I agree with John Kass’s assessment in his Chicago Tribune column. Removing Trump from office will not result in a “return to normalcy”. Things will only get worse:
True, Clinton received about 3 million more votes than Trump. But almost 63 million people voted for the president. And forcing them to their knees in capitulation is not a prescription for unification but a prospect for disaster.
Trump voters didn’t create the divided nation. The elites divided it over time, through economic dislocation and abandonment of the working class, and a mad push for endless wars in which soldiers returned to find no jobs or economic future.
Now America is reaping what the elites have sown.
Months and months before the presidential election, I began thinking of Trump not as a cause of American disruption but a symptom of it. And as much as I don’t like quoting myself, here is something from March 2016:
“It’s obvious the American political system is breaking down. It’s been crumbling for some time now, and the establishment elite know it and they’re properly frightened. Donald Trump, the vulgarian at their gates, is a symptom, not a cause. Hillary Clinton and husband Bill are both cause and effect.”
The establishment pushed the wars and free trade and their partners in the corporate-government matrix agreed to the sending off of capital (and jobs) to foreign lands.
For all the talk of partisanship, Democrats and Republicans were the two horns on the head of the goat.
There is no national consensus on the way forward but profound disagreement, particularly between those have power and those who don’t. Removing Trump as president even if it were to prove necessary or possible wouldn’t resolve that.
I don’t know that anything will.
Why are even talking about removing him from office? Not happening. The GOP Senate will not remove him. The best we can hope for is to just minimize the distraction. We should limit these investigations so that they last no longer than did the Benghazi investigations. We need to set some reasonable limits or this could drag on forever.
Steve
Dave, what do you make of this?
https://medium.com/@piercello/searching-for-consensus-550ea49ff86b
As long as the search for heretics remains a major occupation, I don’t see any way of accomplishing that.
That’s the rub, isn’t it?
But the post at least does outline a mechanism, if not the motivation for using it.
(Noting, of course, that while ending the search for heretics is a losing proposition, ending it _as a major occupation_ is at least within the realm of possibility, however farfetched.)
Pier cello, you might want to view the video embedded in the article linked in the post above this one. The professor uses some of the techniques you recommend but the angry mob just becomes more hostile. Just the act of seeking consensus is considered heretical.
CStanley, I know. Mobs are notoriously unreceptive to calming rhetoric! As in vaudeville, timing and audience matter.
With that said, the post’s target audience is those who have unwillingly found themselves trapped in “pre-mob” situations, including modern American politics, and are looking for a way back from the brink.
It doesn’t take everyone, just a critical mass. Step one toward achieving that critical mass, then, is to re-establish that a consensus-based path for de-escalation does exist. Hence the post.
Point taken, Piercello, but I fear that the mob mentality has claimed many domains, especially social media and blogs. It may be too late, though I hope not.