gracchusdixit

During Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House, he often responded to our nation’s most dreadful follies—the ceaseless mass shootings, unending displays of racism and prejudice, chest-thumping expressions of mindless nationalism—with the words, “This is not who we are.  We are better than this.”  Coming from a person and a president so rational, so courteous, and so consistently thoughtful, such words provided consolation and hope, in particular, the hope that, despite our lapses, there remained a fundamental decency in the American people that could, and in the end would, prevail over the worst of our instincts and the darkest events in our history.

Given the present awfulness of our public life, I am no longer convinced that Barack Obama’s comforting words any longer apply—or were ever true, to begin with.  Indeed, they seem, in retrospect, to have been rather naive, the words of a man too decent to see the world, and our nation in particular, as they actually are.

It is no longer possible to deny the fact that a criminal occupies the oval office: a man who daily enriches himself, his family, and his cronies at the nation’s expense; a man who betrays his wife by paying other women for sex and paying them off when they threaten to reveal his betrayals; a man whose only concern is his own survival and glorification.

All the while the Republican Party now dominated by this man strives to undermine our legal institutions, the man himself does everything possible to vilify and hobble the free press, the last of our public institutions that seems determined to hold his authoritarian instincts in check.

It is, moreover, undeniably clear that Russia manipulated our last election and is already well on its way to manipulating our next, without having suffered an iota of punishment or retribution. On the contrary, the President of the United States, having benefitted from this manipulation, kowtows obsequiously to that foreign power and would, if he could, forgive it entirely.

Meanwhile, in pursuit of this man’s authoritarian agenda, federal agents are rounding up helpless and innocent immigrants by the thousands, as if they were dangerous felons.  Worse yet, we have shut our doors to the world’s refugees and asylum-seekers, all the while their numbers and desperation grow.  Many of these hapless people owe their fate directly to us, the result of the ineptitude, neglect, and stupidity of our foreign policy, for which our current president refuses to take any responsibility whatsoever.

A tax bill has just been passed and signed that will reward a handful of the richest Americans for their support of Donald Trump and his enablers, a give-away of historic proportions that will be paid for by a staggering addition to the national debt. Ordinary Americans—you and I, our children and grandchildren—will be subsidizing this give-away for decades to come.

A budget has also just been passed that will spend vast and unnecessary sums on our already bloated military, at the expense of one modest domestic program after another.  Medicaid, Medicare, Food Stamps, Public Broadcasting—the list goes on and on—will be slashed to pay for weapons the military does not need and does not even know how to use.  In the last year alone, the Pentagon spent nearly a billion dollars it could not account for.  This lavish waste adds nothing to the safety of the nation.  It merely lines the pockets of the defense contractors who have been fleecing our nation since the end of the Second World War.

Day after day, dozens upon dozens of Trump administration officials either resign or skulk away, striving to avoid scandal or prosecution for corruption, sexual misconduct, or domestic abuse.  The only scoundrel yet immune to this public shaming is, of course, the president himself, whose record of personal and financial misbehavior is bottomless.

Just days ago, yet another American school was devastated by a deranged killer with a gun that no other decent society on the planet would have allowed him to buy.  To this latest gruesome tragedy, our representatives in Congress and our President have nothing to offer but prayers, empty condolences, and meaningless promises of support.  Thanks to the NRA and the gun lobby that funds it, our government will do nothing, yet again.

To all of this, the American people seem to be indifferent, or even worse, approving.  Donald Trump’s ratings have risen.  Despite all historical evidence to the contrary, a majority of the gullible electorate now believe that Republicans are better able to manage the economy.  Just weeks ago, it was assumed by most pundits and prognosticators that a Democratic “wave” was coming in the 2018 mid-term election; that hope has all but evaporated.  In the latest “generic ballot’ polls, Democrats and Republicans are roughly equal.  Absent some unanticipated calamity, it now seems more likely than not that Republicans will retain their control of both houses of Congress in 2018 and that Donald Trump will win reelection in 2020.

So much for the comforting proposition that the American people are “fundamentally decent” and will, in the end, “do the right thing”.  I do not now where “the better angels of our nature” may be spending their time these days, but they seem to have abandoned us.  Whatever we may be, we are not the nation imagined by Barack Obama.