Thank God. Our long national nightmare is sorta kinda over. Trump is gone, and hopefully, he will soon be in cuffs and a jumpsuit of roughly the same color as his skin for the rest of his life.
The problem is, of course, that the problems don’t go away with Trump.
There is still a sizable amount of vile scum on the right who believes in authoritarianism, populism, fascism, and racism. They’re now organizing and in control of way too large a portion of the Republican Party. For instance, in my home state of Arizona, the GOP just put certifiable lunatic Kelly Ward as head of the state party again. To say this woman is crazy is to insult everyone with schizophrenia. No sane party would ever have given this mentally challenged loon any power, let alone control of a state political machine. And we know that this is not just an Arizona problem.
And then you have all those idiots in the House and Senate. They voted to try and overturn a completely legal election. A just society would have them forcibly ejected out of Congress, in a courtroom for treason, and as quickly as due process allows onto a gallows.
And it’s not like the other side is much better. On the one hand, while Joe is a decent human being free of most corruption, it’s not like he is great. He was there cheering when Obama did all the same shit Trump did, just to a lesser degree. And it’s not like Joe has ever been on the sane side of the Democrats; he just repositions himself constantly in the middle of where the Democrat Caucus is. Yes, this speaks to a certain common-sense pragmatism that has been sorely lacking in the executive. While it won’t fix all of our problems, it will help restore a certain amount of normality and following of the law by our government. But it’s not going to fix all the problems.
Further, the less said about the far left of the Democrat party with Bernie, Warren, and AOC, the better as they and their followers are no better than Trump and his ilk and would likely have the same dismissive attitude toward the Constitution and the rule of law if they were in power as the outgoing administration.
So how do we deal with the fact that all sides have their fair share of a sick mix of crazy, evil, and stupid?
We’re going to have to stop looking at the personal side.
We don’t like any of these people. At all.
But we have to deal with whom we have. And since that is not great, we can only care about policies.
No caring about personality or character until at least the next primary season. Everything has to be about policy.
We have to support policies, not people, for the immediate future.
I don’t like Mike Lee, it makes sense, but all that matters is if he votes for laws that make sense and votes against ones that don’t.
I don’t like Biden; I can’t blame you, he wasn’t my favorite until the other options were vastly worse. Still, all that matters now is if his policy is good for America in the long run or not.
From this point forward, we have to only deal with facts, figures, and logical arguments about the policies.
I know I have had more than my fair share of insulting politicians on a personal level. And I know I could go forward as there is practically no one I would trust right now aside from Romney, Amash, and maybe Buttigieg. But with such a plethora of personal and intellectual failing to one degree or another, we have can either insult everyone or just focus on the policy.
We have to argue for the policies we support with facts.
We have to argue against the policies we dislike with facts.
And we have to search for facts from as many sources as possible.
If we see someone going back to personal attacks, we have to just respond with facts.
Every one of us has to only deal with facts.
It doesn’t matter that pretty much for all of us, the last couple of decades has been nothing but sniping at each other with increasingly petty insults. Many of them are justly earned by our interlocutors.
It’s not helping.
We need to get back to being for and against policies, not people, not parties. Certainly, we have seen character plays a big part in this, but we got to the point of the character being so crucial because we stopped caring about policy, and unless we all go cold turkey off the insults, it’s not going to get better.
And the reason we have to do this is that if we deal in the nearly infinitive moral failings of every side, we will get bogged down in the same swamp of extremism. If we make this personal, then we let politics continue to be the realm of populism versus progressivism, of socialism versus fascism, of a system where we lose.
The only way to stop this nonsense is to make everything about policy and policy only. If AOC and Ted Cruz, with their two collective brain cells, develop an acceptable policy (it won’t happen, but go with the powerful argument), we have to support it. Granted, from those two, you would want to make sure there are no devils in the details, but due diligence should be given to everything.
The demagogues always lose if we focus on policy. Tyranny always wins if we only make this about how much we hate one or both sides.
One last thing. Votes for tyranny and in favor of tyrants is bad policy and those who vote in such ways must be removed by any legal means available from any and all positions of power.
The Conservative New Ager 