Even After Trump, Dignity is Non-Negotiable

Trump, mocking a New York Times reporter with a congenital disability

There’s an idea floating around that Donald Trump, having ascended to the presidency, is now owed the respect of his opponents. I beg to disagree. The powerful do not deserve respect merely by virtue of their being powerful. Like anyone else, the respect they receive should be proportionate to the level of dignity with which they conduct themselves, and treat others.

And yet some feel that Donald Trump deserves respect.

That’s right. The serial misogynist. The candidate who ran his campaign on bigotry and xenophobia, and who incited violence at his rallies. The 70 year-old who responds to detractors with ad-hominem jeers. The able-bodied billionaire who publicly mocked a disabled reporter. Our zillionth white president, who sought to delegitimize the first black one. The Vietnam dodger who insulted prisoners-of-war.

(On this last point. If you didn’t go to Vietnam, power to you. But to then degrade those who did, and were captured? That’s low.)

Trump’s behavior invites ridicule, not respect. He continues to act, react, and communicate in as indecent a manner as ever, signaling a lack of interest on his part to make meaningful amends with the people and groups he so gleefully cast aside during the campaign. Until such time as he reverses course on this matter, the notion that he deserves even a modicum of respect remains laughable.

I don’t know that Trump could win my respect even if he were to temper his rhetoric. I’m tired of the suggestion that it was primarily economic frustrations, rather than bigotry and xenophobia, that enabled his faux victory. Working class folks did have a champion, and it was Bernie Sanders.

Whereas Trump won over his voters with vacuous promises and a kind of rigorous self-promotion to put P.T. Barnum to shame, Bernie offered genuine solutions. Oh, and he did it without the race-baiting and Islamaphobia. If it is the case that Trump voters didn’t act out of antipathy toward minorities and immigrants, then why didn’t they go with the actual populist?

Well, Eli, maybe they voted for Sanders in the primary?

Perhaps, but that doesn’t mitigate the fact that Trump never actually proposed meaningful solutions to working folks’ malaise. Sure, he was anti-free trade, but other than that, it was standard Republican policy.

Anyone who supports massive tax cuts for the wealthy, disdains unions and the minimum wage, alienates large swathes of the country on the basis of ethnicity and religion, and displays zero interest in expanding health coverage, cannot reasonably claim to be fighting for the needs of average folks.

The country is in a volatile place, and we have yet to arrive at the terms of reconciliation. All the same, I know this to be true: We will continue to honor the ideals of dignity, decency, and respect, even when our future president does not.

Treating women, people of color, those with disabilities, the LGBTQ community, and religious minorities with the same degree of dignity, decency, and respect as befits any other group? Non-negotiable.

As someone who, broadly speaking, aligns himself with the philosophy of existentialism, I hope to someday see a world in which individuals are treated as such. If someone’s a jerk, it’s because they act like one. Not because they’re a woman, or a Muslim, or any other group, but because they have acted in such a way as to garner the label that most accurately describes who they are as an individual.

Trump-ism (indeed, bigotry in general) universalizes, ascribing identities to people before they act, in line with their ethnic, religious, and biological backgrounds. Trump might not be above it, but the rest of are. He might not be dignified, but the rest of us are.

Or, at least, we should be.

Best,

Eli.

Bernie or Busters, Time to Call it Quits

Come November 8th, those who still carry the torch for the “Bernie or Bust” movement will have to make a challenging decision. These die-hard Sanders supporters will have to saddle up to the voting booth, take a long, deep breath, and affirm to themselves that they are, in fact, comfortable foregoing the chance to ensure that Donald “grab ’em by the pussy” Trump is one vote further away from achieving the Presidency of the United States.

In that moment, they will have to reckon with the hard truth that sticking to their conscience will do nothing to help guarantee a victory for the lone person on this planet capable of keeping Trump out of the Oval Office, Hillary Clinton.

I can already hear the Bernie or Busters chiding me for my complete dismissal of moral consistency: ‘We stand opposed to warmongering, accepting donations from millionaires and special interests, and a Democratic establishment that colludes to keep outside challengers from having a fair shot at winning! To vote for Clinton is to be complicit in all these awful things!’

To this I say: I know.

I know that it sucks to have to cast a vote for a candidate whose message you definitively rejected just a few months ago during the primaries. It saddens me immensely that I have to look like a hypocrite from a number of perspectives to ensure that Trump doesn’t become president.

But that’s what this is ultimately about. If you consider yourself a true Bernie fan, you would recognize that the myriad of truly awful effects of a Trump presidency (e.g., less hesitance in the deployment of nuclear weapons, federally sanctioned intimidation of the press, an overtly arbitrary and racist ban on Muslims entering the country, the deterioration of crucially important alliances, a massively expanded and financially cumbersome police presence to pursue and deport illegal immigrants, etc.) should be enough to orient you on the only voting path guaranteed to deal a blow to Trump’s odds of succeeding.

