America's first post-sanity election

A few days after the 2016 election, I was in a convenience store owned by a (very patriotic and virulently anti-Taliban) Pakastani-American and his American born wife. The clerk, who I think was the owner's nephew, was talking with a customer about something or other Trump had supposedly said. I never did find out exactly what. 

 Like a jerk, I chimed in, "It will be OK. People were just getting the stupid out of their system." I was mostly speaking to myself. I was self-soothing. I was adjusting to the fact that- admittedly due to a constitutional fluke- the American people had just chosen an obviously unfit president, generally acknowledged to be an ignoramus and a kook,  that we all had a rough four years ahead of us anyway we looked at it- and that I had to give up my deeply-cherished illusion that our brilliant constitutional system together with some deep, native wisdom in the American character made us bulletproof.

Previously, when my side had lost an election, I could at least see some logic to the outcome, some virtue the winner had or vice from which my candidate suffered that spoke, however reluctant I might have been to admit it, to a certain element of wisdom in the outcome. But this time, there was nothing. An incompetent, notoriously corrupt, no-filters, conspiracy-mongering clown like Donald Trump in the Oval Office could not help but be a threat to our very national security. To have him setting policy for the Executive Branch could simply not be rationalized into something harmless, let alone beneficial. Very honestly, I was still trying to come to terms with an outcome to the election I found not only incomprehensible but terrifying.

 I had also misunderstood the exchange I had overheard. The guy was a Trump supporter, not a critic. And for another thing, besides being a boor, I had been exactly the kind of boor the Trump people complain about: an elitist boor. It was bad enough that the Trump people had won the election. But could they be right about people like me?

Am I an elitist? Banishing false modesty, I'm a bright guy. I'm educated; I have a graduate degree. I spend a lot of time thinking about stuff, and I make far more of an effort to be well-informed than most folks. I'm also aware of a tendency to be intellectually arrogant at times, a tendency to make impulsive judgments, and a certain degree of self-righteousness. I like to think that the latter group of characteristics is offset to some degree by a sense of humor and a willingness to admit it when I've been shown to be wrong about something. But while I'm not proud of it, I  do look down on at least the nuttier Trump people. That day in the convenience store, and ever since it's been hard for me to avoid seeing my attitude as to some degree elitist. To be blunt about it, yeah. I saw the Trump core as essentially boobs, ignorant conspiracy theorists and extremists who were not only uninformed but misinformed about practically everything and who were unable to distinguish actual news from paranoid nonsense. I had encountered the phenomenon in previous elections. Such people had generally turned out to be harmless because they never got anywhere near power. They had always lost and usually lost badly. And I had the chance to shake my head and feel superior to them.

But now they had won. Now they were going to govern. I had no doubt that having Donald Trump as our president was going to turn out badly for America, so badly that when 2020 came around, if he hadn't been impeached and removed from office either that way or under the 25th Amendment or simply been forced to resign, he would be summarily turned out of office by an American people too wise to do anything else no matter what geographical aberration might have skewed the system four years earlier. I seem to have been right. I think. I hope. I pray. 

I'm not sure how I ever managed to be so naive, but I never dreamed that the Republican Party would abandon literally everything it had ever stood for and become a cult of personality centered on Donald Trump almost the way the Soviet Communist Party became centered less on Marxist-Leninism than on the person of Josef Stalin. I had always imagined the endgame for Donald Trump as being at least as bi-partisan as it was in the case of Richard Nixon, and if anything, even more so. Nixon, after all, was an intelligent and capable individual and in many respects a good president, whatever one might have thought of his policies or even of his character. But Donald Trump was an incompetent, conspiracy-mongering clown. I never dreamed that something like 40% of the country would form a cult centered around the guy. And it's been hard to reconcile my view of America or of the American people with the fact that such a thing could happen here.

Somewhere else, maybe. But not in America.

But it has. From a Trump rally in Michigan:

CNN: Why are you not wearing your mask?

Trump supporter: Because there's no COVID. It's a fake pandemic. Created to destroy the United States of America.

CNN: But the president said to Bob Woodward that there is a virus and that it is deadly.

Trump supporter No. 1: That’s his opinion. The truth is that the CDC says that only less than 10,000 people died from COVID. The other 190,000 have 2.6 or 2.8 other mordalities. [sic]...

Trump supporter No. 2: I'm not afraid. The good Lord takes care of me. If I die, I die! We gotta get this country moving. What are we gonna do? Wear masks and stay inside for another year? Where will that get us? Let's just mail out more checks to everybody and let the country go bankrupt.

