I kinda think I see where liberals are coming from. They believe the country elected Bill Clinton twice, then elected Al Gore, then Bush won (but should have never been there), then the country twice elected Obama and then a year and a half ago elected Hillary Clinton.
They believe the country is more left than right. That the only reason the Supreme Court is right is because of George W. Bush and Donald Trump putting Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch and another conservative on the courts, and that those should have been Al Gore and Hillary Clinton (or Obama) appointments.
I have mixed feelings about Trump supporters experiencing the personal worst. Nobody deserves to starve to death because we elected someone who thinks hunger a good motivator to compel people to work longer and harder for greater profits and higher executive compensation. Nobody deserves to become a political prisoner, end up in a body bag because of a War for Profit, or 'disappear' as people 'disappeared' in the 'Dirty Wars' of Latin America. Nobody deserves to lose a loved one that way, either. But elect someone whose intellectual shallowness, sadism, or fanaticism makes such possible when meaningful alternatives exist, and you are culpable to some extent. We have elected a right-wing version of Hugo Chavez, and we are headed down the authoritarian, if not totalitarian path. The downward grade gets steeper with every step toward fascism.
The precedent of a largely-cautious 240-mile hike that culminates with walking off a cliff will not result in the restoration of our lives, let alone undoing the bruises and broken bones from going off the cliff.
We liberals already know what is possible. We are re-reading such cautionary tales as
Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Fahrenheit 451. We know that character is destiny, and that Donald Trump is a very bad character. Well-educated people know well (and this should be common sense) that it is impossible to reconcile contradictions. Most of us know that an offer is too good to be true, then it is likely neither good nor true.
Democratic politics is not about getting some power in an election and then using that power to alter the system to entrench power once-and-for-all. That is Machiavelli, whom the Founding Fathers abhorred. It may not be possible to again answer the basic questions of forming a new Republic responsible to the People instead of to a King or dictator -- but Donald Trump is forcing us to reach much the same conclusions as our Founding Fathers did (with a recognition that they got slavery and votes for women wrong when nobody had posed those questions or were on the political fringe).
