Jelani Cobb writes at The New Yorker why neo- fascist evangelist Donald "Rump" Trump marks the end of any notion of "American Exceptionalism." It's a worthwhile read; here are some thoughts that stood out to us:
... Trump is partly a product of forces that the G.O.P. created by pandering to a base whose dilated pupils the Party mistook for gullibility, not abject, irrational fear that would send those voters scurrying to the nearest authoritarian savior they could find. The error was in thinking that this populace, mainlining Glenn Beck and Alex Jones theories and pondering how the Minutemen would have fought Sharia law, could be controlled. (For evidence to the contrary, the Party needed look no further than the premature political demise of Eric Cantor.) The old adage warns that one should beware of puppets that begin pulling their own strings. [snip]
... The end result of Trump’s evangelism is that a xenophobic, racist, misogynistic, serially mendacious narcissist is poised to pull in somewhere north of fifty million votes in the midst of the most bitterly contentious election in modern American history. The easy analysis holds that Trump’s jihad against decency has wrecked the Republican Party, but the damage is far more extensive than this. [snip]
... At a quaint moment in the recent past, it was possible to think that a decisive Clinton victory would exorcise Trumpism from public life. But, on the verge of the election, that idea increasingly seems like an indulgent delusion. The problem of Trump is not simply that his opinions far exceed his knowledge; it’s that what he does know is so hostile to democracy, not only in the Republican Party or the United States but in the world. Whatever happens on November 8th, we are at the outset of a much longer reckoning.That we've arrived at this point could be traced to a number of factors, but Cobb rightly notes the impact of decades of poisonous propaganda coming from Republican media outlets like hate radio (you could add all the Murdoch- owned properties like Fox "News"/ Wall Street Journal/ New York Post, as well as a slew of pundits who spread lies in the pages and studios of "liberal" news organizations, too). Meanwhile, "both sider-ism" in the "mainstream media" allowed the Republican Party, no matter how far its mad rush to the right became, to maintain the illusion that it was somehow a "normal" "conservative" party, and that its efforts to deny science, oppose rights for women and minorities, trade in the most outrageous lies, etc., was just part of a political conversation in this country and not a perversion of American ideals and principles.
You don't arrive here by accident. It's taken decades of complicity by countless participants, and now the corrosive effects can be plainly seen.
