I continue to be proud to have guest essays from Keith Parsons like this. Enjoy—
I REMEMBER VOTING
Keith Parsons
In 1964, Lyndon Johnson ran a notorious ad against his election opponent, Barry Goldwater. The campaign commercial showed a beautiful, blond little girl plucking the petals off a daisy, and counting them down. When she got down to five, an iron-hard male voice replaced hers. At zero, the frame froze and the little girl was replaced with a nuclear explosion. That image was overlaid with the words, "This time, vote like your whole world depends on it."
The ad exploited the image that Democrats sought to attach to Goldwater, the image of a loose cannon and warmonger who would lead us into nuclear war. This was just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis had terrified everyone with seemingly imminent apocalypse.
Goldwater was an ideologue, but he was not a lunatic. Compared to what now passes for a Republican or a conservative, Goldwater was a paragon of sanity and probity. The commercial was over-the-top in 1964 and was withdrawn after one showing. However, its warning should now be heeded because our whole world does depend on the outcome of this presidential election.
Quite literally.
The phrase "inflection point" is a mathematical term for the point on a graph where the curvature changes. Lately, it has come to mean a crisis point or turning point where a change of direction must occur. We are there with respect to climate change. Actually, we are well past the inflection point. The time to do something about climate change was decades ago, when Exxon's own scientists first warned them that it was real.
We still might be able to do something to mitigate the worst effects of the impending catastrophes. But it will require leadership that, as a necessary precondition, at least acknowledges the oncoming climate freight train. We are already feeling the effects in terms of more and worse storms, fires, and floods—and you ain't seen nothin' yet. The only hope (maybe a slim one in any case) is to elect people to high office that are at least willing to face reality rather than "alternate facts."
Donald Trump's plan for dealing with the global climate crisis is "Drill, baby, drill!" To the extent that he has any policy other than vindictiveness, he favors profits over people every time. In that sense, Trump is a traditional Republican, because the GOP (since Teddy Roosevelt) has held that what is good for large corporations is good for the USA, or at least the 1% of it that matters. Trumpian populism does hate the "elites," but the elites it despises are not the uber-wealthy but people who know something. The despised elites are those who have expertise, not those who sequester themselves in gated communities of McMansions where they do not have to rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, like the MAGA hat wearers. The MAGA people get incited to riot—and prison sentences. The rich get tax cuts.
Why would any woman vote for Trump? That is like black people voting for David Duke. Here is a man judicially found responsible for sexual assault, and he will have to pay out multiple millions to his victim, both for the assault and for defamation of her character (The guy is a class act all the way.). As we have known since the release of the Access Hollywood video, he is a sexual predator who brags about it. He has even made leering comments about his own daughter (yeeuck). He also brags about being the one who defeated Roe v. Wade by nominating extremist ideologues to the Supreme Court. Most of his boasts are preposterous (e.g., he is a "very stable genius"), but this one is real. He really has done more than anyone to abridge the rights of reproductive freedom of American women.
BTW, his running mate has a bizarre fixation on childless people, especially women. I am a childless cat person. J.D. Vance can kiss my ass.
Why would anyone who has worked hard and with integrity to build up a business have any respect for Donald Trump? Here is a guy, as the saying goes, who was born on third base and is pissed he’s not getting credit for hitting a home run. He squandered many millions of his daddy's money on ridiculous business ventures and has had multiple bankruptcies. He is a terrible businessman. He couldn't run a burger truck. Civil and criminal juries have found him responsible for business fraud and malpractice. He is going to have to pay out nearly half a billion in the civil case and was convicted on 34 counts in the criminal one. A competent and honest businessperson should feel nothing but contempt for this grifter and many-times loser.
Why would anyone who claims to follow Jesus Christ support Donald Trump? Here is a man of the most sordid and debased character, one who could be a poster boy for all seven of the deadly sins. His sexual depredations are well known, but he is also a conman who duped victims into enrolling in his fake "university" and contributing to his bogus "charity." Lately, he has been on TV hawking $60 Bibles. Does anyone honestly think that there is a shred of piety in this man? His only God is Donald Trump. What about Christian charity? He lives to hate. A monsoon of foul, hateful, and abusive language pours constantly from his mouth. Evangelicals' excuse has been that God sometimes makes use of ungodly people. Sometimes maybe. Satan, on the other hand, uses them all the time. Which one, God or Satan, is a lecherous, profane, mendacious, racist, misogynistic, cruel, dishonest, violent, narcissist more likely to serve?
