Regular readers may note that I am rather deeply haunted by a paragraph written almost exactly a decade ago by the late, great Angelo Codevilla. It was, perhaps, his most important warning to us, and it remains one of the few political predictions ever made that keeps me awake at night. In the waning days of the 2016 campaign, after watching the way the entire ruling class had mobilized to deride Donald Trump and to ensure his defeat, Codevilla penned an essay titled After the Republic, in which he forewarned:
We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation.
The president’s avowed adversaries—those in the Democrat Party and those who abandoned the GOP remade in his image—are, undoubtedly, the people who should heed this warning most readily. Phrases suggesting that Donald Trump “is by no means [the revolution’s] ultimate manifestation” and that someday, “Americans” will be “nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation” should scare the bejeezus out of them. If Trump is as awful as they say he is, if he is as dangerous and reckless as they would have us believe, and if “democracy” is as acutely at risk from his actions as they interminably insist, then the prospect that Trump offers but a weak and blurry glimpse of the political horrors to come should easily persuade them that they need to soften their personal and ideological aggression and find ways to lower the proverbial political temperature in the hope of proving Codevilla a false prophet. That they do not do so, that they, instead, fuel rage and hatred of all things even marginally associated with Trump and the present-day Republican Party, serves as proof positive that they do not believe a word of what they say and, in truth, have far different goals than the ones they so solemnly and repeatedly profess. They don’t appear to fear Codevilla’s dystopian future at all, mostly, one supposes, because they intend to be in charge of it, firmly and permanently.
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