A Point of Extreme Political Danger

“Trump is like a Bond villain. Totally over the top. Bent on world domination and the accumulation of riches without end because of a terrible psychic injury in childhood. Determined to dominate all the men and sleep with all the women around him because of the same injury. Utterly self-involved and untrustworthy.

In other words, almost totally unbelievable.

Except that it is real we are stuck with him for the foreseeable future.”

I have seen no reason to change my mind except to say that, even though I understood Trump’s appeal in teh summer of 2016, I did not expect that his hold over the this country would be so impossible to shake.

Trump is not by any means a political genius. His hold over half the country is a a product of the gruesome fit between his psychic flaws and the deep, long-standing flaws of the United States.

His damaged psyche gives him a lack of self-control and and inability to be shamed by the lies and disgusting sentiments he spouts. Those disgusting sentiments express the ugliness about race and gender that is deep in the heart of a huge number of men–and many but not all of the women whose lives are dependent on those men. His lies about government resonate with the distrust of taxation and regulation that is a product of both ignorance and the anti-statist, conspiratorial sentiments held by Americans since the revolution. And, of course, our individualism and half-balked social safety net, which forces all of us to rely far more on luck and our own initiative than on a welcoming and supportive society and makes too many of us reluctant to care about our neighbors, encourages ignorance.

The US had a nice run. But it may be nearing the end. We are suffering today from a man-child who takes advantage of flaws of racism, patriarchy, and individualism that were baked into our heritage by 1776 and the–can we say this openly now?–the profoundly anti-democratic constitution created in 1789.

I really don’t know whether we can pull out of this deepening miasma. If Trump is defeated in 2024, we have a chance. Younger generations really are not as caught up in the racist, patriarchal, individualist ideas of the past as older generations are. (They have their own flaws but that’s to be expected.)

If we get through this election successfully, we have a shot. If not, at best the United part of this county is going to be over. (And that could happen for different reasons, if Trump loses, too). And, at worst, Trump will destroy what is left of our democracy in his  term of office, which may also not end in four years.

This is a point of extreme political danger. And I continue to think that too many of us don’t know it and the business leaders, who should know it, are too consumed by short-term thinking to care enough to do the right thing.

All of us must rise to this awful occasion.