How Trump’s Election Would Reflect on American Democracy

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

-Winston Churchill (quoting an unknown predecessor in Parliament)

America’s form of democracy, really a democratic republic, must be down the scale of those Churchill was thinking of when he opined on the way a government of the people operates in fact.  How else would he have viewed a country that could elect as its leader an actor who believed in astrology, whose Supreme Court could choose the winner over the actual votes of the people, and now, potentially, that could select a charlatan who wants to build a giant wall and deport 11 million people from the country?

I will confess to having been embarrassed when Ronald Reagan was elected.  I know many claim he was a great president, and, of course, he has become an icon for the current Republican Party.  But to me, he was the antithesis of what a president of my country should be.  And I’m not even speaking so much of ideology here, although I strongly disagree with the conservative philosophy that Reagan emulated and elevated.  But an actor who was acting out the role of candidate and then of president?  And who thought we could build a nuclear shield and that cutting taxes would raise revenue?  And whose wife planned his overseas trips by consulting the zodiac charts?  Really?  We elected him?

Of course, his Strategic Defense Initiative was a fool’s plan, one that, 30 or more years later, has made us no safer from nuclear attack, and the Laffer curve that he blindly accepted has been tried and failed repeatedly at both the federal and state level.  (And he did end up raising taxes more times than he cut them.)  And he presided over the only administration that literally had a rogue office (unbeknownst even to him if his aides were to be believed) who sold arms to Iran to support anti-communist guerillas in Nicaragua (in violation of federal law).  So, I’d say my embarrassment at his election was fully borne out by the eight years of his administration.

I will also confess to having been ashamed by the election of George W. Bush, the first president in my lifetime to have been named president by a combination of the Electoral College and the Supreme Court after clearly and decisively losing the popular vote.  I was ashamed, first, that my country had a system that even made possible the election of a person by that convoluted method, and even more ashamed that the highest court in the land made the ultimate decision by ignoring established legal principles to deny the actual counting of the votes.

And then I was ashamed by the president that George W. Bush was.  From the outset, when he took forever just to decide whether stem cells could be used for scientific research, it was apparent to me that the man was in way over his head.  And then, his response to 9/11: so macho and so wrong-headed.  I’ll never forgive him for invading Iraq, the most illegal and immoral single decision by any president in my lifetime.  And, of course, we are now suffering the on-going after-effects of that calamitous decision.

Reagan and Dubya both qualify in my view as mental lightweights, and I don’t want mental lightweights as president.  And then we have Donald Trump.  I still can’t believe he could really be elected, but, or course, I thought the same of Reagan and Bush junior.

As horrible as I felt at the election of both of them, I would feel even worse if my fellow Americans were foolish, dare I say stupid, enough to elect Trump.  But of course, they very well might, because he’s exactly what many voters want in a candidate at this time in our history.  He sounds angry, and many voters are angry.  He promises to make the country great again, and even though that line is undefined (and probably undefinable), it sounds right to many Americans who feel lousy about their lot in life and think things have gone terribly wrong for them (and the country).

Of course, the evidence doesn’t support those views.  We are far better off in just about every quantifiable way today than we were eight years ago.  But for many the recovery hasn’t been strong enough to help them enough.  And for others, the sense is that government doesn’t work anymore; hence they feel a need for a guy who’ll shake things up.  And Trump says he’d shake things up.  He’d be strong and he’d make deals and he’d be tough and everyone would be better off.

And for a lot of voters, just hearing a guy say those things is enough.  Never mind that he doesn’t have any sense of what he’d really do or of what the real world conditions are that he’d be dealing with.  He doesn’t care, and why should those who vote for him?

I’m really sickened at the thought of a President Donald Trump.  I’m sickened at the thought that I could live in a country with a man like that as the president.  I’m sickened at the thought that my fellow citizens would actually elect him.

But, of course, I’d live with it, because what choice would I have?  I’m an American.  I’m not going to move to Canada.  I already threatened to do that when they wanted to send me to Vietnam back in 1971.  I didn’t go then, and I’m not about to go now.

Instead, I’ll watch as the country I love, the country that has tried for 240 years to get this “great experiment” right, stumbles again into a tragic period of horrific leadership that makes it that much harder for us to get back on track.  I hope that my fellow citizens wake up before it’s too late and that, if he is elected, he doesn’t end up being as bad as I fear he will be, as I feared Reagan and George W. before him would be.

I was right to fear what they would do.  I hope I don’t find out whether I’m right about him.