America's Political Dead End

"Just Between Us and the Stars" Watercolor by Jim Moore

Inescapable factions and partisan self-interests

There is no escape clause in the Constitution

In response to my recent Facebook post of Donald Trump’s bullying tweet on May 20 that he would penalize Michigan for sending out absentee ballot applications, calling the very legal move, “Voter Fraud,” a friend of mine replied, “This is why political parties are a bad idea.”

I considered my friend’s conclusion, and while I agree that political parties are spawning grounds for malicious actors to hone their skills, they represent a much deeper problem, one that has been two centuries in the making.

The founders, in various Federalist Papers, warned against “factions” and the corrupting influence they may play (and did play even at the founding).

James Madison, in Federalist 10, defines a faction as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”

In our current condition, in the iron grip of one of the most brutal factions this country has ever suffered — the Republican Party — we witness daily the adverse actions of that faction, and it will not soon release its grip, no matter the outcome of the November election.

Nor will we be relieved of our burden by any gains of the Democratic Party, which has its own “common impulse” and may be less malign than what we suffer now. But it is no less self-interested.

A democratic republic is a magic-thinking myth

Having worked in and with both parties in my political career, I often wondered how else we might structure a truly democratic republic form of government after becoming so entrenched in, and enamored of, the Gordian Knot of political parties.

It is easy to quote Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” but it is not so easy to fabricate a practical plan to join together that which has become so debilitated and blind to the needs of the Lincolnian “vision” of a nation with its better angels, etc.

A house divided against itself cannot stand

I fear we have lost our way so much that no plan is possible to join that which refuses to bond. America has never been a fair nation; it has never been a decent and kind and fully-embracing country; it’s history has been written and rewritten by the victors, while those who lost at every turn — from Native Americans to “not-like-us” immigrants, to the poor and elderly, to the simply different — now stand forever in the shadows.

Our self-righteousness is dragging us down

Ecclesiastes 1:2 chastises us with “Vanity of vanities; all is vanities.” As if that was not enough of an admonition, the chapter includes: “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. What is crooked cannot be made straight, and what is lacking cannot be counted.”(Eccl. 1:14–15)

Our white vanity and hubristic overseers’ attitudes, our stubborn inability to admit we never really let go of the idea of the divine right of kings and our insistence that “my land is your land, but only if it is really just my land” has dragged us down like anchors on the national soul. And we will not rise to the surface again even for a breath of new thought.

“Vanity of vanities; all is vanity” Ecclesiastes 1:2

There are those who now say we are at a crossroads in our history, a “tipping point” to use the popular phrase. They are wrong. We were at the crossroads, the tipping point, in the 1840s and ’50s. By the time of the inevitable Civil War, we had willingly, with malice aforethought, crossed our own Rubicon and ventured into the land of lost hopes and misbegotten dreams, with no hope of returning to a democratic Garden that never really existed.

We are witnessing America’s end game

Donald Trump is the sum of all our unequal parts; he is the malefactor — the hit man — sent by all our historical missteps to wreak havoc and discord and death upon our body politic. He is the rotting aggregation of all our misplaced “righteousness” when it comes to our inhumanity against all who do not look like us, think like us, act like us, pray like us, accumulate wealth like us, sneer like us, condescend like us, pity like us, hate like us.

It may be possible to remove Trump from office in November, but that won’t solve our problems; Joe Biden won’t solve our problems; a woman president won’t solve our problems. We are in too deep now. How ironic that we are now on our own Trail of Tears.

Trump’s Stink Covers Us All

The odor of his presidency threatens to overwhelm a vulnerable nation

“Miasma” (illustration by Jim Moore)

There is a stink on the Presidency that has become a stink on all Americans. I’m sure you won’t like reading that, particularly if you as vehement a Get-Trump-Out person as I am, but you and I and all of us are covered in the stink just as surely as if the national septic tank that is Trump backed up into all our communities at the same time and washed over everyone and everything.

A majority of us did not vote to be covered in the effluvia that descended that golden escalator not so long ago; but covered we are now. All of us.

