“You know, it occurs to me we might not get away with this one.”
-Edward R. Murrow to Fred Friendly, Good Night And Good Luck
The late Molly Ivins said of Pat Buchanan’s 1992 culture-war cri de cour, “It probably sounded better in the original German.” Tonight, Donald Trump will give largely the same speech, albeit stripped of almost all religious content. And then evangelicals who ostensibly stand in opposition to the way he lives his life and how he does business and his previously avowed positions on things like abortion and gay marriage (because that’s what evangelical Christianity means now in this country) will run out and back him to the hilt, as will big-money Republicans and their ilk, because that’s the guy on their team. Serious misgivings, outright concerns, all submarined – because the highest catechism of their faith for a quarter century is Hillary is worse. No matter what, Hillary is worse.
Here’s the thing: George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney were objectionable less because of their own beliefs or who they are – to me anyway – than as enablers for a GOP Congress. A thoroughly Southernized body capable of doing great harm to the life of this country with no Democrat in the White House to check them. Donald Trump, though, is a man who among other things has already given a tacit green light to Russia to make mischief in the Baltics. Never mind his agitating for a border wall he can’t build or make Mexico pay for, or a religious pogrom that doesn’t pass the slightest Constitutional scrutiny – Donald Trump would not only enable the creation of the United States of Alabama, he’d push for it. All in on building a new America in the shape of every racist Facebook meme and email forward you ever got sent by that one relative.
Against this, Hillary Clinton enters the lists as someone the media reviles, someone the country is constantly encouraged to hate and distrust, someone whose own supporters concede may be the Nixon of the Democrats. Uncharismatic, too calculating by half, fairly or not trailing a mild cloud of unproven scandal at all times…but in the end, as the playwright put in song, she’s all we have. A 74-year-old Jewish atheist socialist wasn’t ever going to be able to close the deal, and an O’Malley or Webb weren’t going to either. The Democrats have had their finger in the dike for so long that cultivating the seed corn wasn’t a priority, and so here we are. It’s HRC or bust.
Because bust is it. You think Brexit was a disaster? Remember how shit-shaped things went under George W. Bush? And he was governor of Texas for six years, and surrounded by the cronies of his father the former President. How much worse will it be with a dilettante from New York real estate whose experience is all in shorting contractors, declaring bankruptcy and slapping his name on anything that can make a buck? And if he tries to do a quarter of what he says he will, we’re looking at a legitimate constitutional crisis within the first year. We are beyond the looking glass already; with a President Trump there’s no telling how much worse it could get. And yet, people will revert to sexist tropes, say they don’t want to wake up to that voice on the news, say that Hillary is the embodiment of what they call “my first wife” – and pull the lever anyway for a man who isn’t fit to drive the garbage truck, never mind hold the nuclear button. I don’t know what’s worse: doing it because you’re too fucking stupid to know better, or knowing better and doing it anyway because I got mine, fuck you.
And the worst bit is: this might not be enough. Even if HRC wins this one, no party has won a fourth straight election since the Second World War. Which means that there may be a glide path for the GOP in 2020 for Ted Cruz or whoever else wants to take up the banner for what Laurie Penny brilliantly called “weaponized insincerity applied to structured ignorance”. And I don’t know what happens then. But sufficient is the day unto the evil thereof, as the Proverbs tell us. They also tell us “Let him drink…and remember his misery no more.” Which frankly may be the only way I survive the next three and a half months.