The bad news is that pretty much everything else Trump has touched has turned to *mud*. (This is a "family" blog.) Neil Gorsuch replaced Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court, the administration has nominated a number of conservative (and in some cases clearly unqualified) judges to lower courts, gutted the EPA and other regulations, imposed a ban on some Muslims, demoralized the State Department, FBI and CIA, given moral aid and comfort to Nazis -- yes, Nazis! -- and . . . oh, heck, the list is too long. Besides, I'm sure you're as well aware of it all as I am. No need to get even more depressed.
And, now, as Christmas approaches, the Donald is about to score his first legislative "W": the incredibly regressive tax "reform." Ugh. So what is one to do?
Well, you could recite that famous quote, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," and be reassured that this, too, shall pass.
But you would also have to remember what John Maynard Keynes said, "In the long run we are all dead."
And that's the problem: that moral universe you've heard so much about can take a long, long time to bend.
Take slavery, for example. That quote has been attributed to a Unitarian minister by the name of Theodore Parker. A famous abolitionist, Parker made that observation before at least 1853 and died himself in 1860, five years before the Thirteenth Amendment was passed.
In other words, slavery, which existed in the English colonies since 1619, was finally abolished almost 250 years later. That's a heck of an arc! (And, in truth, blacks lived in almost de facto slavery under Jim Crow in the south until at least the 1960s and didn't have it a whole lot better in the north.) So while it's comforting to think that the arc of history bends toward justice, a lot of slaves -- and Parker -- never lived to see the "justice" part.
Or think of it another way. Germany has existed in one form or another for about a thousand years. The Nazi era only lasted for twelve of those years, from 1933-45. In the grand scheme of things, that's a very short time, a little over one percent of all German history. But if you were, say, 40 years old in 1933, the Nazi period -- assuming you lived through it -- would have taken up almost a quarter of your life by the time it was over. That's a big chunk of a person's life.
Now, I don't know how long Trump is going to be president (although I bet he gets reelected in 2020) but four, or eight, years can be a long time when you're living through it. (Just ask some of those Germans, if there are any left, about that 12-year Nazi period.) And, while I would think that the pendulum would swing back at some point, that could be a long time from now. I'll be 60 years old next year. I only have about twenty or thirty good years left. So I don't have all day; about two-thirds of my life is over. That moral arc had better hurry up!
If there's a God -- or any justice in the world -- the Democrats will take back the House next year and the Senate and White House in 2020. But I'm not so sure. There aren't a whole lot of swing districts left in Congress so between gerrymandering and voter suppression I'm not holding my breath. Although I suspect there's a younger and more charismatic version of Bernie Sanders out there somewhere, I doubt if he'll emerge soon enough to take on Trump in 2020. And any other Democrat -- Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, or any other of a number of ten or twenty potential candidates -- will be demonized with such a fervor by Fox News and the rest of the right-wing echo chamber that I'll bet Trump skates to victory by an even larger margin next time around. (Yep, you read that right. Think Nixon in 1972.)
Once again, the arc of history bends toward justice, but it can be an awfully long wait, and in the long run we're all dead, remember? So that's not a whole lot of comfort for a Never Trumper like me. And I'm afraid that pendulum I mentioned above isn't going to swing back anytime soon.
Oh, well. Merry Christmas!
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