Origins of Wednesday xxxix: In the place of Donald Trump

In the southwest of Virginia, there

is a popular family boating resort,

in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where

Robert McDonnell pursued disgrace as

the gubernatorial houseguest of a di-

et supplement huckster. Smith Moun-

tain Lake, not far from Roanoke, has

also a permanent population of acute

devotion to Donald Trump. I walked in-

to a typical roadside fish bar and

honky-tonk there, one night a year

ago this week, and was greeted amiab-

ly, by all the patrons. They were my

introduction to the attitudes Trump

is riding very well toward governing.

I knew nothing of Donald Trump, apart

from his interest in real estate, and

a television career I never examined.

I learned a great deal about him, just

by the muscular vows of vengeance for

one perceived infringement or another,

of interests evidently shared by the

entire establishment. And this is an

Establishment, we are discovering now.

Donald Trump hasn't put it together,

he has been put together by them. He

is their toy. If anything exposes the

catastrophic miscalculation that this

Establishment is not serious, it is

the fantasy that he would be discarded 

for his peculiarity. Let him call him-

self, their voice.

I need hardly say, that the disdain

of the Establishment everyone knows,

for the Establishment Trump has iden-

tified, has aggravated and codified

a schism which will destroy the next

Presidency, even as it emerged under

many. We are not presented with

a candidate who contemplates resolv-

ing it, only evading it; and yet we

anxiously aspire for an impossible

victory for our interests and values.

As fate had it, Mrs Clinton ostra-

cized Trump's voters from her retinue 

of redeemables, allowing her stagger-

ingly exceptional candor in brutal-

ity to confess just how structural

their grievance is. It's just as well,

her running mate, a former governor

of the people I met in that bar, then

pitied them for their "dark emotions,

incompatible with American values,"

because he has shown Mrs Clinton's

formulation to have been no accident.

Beyond any license in its tenets or

its impulses, these two candidates

have betrayed liberalism before our

eyes, as a shameless variation upon

inhumane politics at its very worst,

rendering unfalse a sour equivalency.

So, they pray, let Trump be Trump. As

if to reinforce the suggestion, they

adopt the sectarian language his fol-

lowers use, to articulate an expulsion

not merely to statelessness, but from

their Eden of secular spotlessness.

Trump speaks merely of exile; they of-

fer the withholding of God's grace.

At its brightest and best, and at the

most urgent height of its peril, this

Establishment can marshal nothing bet-

ter than gross arrogance. They are as

merry with civil war as Donald Trump.

I have endorsed their candidacy and

I have urged the defeat of the other.

I continue to do so, because this is

our election, and its outcome is ours.

Yet theirs is a contest of spent forces,

and the polls are beginning to confirm

this. Every element of Barack Obama's

coalition is distinctly diminished, be-

yond embarrassment with his candidates.

The schism we were not allowed to heal 

has deepened, the purity of the alter-

native is distilled to alluring toxici-

ty, and we are reduced to a battle of 

condescension and fanciful revanchism.

The parties didn't have to draw us to

this place, for us to see their worth:

two sanctimonies, dragging out their

dénouement, for us to bear their shame.

In such circumstances, the livelier ques-

tion is, whether the parties possess a 

philosophical resiliency to rebound from 

what may be anomalies at the top. To turn

to their platforms for guidance may be

naïve, but everyone's entitled to the de-

fense of subscribed intent. To weigh their

conduct in the States for the same reason,

is not illegitimate, to distinguish even

their national profile from any possible

site of innocence. In these two exculpat-

ing prospects, Trump's party does come

up worse than empty. Devoted to share-

cropper economics at every turn, includ-

ing spectacularly, the most frantic and

systematic suppression of underclass

wages, benefits, education, opportunity,

health, safety, mobility, representation,

and voting rights since the 1920s, to say

nothing of the most vituperative and in-

humane hostility to gender liberation in

the Western world, this curious party is

at a loss to grope for excuses, upstream.

And for that reason, the anomalies which

Trump brings to the height of the party's

sinecure strivings are essentially ones 

of degree. Say what one will for the rude-

ness to a stately tempo in Mrs Clinton's

challenger in the primaries, the coali-

tion he assembled, too, embodies the core

of liberalism's unblemished raison d'être,

and has inoculated every office-seeker in

its colors with egalitarian expectations.

It has endowed that candidate with the

most radiantly progressive platform since

Franklin Roosevelt; and rather than embark-

ing in exultation across the land, with an

uplifting message of hope, she campaigned

unto pneumonia, to stroke a fat cat's fur,

and chuckle at its cuddling compliments.

Mr Sanders has shown the way the ball is

bouncing in this system, for all its ruts

and ill-run grooves; this identifies the

survivor strand, in this dark and turgid

grinding out of decrepit, shameful forces.

In every legislative office on my ballot

this year, I know where I will mark my X.

Deliverance isn't on the list just now,

and who could wish it were? Preparedness 

will do just fine. 

Henning May

AnnenMayKantereit