There is a diary on how prescient some award winning journalists were in 2016 right after the election when applied to the debacle we’re in right now.
www.dailykos.com/…
So I went back and dug up an email exchange with one of my high school teachers of whom I had very high esteem, and who happens to be a Catholic conservative. I wanted to see what he had to say about Trump’s election and unfortunately, I hate to say it, I was and am right, and he was and is wrong. (I’ll skip over the personal parts and the parts where I got into defending Clinton’s supposed wrongdoings which in retrospect seems rather quaint. I’ll highlight the parts that seems relevant today, 2/1/1984)
Me:
My question is: with all the evidence that Trump has shown us, am I justified in thinking that politics has nothing to do with evidence, and everything to do with personality and emotions? Is it all limbic system and no frontal cortex?
... Somebody as venal, xenophobic and untruthful like Trump could not be president. Compared to a bullshitter (who doesn't even care about whether he has the facts or not) like Trump, Clinton is a regular politician. He has managed not only to turn it around to make HER the liar, but to claim being a "straight talker" to his supporters.
Watching the debates made me realize that Trump probably has untreated ADD. I found myself thinking like a conspiracy theorist when trying to follow his arguments. I though that surely most Americans realize that such an undisciplined thinker cannot be in the White House?
... Trump's victory just made the KKK and neo-Nazis come out of the woodwork. And the young are just sopping all this hate. Just yesterday, at a local high school, white high school students held a Trump sign and shouted "white power" in the hallways.
I seem to remember that you're a Roman Catholic. Leaving aside the question of abortion, how is it possible that about 80% of Christians can be voting for somebody who's broken most of the rules that Christians live by?
The only things I could do now are what Garrison Keillor wrote 2 days ago: hope for the best, take the next 4 years off politically and hope that America wakes up to reality, if doublespeak hasn't won by then. It might be too late by then for climate change. I'm just going to tend to my garden and install my solar panels next weekend.
Him:
You are of course right that Trump is a lout. As an equal-opportunity
political loather, however, I think his opponent also fatally flawed...
[follows with a criticism of the Clinton Foundation and emails]
In sum, a choice between the Mad Hatter and Lady Macbeth.
I continue to think that people¹s fears of the outcome (a colleague came
in Wednesday calling it “Apocalypse, Day 1”) are overplayed. All the
Democrats and half the Republicans will oppose Trump¹s worst impulses, and
the loudspeakers of our culture ‹ the universities, the news media, the
entertainment industry ‹ all seminaries of the Left ‹ have already revved
up their attack engines. (On the way to work the other day, NPR was
broadcasting some hysteria about minorities about to take it in the neck,
as if their unsafe streets and lousy schools in decades-long
Left-controlled enclaves came from elsewhere.) We¹ll see with his first
appointments; but the snippet of the speech that I heard before getting
out of the car Wednesday seemed conciliatory, particularly from him. And
since he owes nothing to anybody, even to the Republican Party that he ran
with but against, maybe he¹ll be more centrist than people think despite
shaking some things up.
Me:
[Clinton defense 101—skip]
What the difference between them that made me support her is that fundamentally, she has good intentions. She may seem to be Lady Macbeth in her methods, but her acceptance speech did not make me doubt her goals. Trump on the other hand made me realize that we've never had a presidential candidate who is going rely fundamentally on charisma and untruths for power, not for any agenda that he would implement. (I've become a fan of the sites Politifact and FactCheck.org. His record on those sites is simply stunning.)
...[more Clinton defense—stupid me]
Never mind, we're all in Trump University now. Retrospective autopsy is irrelevant now. We are just hoping that he's going turn out to be much more mellow than his campaign self. Since you know Chinese and Roman history so well, I'll allude to that: I think he'll turn out more like one of the "bad" emperors like Yang Guang of the Sui Dynasty and Tiberius. He'll rely on the force of his personality. There will be no Democrats or independents on his administration--they will all be loyalists. He'll certainly have achievements which will be overshadowed by either his incompetence, his lack of concentration or his indifference to common norms. Even the best emperors turn senile, suspicious and reliant on ministers that have their own agenda...and he is not young, and certainly no Claudius or Han Wu Di. You mentioned that all the Democrats and half the Republicans will be his loyal opposition. I think the truth will be closer to 80% of the Democrats and 5% of the Republicans (the former Never-Trumpers who will have no power at all).
