gracchusdixit

There were many anxious hours on the night of the 20018 midterm election and well into the next day, during which the outcome was still in question.  For a time, it seemed that the long-hoped-for “blue wave” would never arrive.  When the wave eventually came, however, it rolled in with a roar, as if driven on shore by a full moon, a high tide, and an even higher wind.  The wind soon proved to be a howling gale of resistance, rebuke, and rejection.

A decisive majority of Americans—by a margin of six million votes in each case—chose Democratic Congressional and Senatorial candidates.  More than 300 House districts moved sharply to the left.  In deep-red Georgia, the district once held by Newt Gingrich, the leader of the 1994 “Republican Revolution,” fell to a Democrat.  The Virginia district wrested from one-time House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, by a tea party icon named Dave Brat, was lost to another Democrat.  The California district held by a 15-term Republican, Dana Rohrabacher, a staunch Trump ally called by some “Putin’s favorite congressman,” collapsed like a sandcastle as the “blue wave” rolled in.  Even in Iowa, where the only things more ubiquitous than corn stalks are evangelical churches, three out of four Congressional districts were won by Democrats.

If nothing else, the 2018 midterm election was a dramatic illustration of the old adage:  “Be careful what you ask for; you may get it.”  Convinced of his personal magnetism and political prowess, Donald Trump chose to put himself on the ballot.  In rally after rally, he proclaimed that a vote for whichever local Republican candidate was palpitating in the wings was a vote for the great man himself.  Given Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, which confounded the calculations of all the conventional political pundits, it was widely assumed that he could, and probably would, be able to work his magic again.

This time, however, the juju didn’t work, as Trump’s magic turned out to be less magical than toxic.  A few of the candidates he endorsed eked out wins, but most did not; and the ultimate outcome for Trump and his party was little short of disastrous.  That Trump himself understands this, while refusing to concede it, became instantly and painfully obvious.  The day after the election, he held a 90-minute press conference that was more than usually combative and incoherent, and he then promptly stalked off to Paris, where he spent most of the time hiding from the press, snubbing the country’s oldest allies, and grinning at Vladimir Putin.

It would be a mistake to imagine that this election was merely a rebuke of Donald Trump himself—of his low character, loathsome behavior, and limited intellectual capacity.  It was all that, of course.  But it was far more.  It was a rejection of nearly everything the Republican Party stands for.

To right-wing ideologues, who smear every attempt to achieve social or economic justice as socialism; who demonize government as they lionize private selfishness; who believe that fundamental public services like education and health care are commodities to be bought and sold like trinkets in a flea market; who think that Social Security and Medicare are extravagant “entitlements” that the richest country in the world cannot afford; who have persuaded themselves that the rich deserve tax cuts at the cost of bankrupting the very country that made them rich; to these people, I say:  You are not America.  

To the bigots and racists, who believe this should be a “whites only” country; who think that immigrants are either terrorists or disease-ridden vermin; who assert that anti-Semitic sloganeering is “free speech” and demand the right to beat their political opponents into a pulp; to these people, I say:  You are not America.

To evangelical zealots, whose closed minds and cold hearts confuse the ethical teachings of Christ with the control and condemnation of other human beings; who think that religious freedom gives them the right to impose their medieval moral code on the rest of us; who would deny to women the right to make their own decisions, to gay Americans the freedom to love whomever they choose, to transgender Americans the chance to live the lives they have chosen for themselves; to these people, I say:  You are not America.

To the NRA, whose cynical corporate donors believe they can go on forever profiting from death; whose gullible members parade around in their pick-up trucks with bumper stickers lauding a Second Amendment they have never read and do not even begin to understand; to craven politicians who have spent decades kowtowing to the gun lobby; to these people, I say:  You are not America.

To the right-wing judges rushed onto the federal courts by Trump and the Republicans, who exploit the Constitution as an instrument for suppressing democracy; who insist that property rights take precedence over human rights; who interpret “religious freedom” as the freedom to impose one religion on everyone else; who absurdly argue that corporations are persons and have a First Amendment right to buy elections and suborn politicians; to these people, I say:  You are not America.

To all these people, I say:  The damage you have done, the damage you hope still to do, will not stand.  If it takes decades, even if it takes generations, this country will claw back its freedoms, will reclaim its democracy, and will cast you out.