Big consolation, n'est-ce pas? Well, at this time of the “Big Wait”, when I am pathetically hoping for a Biden blow-out and even more pathetically trying not to think, really, not to think about anything at all, it is “nice” to think that other nations have, at other times in their history, endured internal distress, confusion, and humiliation far greater than ours, even though I can’t think of one that has freely chosen such a gross and viciously unprincipled oaf as Donald Trump as its head of state.
The 1930s were harsh for everyone, of course, but unlike other major nations we hadn’t had our whole sense of a nation torn in half by World War I, and when the sequel came in 1939 we weren’t either ruled by a brutal dictatorship or treated to the spectacle of our nation being invaded and defeated by one, or shamefully selling out to one, or both. We were able to keep our conscience clean—without much difficulty, really—because we were never really put to the test.
Well, now we are being put to the test, and about 90% of the Republican Party has failed that test. Jay Nordlinger, one of the noblest hold-outs, writes of his dismay in remarkably measured terms in his recent post for the National Review, “Vote Your Conscience”, very politely burying his lede, as we say in the biz, to wit: that all of his friends who are voting for Trump have no conscience. Which is true.
I have been particularly embarrassed by the fact that Great Britain, as I barbarously refer to the United Kingdom, has never chosen as its leader anyone so bereft of both morals and taste as Donald Trump. Well, I still am, but I am unattractively comforted by the fact that the UK, back in the 1970s, was all but paralyzed by internal dissent, particularly during the “Winter of Discontent”(1978-1979), though the crisis began much earlier. In 1974, James Callaghan, then foreign secretary for the ruling Labour Party and prime minister in 1978-1979, told the cabinet “If I were a young man, I would emigrate.”
It hasn’t reached that level yet here, in my estimation, even though I am very far from being a young man, and I would like to think that it won’t even if my worst nightmare, a Trump reelection, comes true. These are times when men’s (and women’s) souls are tried. And the results of such times are so often so unpretty!
