The proctology caucus and the end of America

The matter of Donald Trump is not one of partisan politics.  It is a matter of what comprises decency.  A colleague calls the MAGA cult the proctology caucus because it is so enamored of an asshole.  He points out that these people will be around after Trump is gone and that their admiration of Trump raises questions about whether the United States can sustain an honorable, uncorrupted government.  To endorse Trump is to reject democracy.

Trump posts statements on the social media that are so crudely malevolent that they are characteristic of an emotionally disturbed, mentally deficient fifth-grader,  certainly not of a functioning adult.  And that brings up the divided state of our country.  The politicians talk of unifying.  That talk ignores the fact that people of some intelligence and decency do not want to be allied with people who lack and disparage those qualities. People who revere those qualities are aware that democracy works only when it is applied with scruples in regard to the rights and aspirations of others.

The election of Donald Trump marked a failure of American democracy.  Although we claim to be a democracy, about half of our citizens think that leadership has to be authoritarian.  They are used to obeying teachers, bosses, ministers, spouses, police, whatever form authority figures can come in.  The founders of our republic were clear about designing a system of governance that would not permit a king or anything resembling one to be in charge.  Still, there are people who are enthralled by royalty and its privileges. Walt Whitman recognized the problem when he said the democratic United States 'are destined either to surmount the gorgeous history of feudalism, or else prove the most tremendous failure of time."  The election of Trump, the heir millionaire with a predatory criminal history, was a step backward into the iniquities of feudalism.  When Trump speaks of making America great again, he is speaking of its vagaries of the past which democracy works to overcome.

Trump is a despicable person who flouts the principles that the republic was formed to develop and protect.  He is an asshole who embodies the values of many Americans, and those are not the values of a functioning democracy.  They are the values of pageantry and power that are rooted in feudalism.

A vote for Trump is a vote to stop the quest for liberty, equlality, and justice.  We borrowed a term from the black American vernacular, woke, to describe people who are extremely sensitive to the inequities, and injustices of the world, and have made it a term of derision and contempt.   That is how close we have come to losing our democracy.

Trump is an asshole, but he has a lot of fellows who admire that quality in a man.  But the biggest problem is how do you unify with people who do not, in fact, want the qualities of life that America was created to develop and preserve?

That is what is at issue in the upcoming election.