I believe that David Shribman, writing at RealClearPolitics, is trying to assuage my concerns by noting that harsh words have been part of our political discourse prior to the 2016 campaign:
Years before he became president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis was the target of unforgiving opprobrium from Sam Houston, who criticized the Mississippi senator by saying he was as “ambitious as Lucifer and cold as a lizard.†In “Profiles in Courage,†John F. Kennedy wrote this of Thomas Hart Benton, who served in the Senate from 1821 to 1851: “Pouring out his taunting sarcasm in short, bombastic thunderbolts of gigantic rage, hate and ridicule, day after day, in town after town, he assailed his opponents and their policies with bitter invective.â€
but he’s falling short of the mark. Both of the examples he cited are about the run-up to the American Civil War. Yes, strong words preceded the shooting. Emphasis on the word “preceded”.
He goes on to ask a number of presumably rhetorical questions:
By contrast, this election raised questions that the end of the campaign will not resolve. Here are six among them:
• Is the Republican Party, since 1909 the party of the Establishment, going to relinquish that role and banish its own party establishment?
• Will the Democrats, since 1932 the party of the poor and striving, take on the tint of the elitist party, its power centers being gentrified urban areas and college towns?
• Will the Republicans, within the lifetimes of many voters the party of social rest, emerge as the party of cultural unrest?
• Will the Democrats, in recent years the party of insurgency, retreat into a new, sleepy life as the party of the status quo?
• Will the Republicans keep the support of blue-collar voters that their leaders spent decades fighting in labor battles but whom Donald J. Trump attracted into their column in 2016?
• Will the Democrats embrace the nostrums of Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and surge leftward?
Leaving the presumably unintended comedy in some of those questions aside, there’s another alternative: we’re going to see a Great Reshuffling and neither party will emerge unscathed.
I think that those who are gleefully predicting the collapse of the Republican Party are looking at American politics from a distance. The Republican Party hasn’t held more governorships, controlled more state legislatures, or had a stronger latch on the House in decades. It’s not going away any time soon.
Similarly, the Democrats’ loss of governors’ mansions, state legislatures, and the House will have implications that we’ve already seen in this election but that I suspect most don’t fully appreciate.
O. K. Put your glasses on the end of your nose peer at me and say, worthless, deplorable, working class. You may be right, Hillary may be right, but we can READ now. Maybe the election is rigged, but I want the anti-American establishment OUT, AND in prison. I want an American leader, not a third rate Obama, who by the way, was only a performer and led U S carelessly into a new , very dangerous age, with multitudes of Muslims leaders free from constraints to attack modernism, women’s rights, and if anyone here even cares, JEWS and their right to exist at all.
In “Profiles in Courage,†John F. Kennedy wrote….
LOL, doesn’t he know that pretty much EVERYONE knows JFK didn’t write that book, at least not the bulk of it?