Trump supporter No. 1's delusion is identifiable as the QAnon-inspired idiocy about how the traditional habit of listing contributing and underlying causes of death on death certificates is somehow an innovation designed to boost the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19. As incredible as it seems, those who subscribe to that particular conspiracy theory don't understand that, for example, pneumonia is a symptom of COVID, and one of the ways it kills. They think of it as a separate disease. Or somehow they see something suspicious in heart disease or hypertension- or COVID- being cited as a cause of death when people die from heart attacks or strokes caused by them. One might as well say, "Cancer itself never kills anybody. It's the damage it does to the organs that kills people." News flash: hypertension and atherosclerosis cause heart attacks and strokes, just like COVID does. The heart attacks and strokes alone don't kill people. Therefore, by the logic of the COVID deniers, ischemic heart disease and atherosclerosis and hypertension shouldn't be listed as causes of death on death certificates when people die of heart attacks or strokes, and in fact, are not serious threats to people's health in the first place!

But they always have been, and they are. Somehow, I don't recall ever reading that the statistics reflecting the number of people who die from ischemia or hypertension resulting in heart attacks and strokes is "overinflated!"

It's insane. But that's the "logic" that's being used to make the case that we're somehow "overreacting"
to a disease that within the next few months will have killed a quarter of a million Americans. As hard as it is to believe, there are those who claim that we shouldn't care, because after all there are over 330 million of us! No biggie! And the same people can't seem to see the moral significance of the fact that at the very least, tens of thousands of those deaths were preventable- but that we chose not to prevent them because it would cause us minor inconvenience.

It has yet to sink in that we are still choosing not to prevent them because it somehow would infringe on our personal freedom and autonomy to suggest that we really ought to be wearing masks so that asymptomatic carriers don't pass the virus on to others, the way that if often and some experts think usually it does get passed on.

It's hard to take that sort of thing seriously, but a substantial percentage of the American people apparently buy into that particular kind of nonsense and reinforce each other's resistance to having it corrected by the facts and common sense.

Trump supporter No. 2 is worrisome for a different reason. I doubt that his pastor would agree that recklessness with one's life is a demonstration of faith or of anything else of which God would approve, or that it constitutes anything but presumption and sin. His sense of priorities seems odd, too, for a Christian. Nobody is suggesting, or really ever has suggested, that we go back into lockdown, this time for another year, and wearing a mask in public seems a small price to pay if it means saving tens of thousands of lives. And I can only say that his economic philosophy is something less than fiscally conservative.

Charlie Sykes links in his Bulwark column this morning to... this. It's from his home state of Wisconsin, one of the battleground states in this year's election.

How are we supposed to react to that level of insanity? Yet that is precisely what Donald Trump has turned loose on us. That is what our first crackpot president has made, if not necessarily respectable, certainly both common and relevant to electoral politics in America. It's always been around. Whenever the Republican Party has drifted rightward, it's come out of the woodwork and crawled out from beneath the rocks. But Barry Goldwater would never have endorsed it. Ronald Reagan would never have become a spokesman for it.

But now, for the first time, an American president has embraced utter, stark, raving, bat-guano insanity like this, and it has become the driving force of his campaign, his identity, and his administration. And how are the sane among us supposed to react?

None of the pro-Trump members of the U.S. Senate would buy into this stuff. None of the conservative columnists who have become Trump apologists would endorse it. Fox News might air an interview with somebody who would say such things, but none of its talking heads would sign off on it. Yet this is what they have allowed the conservative movement to become. This is what they have turned the once-proud Republican party into.

This is what my good Republican friends and relatives who voted for Donald Trump four years ago because Hillary Clinton was such an existential threat (and she was) have enabled, supported, and permitted to become the face of the only thing that stands between us today and not merely Hillary Clinton, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I don't like seeing myself as an elitist. I was raised to look down on people who look down on people. Seeing myself as superior offends my values, my ethics, and my identity. I strive to separate nutty ideas from the people who hold them.

But this has gone too far. I cling to my expectation that Joe Biden will be elected president in a couple of months and that the acute phase of this national insanity will go into remission. But it will not be cured. I hope more than I can say that I'm wrong, but as I've said before in this blog, I cannot see the Republican Party recovering from this political sickness. Too many people would have to recant and repudiate too much of what has happened during these past four, insane years. And it will be very, very difficult for our nation to put the genie back into the bottle.

Donald Trump has opened Pandora's political box, and epic insanity and epic stupidity are loose in the land. Already there is talk of a "post-fact era," a post-modern epoch in which "truth" is nothing more or less than what we, as individuals, want to be true. We distrust experts. Well, to a point, they deserve to be distrusted; they, too, have walled themselves inside their own sociological and therefore political bunkers, and the truth we get from them is contaminated to a point.

But it's all we have. It's all that stands between us and the utter insanity of that Trump rally in Michigan, and that gathering of loony tunes in Wisconsin. And if we've really come to a place where logic and a belief that objective truth exists and that facts actually matter make us elitists, then maybe we have an obligation to be elitists, no matter how unattractive that prospect might seem.

After all, the alternative is insanity.