If we can credit the proto simian president George W. Bush with one good thing, his mediocrity did re-engage the electorate. Not enough of it, nor with satisfactory haste, but eventually Bush’s misdeeds repulsed enough Americans to elect the first black president. They hoped he would jail the Bush cabal and restore peace, but that didn’t happen. Instead the Bush wars carried on and Barack Obama started his own, also redoubling attacks on the American people, the middle class, immigrants, domestic jobs, Main Street, the environment, and paradoxically, the lives of black men. Equality, justice, civil society, continued to be degraded. The wave of youthful activists who saw their black Abraham Lincoln unmask himself to be a Herbert Hoover, disengaged from politics in disgust.
While the widespread revulsion to Donald Trump appears to surpass record tolerance levels, in reality, the alarm and incredulity are not unfamiliar. Once again public despair is being channeled toward the voting booth, as if elections, and midterms, and the same old candidates, and the same stump speeches, will finally yield deliverance.
We can hope that we’re quicker studies this time round, prepared to give Donald the boot after just one term, but in truth, that was the plan with Dubya. It seemed so inconceivable that the Trumpian Bush could win a second term, that when he did, Americans felt they owed the world an apology for the error. Remember the 2004 SORRY EVERYBODY campaign? That election’s democratic challenger turned out to be a ringer, which exasperated voters who were certain that anybody-but-Bush was in the bag.
Midterm elections, whether they succeeded in sweeping Congress or not, provided negligible representative fortification against corporate predation. Not 2002, 2006, 2010, nor 2014. So why is the delusion so persistent?
This time round, I dare not be such a killjoy to suggest Trump will not be stymied in 2018 or dislodged in 2020, but I can’t see a people friendlier legislature nor any presidential replacement on the horizon that won’t capitulate like John Kerry. This weekend’s women’s marches and protest signs were cathartic and inspiring, and the vigor always feels promising, but People, we’re following the same piper! Throw the bastards out, etc! Si Se Puede! Trump Bush!
