It looks like the upcoming 2020 election, like the 2016
election, will be another in which I would want to mark the “none of the above”
box on the ballot.
On the Republican side, Trump has in fact done a few things that
needed doing and that the Obama administration, for whatever reason, couldn’t
bring itself to face. Dealing with China’s unfair trade practices, for example.
Or getting real about the crumbling state of the US military in the face of growing
Chinese military power, especially their growing sea power. Or getting real
about the intermediate range missile treaty, which Russia has been violating for
years and which China didn’t even sign. And he has made moves, like loosening
regulations, that have given the economy a badly needed boost after the long and
depressing 2% growth and uncomfortably high unemployment and flat working class
wages of the Obama years. Not that Democrats will give him any credit for it.
Trump was elected to be a bull in the china shop by people who
thought Washington elites were ignoring their problems (which they were!). He
has done his job well, badly disturbing the ruling Washington insider groups
and their media acolytes and driving many of the experienced State Department types
into retirement – not much of a loss considering the messes in the Middle East
they led us into in their supposed wisdom. And you have to admire the man for
pushing on ahead despite unprecedented, vicious and unremitting attacks by the
Democrats and especially by the bureaucratic “deep state”, whose power and
perks he threatens.
Still, a toilet bowl brush is useful to clean out a
dirty toilet, but one doesn’t necessarily want to use that same brush to clean the
rest of the house. Trump is personally offensive, and clearly something of a
sociopath (though to be fair, Hillary was also a sociopath, just of a different
flavor). I think Trump’s first term has been a necessary, if messy, shakeup of
Washington politics, but I don’t know that I want another four years of it.
As for the Republican party itself, I have no idea what it
stands for these days. It certainly doesn’t stand for fiscal responsibility or
smaller government, whatever candidates may say on the campaign trail. And I
simply can’t support its unremitting attacks on women’s rights to control their
own reproductive systems, a clear attempt to use legislation to foist their own
religious beliefs on the rest of us.
This is not a party I want running the country over the next decade.
The Democrats, on the other hand, have been suffering “Trump
derangement syndrome” since the 2016 election, and seem unable to get over it.
Anything Trump proposes they oppose, even if they were for it under Obama. They oppose his wall, even though Obama built
the first 700 miles of it with the full support of Democrats. They oppose his rapprochement with Russia, even though
Hillary tried the same thing (remember her disastrous “Russian reset”) with the
full support of Democrats. They have been acting like spoiled children deprived
of their favorite toy.
Rather than facing the fact that they lost the 2016 election
through their own incompetence and poor
candidate, they keep feeling that somehow the election was stolen from them;
that they were “entitled” to win. And because of this, they seem to feel they
are justified in resorting to the dirtiest form of street fighting possible.
Even the intelligence agencies and the FBI seem to be in the business of leaking
anti-Trump information to the press these days.
Moreover, the activist liberal wing has morphed from a commendable
sensitivity to racism and sexism into a form of thought police as rigid and
brutal as any in Soviet Russia or Iran’s Islamic State. Anyone who disagrees with them in the
slightest is set upon by the twitterverse and the media and subject to an
online lynching. They even eat their own, if one of them makes the slightest
mistake. This is most evident in the shameful behavior of students at some
colleges, and the equally shameful refusal of college faculty and administrators
to make a stand for free speech and the value of civilized debate – supposedly a
liberal value and the whole point of the college system.
And finally the Democratic party seems to have gone off the
deep end on the left, proposing
outlandish things like “free” college for everyone (just who is paying the
professor’s salaries then?), or “Medicare for all”, or a petrochemical-free
world by 2050. Either they are too naïve or too dumb to understand the challenges
(which is certainly true of some of them), or they will promise absolutely anything
to get elected, even if they know it is impractical. This too is not a party I
want running the country over the next decade.
So what is a voter to do?????
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