Skip to main content

Teachable Moments

Berkley MI

Tuesday

 

Once again, it is Doug from Ontario who has set me off. He is concerned about how we can bring Trump voters back into the fold after an election in which (in our dreams) Trump gets trounced and Congress replaced. How do we help these misguided souls climb down from their grievous mistake without losing too much face?

I’ll start by telling Doug that much of Trump’s core base is unreachable. Their reptilian instincts have been given free rein, and they are simply too racist, sexist, xenophobic, and brainwashed to be responsible citizens. Deplorable indeed, we should just let them stew. There aren’t that many of them. They are mostly old white guys with bad habits. They are subject to actuarial issues that could soon render them demographically moot. And their attitude towards the virus is, shall we say, unhealthy.

But Doug is right. Beyond this core base of true believers are a much larger group of Trump voters, and we mustn’t write them off. Most are, or can be, useful citizens, though many seem to have slept through high school civics. They voted for this monster for a lot of the same reasons many of them voted for Obama. They feel, and rightly, that they’ve been screwed. That the American dream has let them down. They’ve seen their livelihoods, their money, their entire way of life pulled out from under them in a long decline that has left them confused and bitter.

They have, of course, badly misunderstood the reasons for that decline. They’ve blamed all the wrong people. They’ve put their faith in charlatans, both religious and secular. And they could use a better understanding of any amendment beyond the second. But while that makes them uninformed and gullible, it doesn’t necessarily make them bad.

So I have to believe that the virus will offer them some teachable moments. It couldn’t be more obvious, even to the oblivious, that Trump has dropped the ball catastrophically, and yes, murderously. Anyone who doesn’t see that now will surely be smacked upside the head soon, as the virus hammers the heartland. A large number will lose their jobs, contract the virus, or both.

If they lose their jobs, most will lose their health insurance. Which will leave their entire family deeply vulnerable. They will then turn to the Affordable Care Act and, oh wait, maybe not. Republicans still want to crush the ACA, even now. If you live in a red state, there might not even be a special enrollment period. And you might not get to go on Medicaid either, because your dumbass legislature didn’t accept the expansion.

So how does that work for 35 million unemployed and a killer virus ravaging the land? Imagine two weeks in the ICU with no insurance. As I said, a teachable moment.

But we can’t leave re-education to the pandemic alone. We need both carrots and sticks.

The carrots could center around arguably our three biggest problems: healthcare, infrastructure, and environment.

The loss of health insurance will surely leave even Trump voters receptive to some kind of workable plan. The choice has now become absurdly simple: either we reform the system or we die. It’s a strange-tasting carrot, but a carrot nonetheless. Once you’ve had health insurance, you never want to be without it again. No matter who you voted for.

As for infrastructure and environment, the carrot is jobs and more jobs. The problem of deferred maintenance has not gone away. Our roads, bridges, tunnels, sewers, pipelines, etc., are all in dire need of repair or replacement. We need to hire millions of people to make that happen.

And as long as we’re fixing things, we might as well make them eco-friendly as well. Because there’s an environmental catastrophe still waiting in the wings. It’s every bit as nasty as Covid, just more patient. And it doesn’t care if Trump voters believe in it or not. But maybe hiring them to fight it will help them believe. The virus has presented us with a huge opportunity to put Americans back to work.

If only America would get out of its own way.

But carrots aren’t enough. We need sticks too.

The first stick is that criminals must be brought to justice. Trump’s voters must be clearly shown that the man they elected was a malignant swindler, and that they themselves were his marks. The virus will help them with that lesson. So will his tax returns, if we ever see them.

Obama’s biggest mistake was giving the Bush criminals a pass. It let them think they could get away with anything. But that has to stop. There must be indictments for people who have so flagrantly and frequently broken the law, and those indictments need to penetrate deeply into the administration and Congress. The hope, for me, is that when Trump voters see how they’ve been lied to, stolen from, and led to their deaths by people who despise them, this too will be a teachable moment.

