This has always been a country that harbored and accommodated a large diversity of thought, But while there were many fringe elements, the core of the populace, even those who had ample reason to be distrustful of people with power, believed in our democracy and the basic sanctity of the process. There was respect. That even though you weren't always, or even often, going to be in the majority, that even though government didn't do what you wanted it to, you could always depend on our leaders and government being reasonable if failed men and women.
The underlying feeling of belonging, despite all the diversity, all the inequality, all the discrimination, all the disenfranchisement has been dealt a blow by the past four years of the Trump administration. While every other president, regardless of which party, sought to be a unifier and lead the people, Trump was the great divider.
He saw his power in his ability to divide people and bring half the people under his unquestioning control. To be an authoritarian, demagogue, dictator in style and even in fact, to the extent that our democracy and his party gave him that obeisance. And that they did,
His final days are very much in the dictator mode. His refusal to say in the run-up to the election that he was committed to the peaceful transfer of power, to put in his supporters' mind the conviction that if he didn't win it would be because it was stolen by fraud, and then to refuse to accept the results of the election all speak to his deranged state.
That is not much of a surprise. What is a surprise, however, is the response of the American people. That 70 million people saw fit to vote for the man despite his catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, forget about all his other failures, is hard enough to fathom. But that they believed his lies that the pandemic is all a hoax, when we have almost 250,000 dead from the virus. And now they believe his claims that he won but that the election was stolen from him by fraud. It truly boggles the mind.
We have a large portion of the population whose mind has been taken over by a web of unreality. In a recent Monmouth University survey, 77% of Trump supporters said that Biden won the election because of fraud.
Despite no evidence, despite court after court, Republican as well as Democratic judges, throwing out his attacks on the election, this huge mass of people still believe Trump just because of his word. As indeed they believe every thing he says, whether it's about the virus, or climate change, or white supremacists, or whatever.
Regardless whether the Senate is controlled by Democrats or Republicans, where does the country go from here? How do we return our populace to a state of reason, of fact. How do we return to the feeling that although we may strongly disagree, we all at heart want the best for our country and whether one side wins or the other, the country, our democracy, our well-being will not be damaged?
It we look to history, there is no easy answer. After the toppling of a demagogue leader, much of the country has remained loyal to him for many years. If has often taken a generation to free the country from the grasp of his legacy. Plus, in every other case, the demagogue was gone from the scene; in our case, Trump will be, or at least he intends to be, very much with us in the future, attempting to control the Republican Party and perhaps even run for president again in 2024.
We cannot afford to have our country torn apart for a generation. While all of Biden's policy initiatives are in the right direction and of critical importance, this issue, which is basically divorced from any policy success he may have, is of great importance to the future of our country.
So the question remains, what does soon-to-be President Biden do to bring our country back to a state of normalcy? I don't think he can count on his genuineness, his decency, his talk of unity to move the country substantially back to normalcy. I don't think his policies will have much of an impact in this regard either.
One has to understand that the one thing that people loved about Trump more than anything else was that he was fiercely anti-establishment. And yes, he was in the pocket of the evangelicals. There is possibly nothing that anyone that is part of the establishment, or even working with it, can do to change their attitude. They won't even listen to the "moderate" former leaders of their own party.
This anti-establishment feeling had been brewing for decades and Trump finally gave it a voice, an outlet. You can't shut back Pandora's box once it's been opened.
Even if Trump ends up in jail, convicted of tax fraud or whatever, it won't make a difference to his minions. Indeed, they will just think he was unjustly convicted; a victim of the very establishment that he fought against.
I fear that only Trump himself could change the dynamic. And that is truly to dream the impossible dream. And so i think we, Biden, must settle for just making small inroads, slightly reducing the millions that supported Trump through a variety of positive approaches that they feel are in their best interest. Those are the facts
But we can nevertheless rejoice that we soon will have a President, a cabinet, and a government that will get this country back on track from a policy perspective. If a large minority of the people continue in their blind trust and distrust, that will impact their lives and possibly the next election, but this country will move forward. And we can take comfort in that they did lose the election and next time around, their numbers should be reduced, so that they will lose again.
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