Resist!

Resist!

I hear people all the time saying we need to get over the division in the country. We need to get beyond the nastiness, the name calling, the intolerance. We need to be civil and treat each other with respect. Well I am here to disagree. The right wing of the American political culture and the Republican Party have gone so far over the edge that civility and respect are impossible. Defending the Trump administration is simply incomprehensible. There is absolutely no justification for it. Our current political culture calls for polemic not civil discourse. It calls for condemnation not respect. It calls for courageous truth-telling. Let me explain.

It used to be true in this country that there were two more or less respectable political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. Let me use, of all people, Richard Nixon as an example. I have despised Richard Nixon my whole life. As I was growing up our best family friend had grown up in southern California and had experienced Nixon’s first run for Congress in which he told lie after lie about a very good Democratic opponent. I learned to hate Nixon from that family friend. It surprised me not at all to learn that Nixon kept an enemies list, that he tried to use the IRS against his political opponents, or that he lied and lied about his involvement in Watergate. Yet I have to concede that compared to today’s Republicans Nixon’s actual policies were not that bad, or at least not all of them were. If I recall correctly, Nixon signed the legislation creating the EPA and OSHA. He negotiated with the Soviets. He recognized the People’s Republic of China, a necessary move that could have made US-Chinese relations better than they are. He was of course absolutely horrible about the Vietnam War. In the 1968 presidential election lied and lied about having a secret plan to end it. His only plan was more violence and international war crimes by expanding the destruction to uninvolved countries. He did however eventually recognize that we could not win the war and dummied up a supposed peace that got us out of the fighting and left the corrupt South Vietnamese to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese Communists. Nixon then was a very mixed bag, very bad on some things but actually not bad at all on others. I didn’t think Gerald Ford was that bad either. I actually supported his pardon of Nixon because I feared what a prosecution of Nixon would do to the country. He did, after all, still have his supporters. I voted for Ford in 1976.

Fast forward to 1980. This country made the bad movie actor Ronald Reagan president. Some Americans claim he was one of our best presidents. Actually he was one of our worst. He and his minions in Congress revised the tax code to benefit the wealthy and screw the rest of us. He created what was then the biggest budget deficit in American history. People say he brought down the USSR. He didn’t. Internal contradictions and inadequacies brought down the USSR. Trust me. I lived there for a year. I saw those contradictions and inadequacies up close. Reagan just happened to be US President when the disintegration of the USSR began. Reagan knew about the AIDS crisis and intentionally ignored it leading to the deaths of God only know how many people. Reagan and Reaganomics made greed and neglect of the poor respectable. Reagan engaged in irresponsible rhetoric about nations he didn’t like—the USSR, Iran, North Korea—thereby making any improvement in the world situation much more difficult. Reagan wasn’t one of our best presidents. He was a disaster.

Things didn’t get better with his Republican successors. George H. W. Bush was perhaps not too bad, but his son George W. Bush continued Reagan's disastrous economic policies and was an international war criminal when he started an unprovoked and unjustified war of aggression against Iraq. He ran up enormous budget deficits and let Wall Street get so out of control that at the end of his second term the economy collapsed, giving us what was at the time the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. It took the wisdom of the Democrats to pull us out of it. Democrat Barack Obama wasn’t perfect by a long shot. He believed in absurd American exceptionalism as much as the Republicans did, but he wasn’t nearly as disastrous as Reagan and the Bushes had been.

He was however succeeded by Donald Trump, easily the most disrespectable, despicable, incompetent, and destructive president this country has ever had. It’s not just that Trump pursues destructive policies, though he does. He and his minions have cut taxes for the wealthy even more than Reagan did. He has run up enormous budget deficits. He has undone or attempted to undo all of the Democrats’ environmental regulations that did at least something to address the existential crisis of global warming. He cozies up to dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. Perhaps worst of all he has thoroughly botched the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic resulting in at least tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

His policies are disasters, but he’s an even worse human being than he is a politician. He his personally immoral. He brags about “grabbing women by the pussy” with no concern at all for consent. He has affairs with porn stars and Playboy models while he’s married to other women. He calls white supremacists fine people. On top of all that he lies and lies and lies. People who have kept count say he has already lied something like twenty thousand times since he’s been in office. He has no concern whatsoever for the truth. He does not operate within the categories of truth and falsity. He operates only with the categories of what he thinks is good for him politically and what he thinks is bad for him politically. He uses federal law enforcement forces like fascist black shirts. He doesn’t read anything including his daily intelligence briefings but gets most of his information from the dissemblers of Fox News. He welcomes support from the followers of the insane conspiracy theory Qanon. There is a great risk that he will not accept the results of the November presidential election this year and cause a constitutional crisis by refusing to leave the White House and claiming he actually won when he loses. He is the worst president of my lifetime, and whoever the second worst president is isn’t even close to him in incompetence, immorality, and despicability.

