The political winds are shifting with all the subtlety of a hurricane.
Doug Jones’s defeat of Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election is yet the latest signal that the accommodators of Donald Trump, those who have normalized and bolstered him, the gutless, schismatic conservatives who abandoned principle to follow a pariah, will have hell to pay in 2018.
That is the beginning of yet another powerful column from Charles M. Blow, this one titled The Omen of Alabama.
Blow offers powerful and direct language which drives home his points, not like a hammer, but more like a series of wonderful thrusts with the sharp weapon of his intellect and his command of language.
Consider what he says of so-called Evangelical Christians who abandoned any principle of their espoused faith to support a man credibly accused of serious perversity:
They made a mockery of Christian faith and moral fidelity. But as the Apostle Paul wrote in Galatians, “God is not mocked.”
Ouch!
Blow goes through the various segments of the Resistance that came together for Tuesday’s historic victory, starting of course with African-Americans, and then offering this:
The election demonstrated that for many college-educated, suburban conservatives, there is a limit to their tolerance for regression, fallaciousness, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia and anti-scientific, ahistoric, truth-hostile positioning.
Now that is a powerful peroration of less than sanguine descriptors.
Blow tells us that the Resistance had its own Southern strategy, turning on its head the notion dating back to Nixon in 1968 that an appeal to racial animus was sufficient to carry state of the old Confederacy, then asserting of Tuesday’s Senate win
And most important, it proved that people who believe in the fundamental values of this country, in its ability to change, in the necessity of making the imperfect more perfect, are not the minority, but rather an inflamed majority.
Blow then pivots to Trump, describing him as “a fringe candidate” who only won with the assistance of a foreign adversary as he “ tapped into an American ugliness” (which is still unfortunately a persisting thread of our history and culture), then saying of the resident of what he is unfortunately turning into what I now consider the Offal Office
Trump is both anomaly and abomination, and America wants to carve him out like a cancer.
We read about the tweet that may finally have gone too far, about Gillibrand, and see Blow also describe Trump as a pathological liar (which I consider an accurate application of that diagnosis).
But this is less about that man than it is about The Resistance he has inspired.
Consider this part of the column:
The Resistance has come to take its country back and make America great again. That means posing a plausible electoral threat to all things Trump and every person who supported his defilement of this country.
The Alabama win was just the wind the Resistance needed beneath its wings to feel the true expanse of the possible.
Confidence is a compounding commodity. It builds on itself.
Trust me when I say that my overview of and examples from this column do not come close to fully demonstrating the power of this column.
Read the whole piece.
Then these final words will serve as an appropriate conclusion —
Republicans must brace for the reckoning. If the Resistance can maintain its intensity — and there is no sign of it weakening — the midterms may well amount to a purge.
Indeed.