The End (What I Thought In January)

I had a regular compulsion during the 2016 presidential election: I would google image search Spanish Civil War posters and stare at them, especially the Republican ones.  There was something so melancholy about them.  "They thought they were right," I said to myself, "They thought they were on the right side of history."

It's a sad parallel to my current vision of my country of birth.  We thought for eight years that we were moving, ever so slowly, into enlightenment.  Even with a few mis-steps and stumbles, like a "stolen" election and a mandate for that stealer in the next one, we were on the road to something better.  The American Experiment was continuing to produce hopeful results, in spite of the disappointing ones.  We had a minority president; we allowed homosexuals to legally marry nationwide; even in the face of terrorism, we tried to stand up for our values of diversity and individual liberty.  Then came the campaign of 2016.

First, a businessman who came off as an ignorant and short-tempered buffoon won the nomination of a major party.  He counted among his supporters a loud number of "anti-SJWs", although they were mostly a loud minority.  The troubling thing is that past politicians saw campaigns and careers lost with a mere hint of association with the likes of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups.  This time, few people cared enough to stop taking his campaign seriously and start taking his threats seriously. There were voices of alarm about what he planned to do to "help" the inner cities and the economy as a whole, but little notice was taken on a broad scale.  Fears were centered in liberal populations.  The media refused to take him or his support seriously, giving us assurances that his opponent would win, even if the victory was by a narrow margin.  Then, we woke to shocking headlines on November 9.

We have had bad presidents before, either unpopular, or incompetent, or both.  This time, the threat is not the man in the post himself, it is his braying entourage, who despise the very framework of the government they are to be part of.  A number of writers have taken to their outlets to try to explain to us disillusioned liberals why those who supported their adversary thought it was the right thing to do.  Many examples do little to convince me of their good intentions.  Perhaps fittingly, the only place I found the explanations not only believable, but also truly clarifying was a comedy website.  I admit freely that I do not understand conservatives, and I have done very little to remedy that.  Like most of us, I stay in a fairly tight bubble of information that lets me feel good about my values and tell myself that those on the other side are mistaken or deliberate hypocrites.  How can my country be full of such people, at least in a concentration that can't be diluted with other groups?  I feel a bitter schadenfreude upon seeing tweets and posts from Trump voters who whine about the possibility of losing their Medicare or access to women's health care at centers like Planned Parenthood.  I nod sagely, thinking to myself that they should have known a politician, even an amateur one, would try to keep at least a couple of campaign promises.  My liberal heart tells me they don't really deserve to lose those, or any, services, but it's so easy to say, "They were asking for it."

This is one of the differences between liberals and conservatives in a broad description: Liberals feel compassion for those who are suffering, even if through their own actions, while conservatives trust that there is some kind of cosmic justice at work when people are suffering.  As I said, a broad description, one that has room for many exceptions on both sides.  Do you see how liberal I am?  Our compassion and our need to try to be fair can be exploited by those who have narrower targets and stronger ambitions.  We hesitate to block any progress just because it isn't going in the direction we want.  We want both sides to have a turn, and when there are instances of bad behavior, we often try to find examples from the other side, for balance.  Or something.

Now, some groups are calling for resistance, telling us that the tactics of the other side, now seen more as enemies than ever, are the ones to adopt.  No wishy-washiness, no appeals to fairness.  Now is the time to double down and obstruct.  There are also voices bemoaning the very suggestion, reminding us that we should be better than our enemies, and we should keep hold of the moral high ground.  It is an easy thing for most of them to say, coming as they do from comfortable circumstances.  We are reminded that we as a nation and as a collection of groups have survived other bad times and bad actions on the part of our presidents.  But, as the new resistance will be quick to tell you, we didn't all survive.  The most vulnerable may be overlooked at best by a "progressive" administration, but they could very well be targeted by this one.  People are afraid.  Not that they might have to pay a little more tax to fund a public school or hospital, not that they will not be allowed to use their position as employers to dig into their employees' personal beliefs, not that they might have to be reminded that people who have attractions different from their own exist.  Those fears will probably exist forever anyway.  People are afraid that they will be denied jobs, health care, services, and even "right to life" because of factors beyond their control.  People are afraid of being denied any possibility of control over those factors, even where it is possible.  I, personally, am probably in little danger.  But I have been raised to value fairness, and those fears seem deeply unfair to me.

This is actually what makes me most angry about our last election.  It seems to have validated aggressive and obnoxious behavior to the point where it is the only way to make your voice heard.  I might have hesitated to condemn criticism in the past, or tried to be fair about dishing it.  Now, I think the best thing we can do it criticize, and do so unmercifully.  We can avail ourselves of all the raw emotion in the world, and all the black-and-white viewpoints.  The goal is to block every single thing that might be proposed.  If the opposition are spineless, they must be voted out or removed to jeering voices.  We can never "wait and see" again, because we are risking our future.

Those posters seemed like an odd thing over the summer of 2016, but in November they came to be more like a premonition.  The Spanish Republic was fighting fascism, and lost.  Not, they say, because of the objective supremacy of the Nationalist army, but because of their own lack of union. There are posters promoting their strength in diversity.  There are posters pointing out the heartlessness of the enemy.  In the end, all for nothing.  True, we arrived at this place through our own democratic process, not through insurrection and civil war.  But the conflict of values is similar: diversity versus homogeneity; secularism versus religion; international relationships versus isolationism.  We know the quote about fascism coming to America, being as American as possible. It is up to us to make sure the definition of America is never limited to "fascist".