Excelsior

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.