The End of the Republic

It may seem like an eon away, but just a year ago it was widely assumed that Jeb Bush would be the Republican nominee and take on Hillary Clinton in the general election to decide who would be the next President of the United States. Normally, those who choose which candidates get promoted into positions of political power in this country at least have the decency to change the label on the can of crap they are selling the American public. In the current election cycle, they didn’t even feel they needed to change the names on the cans, that the American voters had become so comatose and uninvolved we’d just get in line for the latest can of Bush, the new and improved Clinton. At the time, I thought it would effectively be the end of our Republic if the American people validated the choices of the donor class and made these two candidates their respective parties’ nominees, that the people’s right to choose would have been so abridged by the money men that democracy as practiced in this country would cease to have any real meaning.

Thankfully, the American people, or at least those in one of our two major political parties, rebelled. Of course, part of the reason was that one of the brands was particularly sour. Have you ever met anyone who thought the last President Bush did such a great job that we had to bring the Bushes back for one more round? Forget all the other contradictions of his Presidency, of campaigning against nation building and for a smaller government then executing the biggest expansion of the federal government and the American empire since the Johnson Administration. Just the decision to cajole us into waging the Iraq War alone should have been enough to forever stain the Bush name. Yet there we were, not even a decade later, being asked to vote for another Bush as President. The hubris of those bankrolling Jeb’s campaign was astounding. Fortunately, other than Mitt Romney and a couple of other wealthy sycophants, no one was frightened away by all the Jeb campaign cash. Even more fortunate, Jeb! was a half-hearted, petulant candidate whose only early sign of passion was a soliloquy about how being an illegal immigrant was an act of love. Now whether any of the elves and dwarves in the Republican field would have been capable of exposing Jeb’s vulnerabilities is an open question. Which is why I credit Donald Trump with the saving of our democracy.

I should state right here that I’ve always disliked the Trump brand, and I remain unconvinced that he is some kind of a political wunderkind, or for that matter that he would make a decent President. But there is one thing that should be clear by now: Donald Trump knows how to destroy a person’s reputation.

However, I don’t think Donald Trump will survive the conflagration he has ignited. To me, Trump is Robespierre. At some point, the same forces he has unleashed will turn on him, and he will be consumed. Now whether this happens before or after the general election in November, I can’t say. But I would be very surprised if a Trump Administration made it past a first term. For that matter, I think the same thing about Hillary Clinton.

For a long time, most Americans have not trusted the institutions of political, cultural, and economic power. But we pretty much kept quiet as the machineries of power kept rolling along, seemingly oblivious to how much we had grown to despise them. Now, like Prospero, Donald Trump has come along and spoken the words that dare not be said. The important words being not so much “build the wall,” although that is what got things started, as “the system is totally corrupt” and “our leaders must go.” 

As much as they try to isolate and castigate their opponents, I doubt the established purveyors of public policy and opinion will be able to get this genie back in its bottle. The storm has begun. And I, for one, hope it will not end until the authorities have all been routed. In fact, I don’t just want them gone. I want them to suffer, like they’ve made the American people suffer for the past 20 years.