Thursday, December 10, 2020

What is Going On, America?

So, what the hell is going on in America?

I have been here for a long time. I voted in every election since 1956—Ike-Stevenson—and I have never witnessed anything so bizarre as what we see now on almost a daily basis.  And, of course I include our pseudo-president, The Donald, but it is what we can see almost daily from at least some of the 70 million people who voted for Trump.  Worse yet, we are observing the almost complete destruction of the republican party, as only maybe 27 of the republican members of Congress are willing to concede to the Biden election victory.  Can anyone imagine such a bizarre situation in, say, 1960, when Kennedy won the election?  

The 1960 United States presidential election was a closely contested election. Democratic United States Senator John F. Kennedy defeated incumbent Vice President Richard Nixon, the Republican Party nominee. This was the first election in which fifty states participated and the last in which the District of Columbia did not. It was also the first election in which an incumbent president was ineligible to run for a third term because of the term limits established by the 22nd Amendment.

Nixon faced little opposition in the Republican race to succeed popular incumbent Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kennedy, a junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, established himself as the Democratic front-runner with his strong performance in the 1960 Democratic primaries, including a key victory in West Virginia over United States Senator Hubert Humphrey. He defeated Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson on the first presidential ballot of the 1960 Democratic National Convention, and asked Johnson to serve as his running mate. The issue of the Cold War dominated the election, as tensions were high between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Kennedy won a 303 to 219 Electoral College victory and is generally considered to have won the national popular vote by 112,827, a margin of 0.17 percent. The 1960 presidential election was the closest election since 1916, and this closeness can be explained by a number of factors. Kennedy benefited from the economic recession of 1957–58, which hurt the standing of the incumbent Republican Party, and he had the advantage of 17 million more registered Democrats than Republicans. Furthermore, the new votes that Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic president, gained among Catholics almost neutralized the new votes Nixon gained among Protestants. Kennedy's campaigning skills decisively outmatched Nixon's, who wasted time and resources campaigning in all fifty states while Kennedy focused on campaigning in populous swing states. Nixon's emphasis on his experience carried little weight for most voters. Kennedy relied on Johnson to hold the South, and used television effectively. Despite this, Kennedy's popular vote margin was the narrowest in the 20th century.

But did we get riots in the streets, or right wing terrorists threatening to gun down the country if the election was not overturned?? Hmmm, well no, we did not. 

And how about that narrow race in 1968?

The 1968 United States presidential election was the 46th quadrennial presidential election, in which former vice president Richard Nixon, defeated the Democratic nominee, incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey. Analysts have argued the election of 1968 was a major realigning election as it permanently disrupted the New Deal coalition that had dominated presidential politics since 1932.

Incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson had been the early front-runner for the Democratic Party's nomination, but withdrew from the race after narrowly winning the New Hampshire primary. Eugene McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Humphrey emerged as the three major candidates in the Democratic primaries until Kennedy was assassinated. Humphrey won the nomination, sparking numerous anti-war protests. Nixon entered the Republican primaries as the front-runner, defeating Nelson Rockefeller, Ronald Reagan, and other candidates to win his party's nomination. Alabama governor George Wallace ran on the American Independent Party ticket, campaigning in favor of racial segregation.

The election year was tumultuous; it was marked by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and subsequent riots across the nation, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and widespread opposition to the Vietnam War across university campuses. Nixon ran on a campaign that promised to restore law and order to the nation's cities and provide new leadership in the Vietnam War. A year later, he would popularize the term "silent majority" to describe those he viewed as being his target voters. He also pursued a "Southern strategy" designed to win conservative Southern white voters who had traditionally supported the Democrats. Humphrey promised to continue Johnson's war on poverty and to support the civil rights movement. Humphrey trailed significantly in polls taken in late August but narrowed Nixon's lead after Wallace's candidacy collapsed and Johnson suspended bombing in the Vietnam War.

Nixon won a plurality of the popular vote by a narrow margin, but won by a large margin in the Electoral College, carrying most states outside of the Northeast. Wallace won five states in the Deep South and ran well in some ethnic enclave industrial districts in the North; he is the most recent third party candidate to win a state. It was the first presidential election after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which had led to mass enfranchisement of racial minorities throughout the country, especially in the South. Nixon's victory marked the start of a period of Republican dominance in presidential elections, as Republicans won four of the next five elections. In addition, he became the first non-incumbent vice president to be elected president, a feat which would only be duplicated in 2020 by Joe Biden.