There simply is no justification for Donald Trump. Any attempt to defend him only proves that the person who makes the attempt is ignorant, bigoted, and concerned only with him or her self. There simply is no avoiding that conclusion. Any other conclusion simply ignores the obvious and undeniable facts. Yet people want me to treat defenders of Donald Trump with civility and respect. I’m sorry, no. I can’t do it. I won’t do it.

Here’s why not. Sexual aggression against women is illegal, immoral, and indefensible. Trump brags of it. Racism and white supremacy are despicable sins that corrupt the core of our society. Trump is a racist who calls white supremacists fine people. The legitimate function of government is at least to care about if not for all of the country’s people. Trump gives not one good God damn about anyone except his wealthy supporters. Organized crime causes immense harm to innocent people. Trump functions more like a mafia don than like a president of all the people. The United States of America has always at least claimed to stand for freedom and democracy, not that it always has. Trump works to undermine the electoral process and prefers to cozy up to dictators than cooperate with our traditional democratic allies. He pulls us out of international agreements intended to protect the environment and preserve peace in the Middle East. The United States Constitution isn’t perfect, but it at least guarantees significant civil liberties including the right to vote. Trump neither understands the Constitution nor gives a damn about what it says. He violates his oath to protect and defend the Constitution at every turn. The list of Trump’s transgressions and outrages could go on and on.

Here’s the unavoidable conclusion. Donald Trump is not a traditional American politician with whom I just happen to disagree on policy issues. He is a sinful, despicable human being. He is a disaster as a politician. He is a true threat to our constitutional system of government because he doesn’t believe in it. He threatens the world order, that has avoided a third world war for the last seventy-five years, by damaging our relationships with our allies and making friends with murderous dictators. He models grossly immoral personal behavior as reasonable and acceptable. He gives our children the model of one who lies prolifically to get his own way as though that were morally acceptable.

Donald Trump is not a traditional American politician with whom I happen to disagree about policy. He is an American fascist. He wants to be a dictator. He wants to rule not through our constitutional system but by executive fiat. He despises women, people, of color, and the poor. He mocks people with disabilities. He tears children away from their parents and keeps them in cages. He tears parents away from children and deports them back to countries where they are unsafe and impoverished. He calls immigrants rapists and murderers. He stokes unjustified fear of immigrants as a way of manipulating his base just like Hitler stoked thoroughly unjustified fear of the Jews. Donald Trump is a radical departure from and the debasement of the norms of American political life. There is no denying that truth There is no defending him.

Yet this country is full of people who do defend him, and I hear people saying I should communicate with them with respect and civility. To that request I simply say no. Our current political situation with Donald Trump as president does not call for civility and respect for those who defend the indefensible. It calls for our most energetic, consistent, and truth-based resistance. It calls for the most vociferous, forceful, truth-based attacks on Trump and his supporters that we can muster. It calls for all true Americans to condemn both him and them for advocating and implementing the despicable, sinful, and indefensible as acceptable policy. European fascism killed tens of millions of people in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. It was evil there and then. American fascism with its Fuhrer Donald Trump hasn’t gotten nearly as brutal as Nazism was—yet. It is nonetheless fascism. It is fascism in the American context. Civility and respect were not the way to respond to Mussolini or Hitler. They are not the way to respond to Trump and his supporters either. I do not want to be unified with them. I will not be reconciled with them. I will not accept them in our political mix.

So again I say to those of you who call for civility and respect: No. That is not what is called for now. That is not what we need now. We need assertive, aggressive, uncompromising resistance. The Germans didn’t resist Hitler. They bought his hatred and his lies. Their country and the world paid a horrific price as a result. We cannot make their mistake. No, we don’t have an Auschwitz—yet. We must do everything we can to make sure we never do. Civility and respect are not part of how we do that. So once again I say to requests for civility and respect no. And not just no, but hell no!