“The whole aim of
practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be
led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.” [H. L. Mencken]
The
days, weeks, and months have gone by on the Republican campaign trail, and we
are beginning a new year, 2016. Nowhere else in the world does a campaign for chief
executive of a purportedly democratic country last for 18 months. Nowhere else
in the world do candidates who are willfully ignorant and unprepared to assume
such office have piggy banks openly topped off by billionaires seeking as many
tax breaks as they can buy. Nowhere but in these United States.
The
Republican candidates together and individually constitute a carnival, a parade
of freaks and aberrations. The leader of the pack, real estate mogul Donald
Trump, hair transplant flopping (dyed) over his surgically diminished forehead,
is the quintessential cavalcade barker, full of invective, insults, and
incitements to violence for the thousands who flock to his rallies. He has used
barnyard language to insult a female Fox News debate moderator repeatedly, the
most respected Latino broadcast reporter in the country (who was physically
thrown out of a rally), a disabled man who attended one of his events, all
Mexicans (calling them “rapists”), all Muslims (vowing to keep them all from
visiting or immigrating to the U.S.), both Bill and Hillary Clinton, his
Republican opponents . . . a never-ending cacophony of profane language. Everything
and everybody is “disgusting.” This is the language of a schoolboy, an
overgrown adolescent who has bullied his way through business and his personal
life.
Donald
Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks appeal in particular to white working class men
with no more than a high school education who have a high rate of unemployment,
inadequate job skills, poor health generally, and an unexpected increased death
rate due in part to addiction to alcohol and other substances. In short, his
most fervid supporters are feeling the pain and adore Trump for describing
their grievances against the world as legitimate. He knows that his base does
not notice the discrepancy between what he says about the state of the country
and how the declining white working class is affected by the real state of the
country, held in thrall to the 1%, of which he is a bona fide member. His
demonizing tactics are eerily reminiscent of those of the late Alabama Governor
George “segregation forever” Wallace, who ran for president four times,
garnering 13% of the national vote as a third-party candidate in the 1968
election, apparently splitting much of the Democratic vote that would otherwise
have gone to Democrat Hubert Humphrey, insuring the election of Richard Nixon.
Trump
takes up most of the oxygen in the room, but is by no means the most dangerous
of the GOP stable. That distinction belongs to Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz,
Harvard Law School-educated bomb-thrower in the Senate. Cruz has an enviable
string of professional accomplishments, but subsumes most of them in his religious
fervor and terminal arrogance, antagonizing the powerful with breathtaking
disregard. In 2013 he single-handedly shut down the U.S. government for 16 days
at a cost of $24 billion to U.S. taxpayers, and he has alienated most of his
fellow lawmakers and Republican cohorts. He looks and sounds a lot like Wisconsin
Senator Joe McCarthy, rattling a sword of evangelical Christianity on a crusade
to remake the known world. Cruz had initially attempted to stay out of range of
Trump by never publicly criticizing him, but those days are over. Cruz is the
most talented and diabolically wrong of the GOP bunch. He uses his two young daughters
as props in political ads and then reacts with phony outrage when this tactic
is criticized.
Although Cruz’s actions as Texas Solicitor General—which
have had a considerable influence on current gun laws as interpreted by the Supreme
Court with reference to the Second Amendment—“may be pleasing to conservatives,
other aspects of his record are sure to attract critics. He argued against
leniency for an unjustly sentenced man whose lawyer had made a technical mistake;
he invoked 13th-century ‘Saxon law’ and the practice of cutting off testicles
to justify harsher punishments in a rape case; and he referred to a late-term
abortion technique as ‘infanticide.’” [Michael Kruse in Politico]
Ted
Cruz would be a disastrous and divisive president, harkening back to the 18th
century or earlier, governing by evangelical precepts as much as constitutional
interpretations. God save the King (or the Sheriff of Nottingham).
As for the other GOP contenders, including the
second Cuban-American candidate Marco Rubio (currently fending off officious remarks
about his shiny new high-heeled boots rather than addressing personal and
official financial shenanigans) and curiously uninformed neurosurgeon Dr. Ben
Carson, whose fall from grace appears to be gathering steam, they appear to be
poised to collapse like nine-pins after the early caucuses and primaries in the
next few months. It is Trump and Cruz who in the end will probably be left
standing, whipping up their extremist constituencies as the GOP prepares for
next summer’s nominating convention extravaganza.
