If Donald Trump Is The Best The Right Has To Offer…

… I don’t think they quite understand the term ‘supremacy.’

Donald Trump is, indeed, the best that the Right can do. He has a gift for dividing people and has a mean streak that fits neatly into the longstanding conservative anger fetish. He is but the latest — if also the most blatant — in a line of increasingly amoral politicians like Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Mitch McConnel.

The definition of polarization is simple: two powerful forces comprehensively at odds with each other and which therefore cannot exist together in one place at the same time. Donald Trump represents one pole, where the force consists of lying, cheating, and stealing in the name of callous supremacy. The power on this pole derives from blunt, brute, feckless, and belligerent amorality.

What’s at the other pole? People who don’t lie. People who don’t cheat. People who don’t steal. People whose default is moral and ethical behavior.

People who have a regard for the rule of law simply can’t co-exist with people who despise the rule of law. The simpleminded American media has long treated the opposing poles as more or less equal in moral weight, reducing the debate to ‘just politics.’ This narrative is propped up by the fallacy of outcomes defining the process after the fact: if the House and Senate are poised upon a balance of forces, those balance of forces must represent the true, evenly-split, nature of the electorate. Under this fallacy Donald Trumps’ nearly 63 million votes, plus the Electoral College is exactly equivalent to Hillary Clintons’ nearly 66 million votes. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 vote total is the second-largest in the history of the country… but under this fallacy of outcomes that determine the process, this can only mean that she had to have been the. worst. candidate. ever.

If Mitch McConnel leads a narrowly Republican Senate, of course, that means the entirety of the United States must be narrowly Republican. But if you count up the population of Republican states you’ll see that McConnel’s Senate majority doesn’t even come close to representing a majority of voters. Similarly, if the Democrats can only muster a slim majority in the House that must mean they are only a slim majority in the country. But the Democrats slim majority in the House derives from following the rules and the law. The Republicans shamelessly lie, cheat and gerrymander the House seats to a fare-thee-well.

Polarization is real and derives from stark choices: Nancy Pelosi, whatever her faults are, is simply incapable of acting with the same reckless spite and meanness as, say, Newt Gingrich; Chuck Schumer, whatever you may think of his morals, is simply not as amoral as Mitch McConnell. Barack Obama is the complete opposite of the reckless and feckless Trump. A president, and a political party, that has no moral or ethical compass whatsoever is always going to be opposed by those who do possess and cherish moral and ethical values. Polarization is axiomatic.

No, the moral and the ethical are not perfect and they certainly are not guaranteed of victory just because they are the good guys. But let us stop fooling ourselves with the notion that one sides perfidy is equal to and as valid as the other sides efforts and therefore polarization is irrational. Polarization derives from those citizens who are possessed of a strong and vibrant moral compass who simply cannot accept Trump’s actions as legitimate mostly because they admire and wish to be guided by Obama’s quiet, powerful, morality. That is a fully-justified polarization: the actions of the one group repelling the conscience of the other. This is why Joe Biden received such fully-justified grief for his lamenting a by-gone era when decent liberals could deal straight with honest Southern Segregationists: There are no honest Southern Segregationists and the very idea that there were, or are, or could be, appalls the conscience and repels the morally sane and the intellectually honest.

Polarization derives from the people who believe in the Constitution frustrated that those who clearly don’t believe in the Constitution and who abuse their power to stay in power. Why wouldn’t we be polarized in this situation?

Supremacy ought to derive from the law. That’s why the Supreme Court delivers the final and ultimate verdict. That’s what moral and ethical people believe. It was the tension between what the law said and what White hegemony did that allowed the civil rights movement to steamroll much opposition. Then too, we were polarized. We don’t consider that, then, many of the people helpful to the status quo considered voting rights activists as mere troublemakers and rabblerousers. Those troublemakers could no longer abide in the same space as the blatantly racist and blithely complacent.

We have come again to a fullness of circle and find the opposing forces of a thuggish venality and moral purpose trying to occupy the same space.