The other stick must land squarely on Fox News. It is impossible to overstate the carnage they have inflicted on the country. Since Trump took office, they’ve morphed into a 24/7 alternate universe, watched religiously by vast numbers of reprogrammable cultists. Too sophisticated for their own good, Fox cranks out propaganda, misinformation, lurid conspiracies, and outright lies, all nonstop. They are more than capable of making at least some their viewers believe Lysol cures Covid.

But now, for the first time, Fox has stepped in it, and lawyers are surely getting excited. Turns out, it’s not just deeply irresponsible to misinform the public about a deadly pandemic. It might also be a crime. This already has the attention of Fox's in-house lawyers. It will surely have the attention of the new Attorney General. 

And where there’s criminal exposure, civil litigation inevitably follows. Class action lawyers, you can be sure, are already licking their chops, trolling for victims of deadly misinformation. They know a plaintiff-rich environment when they see one, and many of their clients will be Trump voters. Suing Fox News. Will they see the irony?

As the damage from the pandemic converges so appallingly with the damage from the Trump crime family, teachable moments will surely abound. So, in time, will opportunities to fix a broken country. For Trump voters, the carrots will be there, and the sticks will be aimed at criminals, not them. Hopefully they’ll see this as a chance to rethink a lot.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Warning: Red States may be Hazardous to your Health

In late September, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison for helping her daughter obtain abortion pills. The case was less about abortion than about some bizarre behavior regarding the burial of the fetal remains, but this is still appalling on any number of levels. Even so, that’s not what piqued my interest. Rather, I was drawn to one curious footnote to the story, and I’ve heard nothing about it since. Apparently, the judge in the case had ordered the woman to undergo a psychological evaluation prior to sentencing. Presumably, the results might have helped to mitigate her sentence. Which sounds reasonable, perhaps even routine. But that evaluation never happened. It was, strangely, “cancelled due to lack of funding.” Huh? A person whose future may have hinged on that evaluation was denied it because the state couldn’t afford it? How underfunded are we talking? How many other people moving through the Nebraska judicial system haven’t rece

The Media Wakes Up and Smells the Fascism

  A funny thing happened on the way to the 2024 horserace. The mainstream media brought Hitler into the conversation. Trump gave them no choice. He kept amping up his rants in terms that were so explicitly Nazi, so lifted — practically verbatim — from Hitler’s speeches, that it was hard for them to keep ignoring what they’ve willfully ignored for so long. When Trump used the word ‘vermin’ in his Veteran’s Day speech , he was taking a whole chapter from the fascism playbook. Whether he knew it or not. Dehumanization — the art of equating human beings with insects — is a classic stochastic terrorism technique, beloved of dictators the world over. In Rwanda in the nineties, the Hutu tribe openly called its rival Tutsis “cockroaches” on the radio, inciting its members to exterminate them with machetes, which they did. We’ll probably never know who actually wrote the Vermin speech — Stephen Miller or Steve Bannon are likely suspects — but we can be sure it wasn’t T

Things Have Been Too Cheap for Too Long

  Once upon a time, gasoline cost roughly 35 cents a gallon. That halcyon era came to an abrupt halt during the Carter administration, when oil-rich Arab states severely constricted our petroleum supply, causing hours-long lines at the gas pump that are still fresh in the memory of anyone who was there. When the dust cleared, gas was four times more expensive, and now we count ourselves lucky if it’s only ten times that long-ago price. But we did get over it, more or less. We learned to live with it. Around that time, some pundit I can’t remember said something that has stuck with me ever since. To paraphrase, “This country was built on cheap energy and cheap labor, and we’re running out of both.” It stuck with me because it’s even truer now than it was then. This despite the best efforts of corporate interests — and their Republican flunkies in government — to do all they can to keep both energy and labor as cheap as possible. For several decades, they made