Don't despair, fellow progressives, I believe everything will
work out eventually.
“Poppycock!” you may say (or words to that
effect). “Right wingers on the Supreme Court have just crippled workers’ rights
and now Justice Kennedy’s retirement will allow Trump to appoint an even more
aggressive conservative to the bench.”
Okay, true enough, but in the long run, the arc of
the moral universe will nevertheless bend our way.
“Long run?!! So what!” you retort. “In the long
run Florida will be a windswept peninsular fragment, threatened
by ever-rising sea levels!”
Okay, but that aside, I still believe things will work
out for us and also for the arc of moral justice. Certainly, Donald Trump will
appoint a very questionable individual to the Supreme Court. In fact, Culture
World has managed to obtain from an inside source, pictures of three of Trump’s
short listers which I reveal here for the first time…
But nevertheless, here’s what I expect will happen
within the next year and a half.
The newly emboldened Supreme Court will continue
to undermine minority voting rights and women’s abortion rights all the while pretending
their decisions have nothing to do with race or gender. Women in need of
abortions who now live in places like Texas and Mississippi will be required to
travel hundreds of miles for treatment because of the conservative majority on
the Court. This will create a major backlash starting around 2019, resulting in
more women and educated suburbanites leaving the GOP, and minority voters
turning out in droves in future elections.
In addition to this, the Mueller investigation will bring
to light Trump’s financial obligations to Putin and other Russian oligarchs,
further undermining his already low approval rating among normal, non-Republican
voters.
Then, the GOP tax give-away to the rich, based as
it is on debt that the rest of us now owe, will lead us into a recession that
will further infuriate voters. I’m not alone in my concern about a recession.
Here’s a piece from yesterday’s New York Times offering a somewhat worrisome
take on this prospect.
So, by 2020, the GOP will (justifiably) be in
danger of totaling imploding and ceasing to exist as a viable party. Trump, of
course, will blame all this on Nancy Pelosi or Alec Baldwin or someone like that, but by then even
many Fox viewers will have stopped believing him.
Naturally I don’t relish the prospect of a recession,
especially now that our tax-reform-based national debt has made it more
difficult to fight our way out of one. But this recessionary cloud will have a
silver lining: voters will be reminded of how conservative tax plans are invariably
aimed at helping the rich and invariably hurt the rest of us. In response, newly
elected progressive leaders (President Kamala Harris, anyone?) will restructure
the government in a way that eases the suffering of the recession’s hardest hit
victims – just as FDR did in response to the (conservative-created) Great Depression.
So, fellow citizens, hold onto your hats (or bandanas,
or hijabs, or whatever), and together let’s fight our way forward to the next
era of out-and-out progressivism, and in the meantime, let's do what we can to alleviate the suffering on hard-hit families that Trump's policies have brought (will bring) about.