[I was wrong on the Democrats—it’s more like 90% with some of the 10% remaining turning into Russian assets and newly minted GOP. And the Never Trumpers are more like 1%.]
Him—see how applicable his remarks on how inauthentic Clinton’s intentions were are to where we are today on Deshowitz’s “anything to elect myself isn’t a crime”; and his musings on the imperial presidency (of Obama, of course):
“Regardless of [Clinton Foundation’s] funding”?? A mob lawyer might say as much. Pardon me, but the notion that the good done by X excuses or justifies X tout court, I just don’t accept. It’s rather like claiming that the Nazi regime gets a pass because it built the autobahns and Volkswagens. (And no, I’m not calling the Clintons Nazis, just venal and morally compromised.)
You say she has good intentions. I don’t know how you know that, but even if she did, I don’t care about anyone’s intentions. I care about their actions. Hers (and his) frequently sicken me, but his as a libertine and churl, hers as an enabler of a libertine and endangerer of American security, a significant category difference.
...
As for the other wretch, I don’t know which historical analogue to point to. I see no charisma, and those who hope for some Prince Hal transformation may find that they get not Henry V but Falstaff. I should think you’d be heartened if he began to rely on “ministers" like the staid Mr. Pence, with whose views you may differ but whose soberness all acknowledge. But even if not, if the roots of constitutional order withstood Obama’s “phone and pen” bypassings of Congress, the odds are they can withstand bluster and bad hair. As Adam Smith said, “There’s a lot of ruin in a nation.” For my part, I would like the entire system to be devolved; that is, for it to matter far less who occupies the post as head of one branch of one level of our government. The imperial presidency always seemed a bad idea to me. For ordinary citizens until the twentieth century, the feds at most times were a very small part of their political lives compared to their localities. I guess that makes me a fan of lost causes — or Swiss cantons. My only other initiative would be to make “None of the above” a mandatory entry on each ballot. I see only two drawbacks: It would almost always win, requiring us to have endless elections; and some lawyer would be tempted to change his name to “None of the above” and claim all the offices. With thoughts like that, no wonder I have no political home! Il faut cultiver notre jardin, I guess.
Me:
[More defense of Clinton, sigh]
The KKK, the neo-Nazis are irredeemable, especially since we're in 2016, not 1960 or 1945. Misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia (especially when professed by those who claim freedom of religion) are not irredeemable, but to let them flourish in your campaign and not denounce them, even after you've won, is irredeemable as a president. It allows for the proliferation of such actions like painting a swastika with the President-elect's name on a wall, harassing black students at U. of Penn, and pulling a burqa off a woman and saying that's "Making America Great Again." It certainly makes more Dylan Roofs more likely in the future.
...
As for Swiss cantons vs. the Federation of Planets (you're probably not a Star Trek fan I would bet): my view is probably the opposite. Yes, Swiss cantons are a good thing when you have global stability and your garden is walled off. But when larger problems like global warming (I understand you're not a fan of the term) that cannot be walled off come knocking, I would hope that we have the united response that only superpowers can have the resources to come up with. I agree that having an imperial presidency in the wrong direction is surely worse. From what I hear, the EPA is probably going to be neutered effectively, and the Paris Agreement is dead. That's a superpower ignoring a global problem.
Maybe we do need an alien invasion after all.
He replied at last he does not approve of Clinton due to her handling of classified material, and he was too busy grading papers.
I would like to pick up the conversation again with him about the last 3 years, but where to fucking start? How do I even express the outrage, the “I told you so” feeling, the “never ever say the GOP is concerned about deficits and truth and abuse of power” part? Is it going to change his mind at all?