gracchusdixit

So much has already been said and written about the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump that I do not propose to add another voice to the chorus.  Except to say this:  Trump’s “performance” shattered, once and for all, the delusion that he might somehow be capable of transforming himself into a serious, responsible, and mature candidate—because it is abundantly clear that he neither is nor ever will be a serious, responsible, mature human being.

“The Donald” who showed up on the stage at Hofstra University was the same freak of nature we have witnessed for a year:  an insecure narcissist with an ego more fragile than glass; a childish and petulant bully who, to use one of his own favorite gibes, “chokes” when confronted by a determined opponent; an unprepared, uninformed, unintelligent charlatan, incapable of uttering a coherent thought.  The terrifying fact remains that Trump can still win the election, because his supporters are no less deluded and even less thoughtful than their candidate.  It is therefore time for the rest of us to think long and hard about what the consequences of a Trump victory will be.

I say will, rather than may, because those consequences are as sure as the sunrise:

First, the world’s financial markets will fall and fall sharply.  The global economy is so vulnerable at the moment that this could easily precipitate another recession—or worse.  Certainly, our economy will go into a tailspin.  Hillary Clinton called Trump’s economic plan “trumped-up trickle-down.”  It is worse than that.  He proposes to slash taxes on the rich, eliminate estate taxes altogether, cut the corporate tax rates in half, and all but eliminate regulations on the fossil fuel industry.  This fiscal mulligan stew will make the budget deficits created by George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq seem penny-ante, starving our ability to make productive public investments in infrastructure, technology and education.

Medicare and Social Security will cease to exist as we know them.  When a Republican Congress finally gets a president willing to sign off on the so-called “Ryan budget,” Medicare will be turned into a “voucher” system, and Social Security will be privatized.  As a result, millions of Americans will lose the only social safety net they possess and sink into poverty, left to fend for themselves.  The Affordable Care Act, of course, will disappear altogether and, along with it, any hope of replacing our dysfunctional for-profit health care system with something saner and more humane.

Trump will, it scarcely needs saying, fill the outstanding vacancy on the Supreme Court with a Scalia look-alike.  Roe versus Wade will be overturned, the reproductive choices of women will be quashed, and we’ll go back to the “good old days,” when women had no recourse but quacks and back-alley abortions.  What remains of the Voting Rights Act will be further weakened, and millions of black and Hispanic Americans will be disenfranchised.  This will ensure that Republicans are in charge of most state legislatures when the next census comes around in 2020, giving them another chance to gerrymander congressional districts as they did in 2010, reinforcing their stranglehold on the House of Representatives for another decade.

There will be international and geopolitical consequences as well.

Emboldened and validated by the election of a white nationalist to the presidency of the United States, right-wing parties, already on the rise, will take power in one or more European countries.  This will accelerate the disintegration of the European Union and lead to the unraveling of the liberal democratic order put into place by the United States after the Second World War.  The result will be closed borders, severe economic contraction, heightened political tensions, and conflict.

Vladimir Putin, believing (quite accurately) that he can manipulate the suggestible ego of a President Trump, will move to invade and occupy Ukraine.  This will create a crisis for NATO and the United States.  If we honor our treaty obligation to defend Ukraine, American and Russian military forces will confront one another directly for the first time in a century, with the possibility of nuclear escalation.  If we fail to honor that obligation, Putin will turn his sights on the Balkan states, escalating the risks still further.  How Trump will respond is anyone’s guess.  He might submit to empty flattery, or he might pull the trigger when it’s already too late.

These various calamities are not speculations or mere possibilities.  They are the all but certain consequences of a Trump victory, because, for all its apparent randomness, history follows a certain kind of logic.  Far more often than we imagine, decisions and actions produce predictable historical results.  That is what George Santayana meant when he said:  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  If we choose to ignore the logic of history, we cannot escape blame, shame or culpability for what comes; we cannot pretend that we had nothing to do with making history  go one way rather than another.

When Imperial Russia decided to enter the First World War, it was all but inevitable that defeat, revolution, and the end of the Romanov dynasty would follow.  Russia was utterly unprepared and ill-equipped for war, and her leaders knew it.  For the tsar and his government to have gambled the future on the hope that war might somehow unite a divided nation and prevent another revolution was an act of folly, the consequences of which were not only predictable in hindsight but predicted at the time.

When Adolph Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, it was equally inevitable that the twin horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust would follow.  Hitler had made no secret of his demented intentions.  In Mein Kampf, the book he published a decade before his rise to power, he had advertised them quite explicitly.  When the German people cast their votes and raised their arms in the Hitler salute, they knew—or should have known—what would come.

If the American people, knowing what will come, nonetheless decide to make Donald Trump their president, they will not be able to escape their share of the blame.  As the old saying goes, elections have consequences, and sometimes those consequences can be foreseen.  This is one of those times.  We may pray for the best, but if Trump is elected, we must prepare for the worst.