And yet, despite all that tumult, we had no violent protests of the election results. No armed thugs running around threatening Governors, or state officials to get them to change the vote counts. Nope, however annoyed were the masses, people finally accepted the vote, and once again, we had a new president sworn into office.  And you also perhaps noticed that the losers did not run around the country insisting they had won, if only legal votes were counted. Nope, however annoyed were the losers, they acted like actual Americans, and accepted the results. 

I realize I am really old, and I perhaps belong to a discarded population group that remembers a different world.  But see, I also remember World War II, and Korea, and Vietnam, and the Cold War, and the Berlin Blockade, and the Kennedy assassination, and the MLK assassination, and the Bobby Kennedy assassination. I remember Reagan getting shot (and No, I don’t remember Lincoln’s assassination).  But those shootings resulted from vaguely crazed thugs, likely NRA supporters, who had more guns than intelligence or common sense.

I guess America has always been a kind of weird place, filled with all sorts of people, including vaguely crazed people.  But mainly, in my memory, the truly crazy people largely remained in their respective closets, because most of the folks living here really did not want nutcases on the loose.  Now, periodically some of the nutcase thugs escaped from their closets and acted out their crazy fantasies—see all those assassinations above.  But even when we maybe did not like the person who had been shot, we still gathered together to decry such actions. They were UNAMERICAN!  True Americans simply did not act like that and the idiots acting out had to be censured by the masses (us guys).

Now, it seems, life in America is different. We have a fully delusional president who has well and truly lost the election, but who refuses to acknowledge his loss (a first I think).  But, worse than that, almost the entire Republican Party that he represents seems predisposed to endorse his lunatic assertions and actions. Think of that. The entire Republican Party is afraid of Donald Trump, a man who has never accomplished anything in his entire life. A man who has instead failed at everything he has ever attempted, from his dismal businesses, to his even more dismal marriages.  I keep looking for models for this behavior, and I have great difficulty, but I keep getting drawn back to Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s, with perhaps Mussolini being the better role model. But even they are problematic role models, since they at least had visions in their heads, whereas Trump seems to have mostly images of blonds with big teats. 

But perhaps even more dismaying than the collapse of the entire Republic Party is the roughly 70 million people in America who saw fit to vote for this dismal being, not once, but twice. Even after his catastrophic first four years, with his handling of the pandemic representing a new low in executive mismanagement, those 70 million people still saw fit to vote for him a second time. 

How is that possible?  Do we have 70 million racists or white nationalists who are still protesting the election of a Black Man to the presidency?  It seems impossible to believe. Now many are laying blame at the feet of our various social media channels, and several TV channels, principally Fox, OAN and NewsMax.  These channels, for reasons known only to them, decided to support this delusional person, regardless of what he did or said.  They seemed even to regale his worst instincts and outbursts. I assume that both money and a sense of white nationalism guides these media outlets.  The other social media channels, like Facebook and Twitter seem guided only by money, but they permit and perhaps even encourage the formation of bubbles, within which you will find only reinforcement for whatever peculiar views you hold.  They pretend to censor, but they either fail, or are not really trying.  Trump is known to have lied to the public, mostly via Twitter somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30,000 times, without being held to account. I guess expecting the social media channel to control delusional behavior is like expecting the Mafia to develop a conscience.  So, these 70 million folks are able to converse and gain support for their views, even when those views are filled with false facts. I guess “Truthiness” is now the watchword of America.  Remember that term? Truthiness is the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. And that seems to be America, 2020.

Will it change, this Truthiness World in which we now live, a world in which violence, even extreme violence seems just around the corner? Well, it may, it just may. But it all depends on whether we can actually drag this creature, kicking and screaming, out of the White House, and also, whether the many institutions within our country that pretend to safeguard our republic, actually care enough to act in the face of violence.  We need both political parties to stand up and say ENOUGH!. We need our judicial system to continue to stand up and say NO to Trumpian idiocies.  And we need our police and our military to say NO to right wing nationalist violence (and there will be violence). The 70 million people may well finally retreat into mere opinionated annoyance, if we are able to begin to control the Truthiness Machines of Trump and his right wing PR outlets. 

But these are all still MAYBE’s.  Because Trump has actually dragged us to the rim of darkness, where we are looking down on that thing called a Civil War.  We still have time to retreat. But a retreat to decency and civil behavior towards one another is not guaranteed.  We need to want peace. We need to want actual TRUTHs to govern our behavior. We need to want to stop killing people through inaction or stupidity (hallmarks of the Trump administration).

We need to want Decency, and Ethical Rational behavior,

If we don’t want those things enough, there is still time for the killing to begin. Let us hope we are better than that. Let us hope that the New Year, 2021, represents the beginning of a New Age of Decency in America, a return to our founding principles. Let us Hope Together.



No comments: