Trump's 38% support rating is far too high (it's been around that for now almost 10 years), but it enables him to be elected and maintain power because on top of that number there's a certain group of people who can't stand Trump, but hate the Democrats even more. In his 38% there are the people who genuinely like his policies or are simply part of his cult of personality; but it's in that excess segment that we find the numbers that give him power to drag our nation through the mud.
Earlier this year, even through all the Trump scandals, there was some reporting about approval of the Democrats being something like 20%. I'm too lazy to go find the exact figures, but that's about right. Many people are like my friend Glenn, who knows Trump for what he is and while he likes some of his policies, knows that he's terrible. Yet he hates the Democrats even more, and so is, in some ways, enabling Trump.
As a casual student of history my mind is taken back to a few decades before the civil war, when the two main political entities in our fair country were the Whigs and the Democrats. As the nation ramped up into the terrible conflict that would soon come, the Whigs faded while a new political party, the Republicans, came onto the scene. A gap in my knowledge is the question of WHY the Whigs went away within a decade, never to return. There was a realignment that was taking place during this time, with people changing loyalties and positions...but regardless, after a period of turmoil what once had been was no more and replaced by something new and transformative, leading the nation into finally ending slavery.
I think about that history when I think about the Democrats. We live in a time of changing political loyalties: the formerly blue-collar Democrat has now aligned himself with MAGA. White-collar educated voters who were once Reagan Republicans are now firmly against Trumpism. Both groups (and many more) have their reasons for change, but while the Republicans seem to have opened their doors to the influx of people whose sole thought is an attraction to Trump (itself a fascinating study in how far downhill our country has gone), I (and many others) have no interest in becoming Democrats. But unlike the people who abandoned the Whigs and formed something anew, there's really nothing on the horizon for us today to turn to. So we shake our fists, march in No Kings rallies, and yet nothing really changes.
In my lifetime there have been fringe movements like the Greens or the Constitution party, groups who likely were far too extremist to attract many people. There was the Reformed party of Ross Perot, which claimed a few governors and a small following but eventually faded; and in the past few years there's been a group going around called 'No Labels' whose very identity is based on the idea that their openness means that they really don't represent anything of importance. But where is our 1850s Republican party? Where is a group of people whose ideas are so strong and principle-based that they capture the imagination of the nation?
Of course it's easy to say, what am I doing about this? I suppose it's not enough anymore to simply be an independent; maybe it's time to start creating something anew. Yet maybe that's the problem...we are now a culture so stagnant, so glued to social media, so increasingly stupid that a new movement is no longer possible. And for that, we should grieve.
