Wednesday Reads: Old And In The Way

Good Afternoon.

I was born soon after World War II, in 1947. I grew up in a culture with plenty of flaws, but we were patriotic, proud of our country. The notion that one day the United States would become a satellite of Russia would have been impossible to believe. And that is what has happened. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Robert Kennedy, Jr. are Russian assets. 

If they have their way, we will lose Social Security, Medicare, and Obamacare. We will live with massive numbers of immigrants–both undocumented and documented–being rounded up and sent to concentration camps. We will become a nation of fascist bullies gloated at our leaders hatred and cruelty. 

I guess I should be grateful that I’m old and on the way out. But I was cursed with empathy. I don’t want to live with the ugly hatred, and discrimination that is coming for my fellow Americans. As I wrote above, my early experiences led me to be a proud and patriotic citizen–even though I could see so many flaws in our culture.

I also internalized the idea that we are citizens of the world as well. I thought national security was important and alliances with other countries were imperative to the survival of our democracy. But now I know that a majority of my fellow Americans don’t care about democracy or our long-time foreign allies. A majority of Americans apparently wants our country to be allied with Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and North Korea. The majority of voters in this election appear to have no problem with the U.S. leaving NATO and Russia taking over Ukraine and then marching on through Europe if they can pull it off.

Finally, I have been reminded for the umpteenth time that a majority of my fellow Americans hate and fear women and are enraged when an “uppity woman” dares to try to win the U.S. presidency. 

Well, I’m not going back. I’m almost 77 years old. I’ve had a decent life. I’d like to hang on for a few more years, but I don’t want to live in the Fourth Reich. I don’t want to live in a world without vaccines in which children once again get polio, measles and all the rest of the childhood diseases that I lived through. Hey, maybe Bobby Jr. will even bring back smallpox. Wouldn’t that be nice? If I sound bitter, it’s because I am.

Will Elon Musk really be given the power to cut government programs and fire long-term employees? He has been warning that there is going to be a period of austerity–but of course that will just be for the “little people.” Trump has promised to extend his tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Will Musk and his pals succeed in replacing America’s official currency with cryptocurrency? That apparently is his goal. I know almost nothing about cryptocurrency, but that doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.

We’ll see what happens in the coming days, weeks, and months until Trump and his thugs take over. I certainly have no clue. I actually thought Kamala Harris would win and that we’d finally have a woman president. But now I know that may never happen, because Americans hate women–and the haters include plenty of self-hating women.

I’m just an old woman, and I realize that I don’t belong in today’s United States. I’m just a relic of the past, a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s. I’m just old and in the way.

Three articles, and then I’m going to go back to protecting myself emotionally and getting through this day without going insane. 

This is by Jessica Valenti at Abortion Every Day: It’s Not Okay. The country may have failed us, but we won’t fail each other.

I lied to my daughter last night. As I put Layla to bed, I promised her that everything would be okay—even though I knew it wasn’t true. Of course, of course, it’s not okay. But I’m a mom, and my honesty was easily outweighed by my desire to comfort her. 

Here’s what I should have told her:

It is an awful thing, how much this country hates women. It is painful, soul-crushing and impossible to understand. The knowledge that America would rather elect the world’s worst man—a racist and liar, rapist and bully—than even consider letting a woman lead is a heavy, horrible load. 

I wish none of us had to bear it. But we do, and we will. 

We will take the next few days to feel the full weight of that pain. To ignore or avoid it would be a mistake; glossing over grief does your body and mind a disservice, and we all need to process in our own way.

But we can’t sit with the horror for too long. We can’t let it overtake or immobilize us—because that is exactly what they want. The men who want to put us in our place, keep us in the home and humiliate us into subjugation need us to be paralyzed with fear and sadness. They are desperate for us to give up, or to bury the reality of what they’ve done in a small corner in our mind. They want us to decide that it’s easier not to put up a fight….

Women are taught our whole lives to direct that fury inwards, to quash or internalize it. We’re not going to do that today, or ever again. There are people who deserve the full scale of our outrage, and they will get it. 

That’s why you’ll get up, alongside me, and do what it takes to fight back. You’ll remember that we are in the right, and that they are in the obvious, awful wrong. You’ll refuse to let them steal one more moment of your joy and hope, and decide that living your life with purpose in a country that wants you to fade away is a radical act. 

I know what you’re going to say: That’s what you’ve already been doing! You’ve cared so much and worked so hard. You’re tired—I am too. How can we possibly continue on when the country fails us again and again?

We just do. Because the alternative—that we pretend this isn’t happening and let the most vulnerable among us suffer first and worst—is unthinkable. 

Read the rest at the link.

Tom Nichols at The Atlantic: Democracy Is Not Over. Americans who care about democracy have every right to feel appalled and frightened. But then they have work to do.

An aspiring fascist is the president-elect, again, of the United States. This is our political reality: Donald Trump is going to bring a claque of opportunists and kooks (led by the vice president–elect, a person who once compared Trump to Hitler) into government this winter, and even if senescence overtakes the president-elect, Trump’s minions will continue his assault on democracy, the rule of law, and the Constitution.

