Political Ruminations: January 2021

The Senate loss in Georgia and the storming of the Capitol are the best things imaginable for the GOP: definitively, the toxi grip of Trump on the party is broken. I am hopeful that purged and deprived of power a better party will emerge: continuing the best of the Trump legacy, especially the defense of innocent life, of the sanctity of marriage and religious liberty. Add to this a stronger stance towards China and Iran. ANd hopefully advancement of the economic populism which Trump preached but never delivered. I imagine a party that champions the underdogs in the class war against the liberal elite in the cultural/moral, political and economic arenas. I forsee fresh leadership: Tim Scott, Nicki Haley, Ben Sasse, Marco Rubio and others. A huge sigh of relief as Trump finally fades from the spotlight. The impeachment of Trump for incitement to insurrection is an imprudent, unjust and even a violent act. Imprudent because it will iflame the rage of the anti-elite, Trumpian populist movement. Injust because he did not incite insurrection. It was surely not his intention nor in his political interest for such criminal behavior to happen. He did not direct the mob to break the law. We must separate his action itself from its consequences. A major ethical error is to judge an act by its consequences: frequently a perfectly good act results in unintentional bad consequences, just as a evil act (in form and in intent) can have unforseen good results. Imagine that the police were prepared to restrain and arrest the intruders and the invasion failed: there would be no impeachment, but Trumps speech remains the same morally and legally. His behavior since the election is no different than that before and during his presidency: infantile, dangerous, narcissistic, reckless, irresponsible, and entirely vile. But that is not criminal nor impeachable. The fact is that about 48% of the electorate in both elections supported him and they cannot be dismissed. The impeachment is violent in that it violates not just Trump but the huge population that support him. The Covid-influenced election of 2020 with the mass mail-in vote was a huge change. It is new territory. It is not insane for many to suspect it. It is not criminal, or moronic, or immoral for Trump and his base an his cronies to moan and groan about a stolen election. I myself think Biden won fair and square, as did Trump in 2016. The lament of the Right does not compare with the three years of incessant, daily, relentless whining from the Left about Russian collusion which was definitively debunked by the expensive Mueller Commission. That was worth its cost in that it settled the question: Trump did not collude with Russia. A similar bi-partisan commission, preferrably headed by a respectded, moderate conservative, should study the 2020 election to see if anything went wrong and how best to proceed in the future as there will be continued wide use of mail-in ballots. The widespread and unfortnate Trump Derangement Syndrome is itself as significant as the Trump movement. The inordinate rage, indignation, fragility, anxiety and hysteria that accompanies this condition suggests an underlying cause not unlike the pathology of Trump himself. There is a negative or adverse mimesis at work: the antagonist imitates the protagonist in an unconscious engagement an entanglement. Donald is a small, sad person: his bullying, pomposity and bravado hardly cover the inner emptiness, the entire loss of any sense of self-respect or worth or dignity. He seems to be desperately fighting for the affirmation he never received from his father. One need not be a psychologist to see this, it is evident. Similarly, the agony, anxiety, rage and fragility so manifest by those obsessed with hatred towards him seems to be something similar: some displacement of unresolved inner conflicts. Really: the President of the United States does not have the power that Trump-haters give him. The Trump impeachment is a lynch mob: itself frenzied with anxiety and rage, scapegoating the President and venting disgust for the other half that disagree with the liberal vision. The DNC just won all three branches of the executive! They should move beyond their Trump obsession and focus their energies on positive policies: there is plenty to do. Imagine that Biden called for the party to forget about Trump and move on with life and with they hope to accomplish. That would be a move to reunite the country. Is it likely that he has the intelligence, magnanimity and moral fiber to do that? As a staunch moral conservative I am sanguine about our country. The unamimous aversion to the capitol desecration gave us a momentary national unity and a shared sense of the sacredness of that building, those institutions and our constitutional legacy. With Justic Barrett we finally have a court that will not inflict upon us its cultural/moral preferences in authoritarian fashion. I am not intimadated by a Democratic executive: first, it will influence my daily life not even 2%. Secondly, the moral core of the DNC and woke cultural liberalsim is rotten, shallow and fickle: the glorified Self, destruction of the innocent, desecration of sexuality and family, identity politics and critical theory and frightened repression, in a soft totalitarianism, of any disapproving moral judgment from tradition. With Yuval Levin I see this as a time for us all to patiently, perseveringly, calmly and hopefully rebuild our institutions, starting with our own families, communities and extending out to our nation and glove.