it mildly.