The urge to cast blame will be overwhelming, because there is so much of it to go around. When the history of this dark moment is written, those responsible will include not only Trump voters but also easily gulled Americans who didn’t vote or who voted for independent or third-party candidates because of their own selfish peeves.

Trump’s opponents will also blame Russia and other malign powers. Without a doubt, America’s enemies—some of whom dearly hoped for a Trump win—made efforts to flood the public square with propaganda. According to federal and state government reports, several bomb threats that appeared to originate from Russian email domains were aimed at areas with minority voters. But as always, the power to stop Trump rested with American voters at the ballot box, and blaming others is a pointless exercise.

So now what?

The first order of business is to redouble every effort to preserve American democracy. If I may invoke Winston Churchill, this is not the end or the beginning of the end; it is the end of the beginning.

For a decade, Trump has been trying to destroy America’s constitutional order. His election in 2016 was something like a prank gone very wrong, and he likely never expected to win. But once in office, he and his administration became a rocket sled of corruption, chaos, and sedition. Trump’s lawlessness finally caught up with him after he was forced from office by the electorate. He knew that his only hope was to return to the presidency and destroy the last instruments of accountability.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

Do not misunderstand me. I am not counseling complacency: Trump’s reelection is a national emergency. If we have learned anything from the past several years, it’s that feel-good, performative politics can’t win elections, but if there was ever a time to exercise the American right of free assembly, it is now—not least because Trump is determined to end such rights and silence his opponents. Americans must stay engaged and make their voices heard at every turn. They should find and support organizations and institutions committed to American democracy, and especially those determined to fight Trump in the courts. They must encourage candidates in the coming 2026 elections who will oppose Trump’s plans and challenge his legislative enablers….Patriotic Americans and their representatives might now make a similar commitment, but for better aims: Although they cannot remove Trump from office, they can declare their determination to prevent Trump from implementing the ghastly policies he committed himself to while campaigning.

The kinds of actions that will stop Trump from destroying America in 2025 are the same ones that stopped many of his plans the first time around. They are not flashy, and they will require sustained attention, because the next battles for democracy will be fought by lawyers and legislators, in Washington and in every state capitol. They will be fought by citizens banding together in associations and movements to rouse others from the sleepwalk that has led America into this moment.

Brian Beutler: Reflections On America’s New Autocracy.

The United States and the world will soon be in the hands of mercurial, vindictive, greedy men with scores to settle and few checks on their power.

Perhaps there’s some solace in that word “mercurial.” Who knows what Donald Trump, the 78 year old former president and current president-elect, will choose to do with his time and authority? Maybe some semblance of stability can be salvaged through the fact that he mostly just wants to be the center of attention.

But I don’t take much solace at all. First, the people who’ve attached themselves to Trump know this about him, and they are ambitious. They have already reasoned that they’ll be empowered to fill all the gaps in his attention, and their ranks include corrupt oligarchs, conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, religious extremists, and fascists. Think Trump might ultimately not care that much about abortion? Well, the people serving under him do, and he won’t be checking their work….

We should do our best to accept—serenity-prayer style—that he got away with trying to overturn the 2020 election, and with his mass theft of government secrets at the end of his first term. Those cases will disappear very soon. And we can infer from experience what he’ll do about the other, relatively limp efforts, to hold him accountable under the law.

He is meant to be sentenced in New York later this month for almost three dozen felony convictions. Do we really think a state trial-court judge will order Trump to prison? Will he sentence Trump to anything at all? Defer sentencing for four years? And what if Trump decides he wants that case—and all the state-based legal jeopardy he faces—to go away? Will he demand clemency from Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY)? Will she give it to him? If she does not, will he promise to retaliate against the state of New York with abuses of federal power?

Just like that—before he’s sworn in, before he can pardon the January 6 insurrectionists—we’re tumbling down the slope. Because we live in an autocracy now.

Just how repressive and lawless ours is remains to be seen. Things won’t always feel completely hopeless. Some vestiges of checks and balances, equal justice under law, and the old rules of political backlash will pop up now and again to stymie Trump. There’s at least some uncertainty surrounding his stamina for further conflict—I mean, he won, right? Isn’t that enough?

But Trump has never rested on his laurels, and I suspect these inhibitions will melt away. The elites and institutions who might wish to resist him will find themselves bedeviled by a collective action problem. It is in their common interest that Trump not transform the United States in to a fascist kleptocracy, or even just an Orbanist one, but it’s in their individual interest to let someone else stand in his way. They are atomized and overpowered and perhaps they can make out well if they go along with him.

Media, tech, and other corporate behemoths are all likelier to succumb to these bad incentives than they are to push back, giving Trump de facto control over much more than the federal government. Do they want tariff relief or a free hand in their markets? Their competitors hobbled? Better pay tribute!

And so on. I think we all know what is likely to be coming our way in 2025.

I’m usually optimistic, but I’m not feeling that way today. I just hope that everyone who has been part of our blogging community over the years is hanging in there and taking care of themselves. I love you all.