Lest this come off as an ode to lesser-evilism, I should note that a Clinton presidency is the only way we Sanders supporters can hope to find any degree of support within the Executive Branch for the causes Bernie has championed. Think Mr. ‘I love Scalia’ Trump will be nominating to the Supreme Court anyone remotely interested in overturning Citizens United? Think he’ll attempt to move the needle on gun reform, health care expansion, or making college more affordable? Work to make certain that the wealthiest pay a bit more in taxes? Veto spending bills that contain drastic cuts to welfare programs, food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Do anything to combat climate change?

Given that the only options available to Bernie supporters are incremental progress or full-fledged regression, the choice should be simple.

Ah, but of course, moral consistency muddies the equation, doesn’t it? That’s what I thought for a while, when I was genuinely considering writing in Sanders’ name at the ballot booth. We should remind ourselves, however, that we constantly undermine our moral integrity.

Abhor animal cruelty but still eat meat? Deplore the consumption of fossil fuels yet use them every day? Want to be a caring person but act unkindly towards those you love? Value honesty while continuously finding reasons to lie?

While you can continually work to bring your actions into closer alignment with your moral convictions, the unpredictable, chaotic, capricious nature of life is such that it’s silly to think you could ever be wholly morally consistent. Situations arise in which you pick a mode of action that runs counter to the kind of person you’d like to be. It feels shitty when that happens; the trick is to refine yourself, to constantly modulate your behavior so as to not replicate the bad decisions of your past.

Presidential elections are dichotomous by nature, and thus force people to make morally ambiguous decisions. I’m not just talking lesser-evilism here; it’s hard to imagine an instance in which a genuinely favorable candidate could be said to be entirely free of moral baggage. Your vote is not the full metric of your morality. Unless you’re the lone individual in history to have acted ethically for every moment of your life, don’t feel ashamed to have to be pragmatic at the polls. The moral trade-off of a vote for Clinton is not insignificant, and I won’t attempt to mitigate the amount of damage she has had a part in fostering through such things as her vote for the Iraq War, or her fervent support for Israeli militarism.

But I will say this. Pragmatism may be a hard pill to swallow, and incrementalism an excruciating road to walk, but given what’s at stake, what President Trump would mean for the direction of the United States and the world, I suggest we take our medicine.

Best,

Eli.

On the Discouraging State of the Election

Taking recent developments into consideration, Hillary Clinton will likely be the next President of the United States. I would rather it be Bernie Sanders (perhaps the last torchbearer of true progressivism we’ll see on the presidential stage for a long time to come), but it appears as though too few share that opinion.

Or maybe they do. We’ll never know for sure, given the patently undemocratic nature of American Democracy (e.g., independents shut out of closed primaries, voter ID laws, restricted access to polling places, superdelegates).

Clinton’s presidency will undoubtedly be historic. Sure, other countries might still chafe at our interventionist stances, and rich people and corporations might still dictate public policy, but at least the person chosen to be complicit in the continued erosion of democracy at home and abroad will be a woman. Don’t get me wrong; it’s absolutely time we end the habit of electing only men to lead the country. I just wish our remaining option wasn’t a hawk who benefits from the very campaign finance system she claims to oppose.

(A note on that last point: I’ve been debating with friends regarding whether or not Clinton’s reliance on Super PACs should make us suspicious of her calls to overturn Citizens United. I can’t say definitively that Clinton will fail to act on her word, but given that she’s capitalized on the very system that she acknowledges is ruining democracy, I remain highly skeptical.)

That said, Clinton will be a far better president than Donald Trump. She’s as able as anyone, and at least nominally supports some very good things, like LGBT rights and female empowerment. I should also note that when I criticize Clinton’s centrism, I’m essentially lamenting a broken campaign finance system that corrals politicians into being indebted to special interests, war mongers, and trust fund heirs. As I’ve thought with Obama, who knows what stances politicians would take if they were only beholden to the people.

Think for a moment, though, about how close Trump is getting to the presidency. One is tempted to chalk the whole phenomenon up to insanity, but the more grim reality might simply be that a lot of people are just really, really ignorant. Hang on, now, that doesn’t mean stupid; to be ignorant merely means to ignore particular things. And I submit that Trump supporters ignore a good number of things that should be required of our public officials:

Intellect? Principle? Empathy? Basic human decency? Forget about it! Trump acolytes just aren’t convinced that these things matter in a presidential candidate. On the other hand, they may believe that Trump actually does have the heart and the smarts needed for the job. If so, our opposing worlds are even more insulated than I had thought.

Either way, we shouldn’t be surprised that a country this weened on inanity and anti-intellectualism (see how the corporate media covers elections) would want as its leader someone as unabashedly vacuous and cruel as Donald Trump.

He won’t be president (i.e., I really don’t think he will), but not in the same way that you or I won’t be president. Millions of people will vote for him, and millions of people will be irate when he doesn’t triumph. How will that anger be dissipated? I look forward to seeing what this all will spell for the fate of the Grand Old Party.

Enough of this country would like to see Donald Trump occupy the Oval Office that the man has secured the Republican nomination for president. Can we just let that sink in? Feel free to pick for your memes and jokes the low-hanging fruit that is Nominee Trump, but remember: we treat this as a negligible phenomenon at our own peril.

Of course Bernie won’t be president. We’re not ready for him yet.

Best,

Eli.