Date: 2024-05-15 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00012215 | |||||||||
USA ... Election 2016 | |||||||||
Burgess COMMENTARY | |||||||||
The United States Is Not About to Spiral Into Fascism and Tyranny I said yesterday that I didn't intend to tell anyone to settle down over the Trump victory. It's every bit as appalling as it seems. And yet, there's a strain of thinking out there that really does need a bucket of cold water thrown on it. Here's Andrew Sullivan:
And here is Charles Stross:
You know, things are going to be bad enough already. Aided by a Republican Congress, Trump is going to do his best to dismantle the entire Obama legacy. He's going to cut taxes on the rich and send the budget deficit into the stratosphere. He's going to appoint at least one Supreme Court justice and probably more. Bye bye Roe v. Wade. He's going to unleash Wall Street from all those pesky regulations they hate. He's going to ignore climate change and let the earth fry. But he's not a cult leader beyond his own small base of superfans, and he's not a king. Congress has its own ideas about what it wants to do, and they will do it. Trump will learn that repealing executive orders is harder than he thinks, and it's unlikely he has the attention span to really keep at it. Hell, repealing Obamacare will be harder than Trump thinks. He's not going to declare martial law or round up Muslims and throw them in internment camps. He will likely face a recession, but not a financial collapse. When it happens, the Fed will take the lead, and Republicans will throw money at it. That's hypocritical, but also perfectly OK as a policy response. Trump will bluster about China and Mexico, but he's not going to throw up 45 percent tariffs on them. He'll bluster about NATO, perhaps, but NATO has pretty bipartisan support in Congress—and let's face it, Trump doesn't really care much about NATO anyway. He won't put troops on the ground in Iraq or Syria. It would be unpopular, and anyway, his generals will probably convince him it won't do any good. He's not going to gut the First Amendment and put the press corps out of business. He's not going to nuke Pyongyang. Trump is bad for the country in the same way that, say, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would be. Beyond that, though, he's less conservative on the policy front. The reason Trump is uniquely bad is mostly symbolic: he's willfully ignorant; he's vindictive; he's a demagogue willing to appeal loudly and proudly to racial animus; and he has the attention span of a small child. He'd be an embarrassment to any country, let alone the most powerful country in the world. Isn't that bad enough? There's no need to pretend we're about to spiral into a fascist nightmare or a financial collapse. We have not embraced tyranny. The United States is a very big battleship, even for Donald Trump. |