Every now and then a pathological liar will say something that lets you know his real intentions. This happened recently when Trump was addressing an audience of evangelicals. He assured them that if they voted him in for another term, they would never have to vote again. Never have to vote again. Have to vote? I like to vote. In fact, I think I have a right to vote and that elections should be free and fair and competently administered so that the results will be accurate. Those who ensure that elections are free, fair, and accurate deserve our deepest thanks. But Donald Trump does not think so. He only believes in elections if he wins. When he loses, he will use every means at his disposal, including violence, to overturn the will of the people. I never want to live in a country where I will think (I wouldn't be allowed to say it out loud) "Gee, I remember voting. It was great."
Enough. We have all seen Trump's faults recounted many times. Well, some of them. No one has enough time to list them all.
Here is what really gets to me: How can anyone, anyone, not watch and listen to this man and realize the absolutely blindingly obvious fact that he is stark raving howl-at-the-moon batshit crazy??? Are millions of Americans equally insane? In 1960, some voters were put off by Richard Nixon's shifty, sweaty appearance on the televised debate with handsome Wunderkind JFK—maybe enough to sway the tight election. How could voters be attuned to such subtle appearances then and so oblivious to the dead obvious now? Has the national I.Q. precipitously declined? (A possibility I would not absolutely rule out.) Even the supposedly liberal press will not call a loon a loon. When Joe Biden slipped up, there were dozens of stories. When Trump rambles incoherently about batteries, sharks, the Battle of Gettysburg, and a fictitious serial killer, the press goes "Meh. That's just Trump." His family should have done an intervention years ago. He needs a long, long rest at Calming Woods Psychiatric Facility (or Sing Sing).
When we look back at history, there have been times of collective derangement in which significant portions of society would engage in behavior that can only be described as psychotic: the children's crusade, the medieval flagellants, the witchcraft mania, antisemitic mania, the McCarthyite communist hysteria, and the "satanic panic" of the 1980's. Is Trumpism another of these collective manias?
Or maybe it is the personality cult thing. I first heard the term "personality cult" associated with the Soviet adulation of Josef Stalin. Even people being shot on Stalin's orders would shout "Long live Stalin!" Stalin was a total monster. The quote
The death of one is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.
is probably misattributed to Stalin, but it perfectly expresses the cryogenic coldness with which he could carry out mass murder. Yet people worshipped him. They still do. Many Russians today look back upon the Stalin era with frank nostalgia, wishing that Russia could be powerful and feared as it was under Stalin. In a cult, the leader is infallible, no matter how stupendously awful he is. Absolutely no evidence or logic—or even the testimony of their own eyes—will convince the cultist otherwise.
So, the real question is not about Donald Trump, but about us. How, within the span of one long lifetime, could we go from the nation that (with our allies) defeated the monstrous tyranny of Hitler to one where approximately half of the voters support a blatant autocrat who hates the Constitution, the rule of law, and the democratic process? That question will long occupy the future historians of our imploding civilization.
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thanks, Keith. We might ask, too, how active and former members of the military could vote for a man who considers them to be suckers, and who at general Kelly's son's grave site asked, "I don't get it, what's in it for him?" All this and more in Tm Nichols's and Jeffrey Goldberg's reporting at the Atlantic.
Perhaps a large part of the answer is that we don't know what democracy is. We think it's only democracy when a certain outcome prevails. This is true on the left and the right. Each has its definition of "the people," and both omit significant sectors of the population. We also think that democracy equal voting, but it's not. Voting is an element of democracy, to be sure, but democracy is fundamentally an ethical orientation toward fellow citizens, even -- especially -- the citizens we disagree with. But when we measure by ends, not means, and when we trim "the people" to our own liking, we're all petits fascistes.