If you think I’m wrong, just think back to the last time you drove over a road-killed skunk, or passed a freshly fertilized pasture, or endured the stench of a chicken or hog processing plant even with the car windows rolled up. That stink stayed in the car a good long while, didn’t it? Same with the Trump election. The stink lingers.

Some odors never wash out

The smell of fear

When I was in junior high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, the route our bus took from home to school passed over a slaughter yard. The bottom of the bridge was so close to the slaughter house we could hear the cattle bellowing before they were killed, and the smell of the place rose up in sickly waves on warm spring and fall mornings and filled our bus with the odor of wild-eyed death.

Well that odor of wild-eyed death is streaming across America now, and I’m not speaking ill of the more then 90,000 Americans who have died of the novel coronavirus. They are victims and often needlessly tragic ones at that.

I’m talking about the stink of Trump and his administration and enablers whose hands are bloodied with those deaths. I’m talking about the man whose recklessness, ignorance, stupidity, meanness, inhumanity, vulgarity, shamelessness, villainy, misogyny, duplicity, brutality, and unadulterated hatred of all that is not him and his spawn.

The source of the stink

Trump is the source of the smell of the wild-eyed death that coats our country today.

Trump is the odoriferous one who has the unmitigated gall to refer to his predecessor as “incompetent.” That’s rich. That’s really rich. The President who sang “Amazing Grace,” is the incompetent one? The President who, despite my own differences with some of his policies, nonetheless grieved as we grieved over the graves of children taken by gunfire, is the incompetent one? The President who smiled, joked, cracked wise even with those in the media who criticized him is the incompetent one? The man who spoke with confidence, using complete sentences to form thought-provoking paragraphs upon which whole world-class speeches were elevated is the incompetent one?

Well, in the words of Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does,” and there is a lot of stupid in a man who calls his predecessor incompetent. There is a lot more than stupid, though. And all of it stinks.

“Stupid is as stupid does”

There is his unerring ability to spread his brand of stink into as many corners of the country as he and his morally-blinded, ethically-disabled hoard of vandals can reach. And it does not matter if you and I don’t live directly in the path of those Trumpian vandals; it is only enough that we live near their foul leavings, their fetid detritus of lies, hatred, and disunion.

The smell is in everything

The stench of their mere proximity, and the vomitous odor of their inane clamoring and fear-branded fealty seep into our daily dialogue, ooze through our thoughts, and coat the fibers of our common bonds.

Trump’s obsession with and racist hatred of Obama drives him to tear down anything and everything associated with the 44th president. Trump’s usurpation of power to rid government of whistleblowers, inspectors general, and contrary Congressional witnesses are clanging warning bells of his dictatorial sickness.

Trump’s oft-displayed and ego-inflated dismissal of women journalists or women of color, courage, and strength who do not swoon in his inflated presence floats on the surface of his sulfurous swamp like a bloom of algae. You don’t have to be downwind of Washington to smell the rotten eggs that have been laid by Trump and his minions.

The stink of lawlessness

To Trump, the rule of law means nothing. To Trump, the rule of Trump means everything, and if lawlessness emerges from that rule, so much the better for the chaos he sows; he will find a way to reap profits from it. For Trump, it matters not that the Office of the President now stinks in the noses of the world community; he cares nothing about the duties and responsibilities to which he swore an oath.

Trump is a gas-lighter extraordinaire, and he practices that nefarious art against his own followers, stirring up fear and distrust, urging them to arm themselves against the deep state, tipping their centers of gravity toward anarchy, pitting them against their better angels and fellow citizens. That is what he does and has always done: putting the stinks of fear and hopelessness and victimhood into the pot of poverty and ignorance and giving it a good stir before pouring it out across the countryside.

A good airing in November

In five-and-a-half months, voting as the good and decent people we know we are, we will have a chance to cleanse Trump’s stink from the fabric of our humanity.

We can expel his dank scent from the shadowy corners of our society where the odor of Trump has congealed into hatred. And we can fumigate the soul of the nation, soaked and sullied but not yet ruined by the tragedy of the Trump presidency.