In yesterday's blog posting, I reported on a commentary by playwright David Mamet, published in the November 23, 2024, edition of The Wall Street Journal. Mamet's opinion piece was, to me at least, a real "stunner." Mamet's unbridled support for Donald Trump, our president-elect, and his dismissive and contemptuous scorn for President Biden and all those who had supported the Harris/Walz/Democratic Party ticket in our recently-concluded presidential election, was truly surprising to me.
According to Mamet, the Democrratic Party is an "elitist" group, completely out of touch with, and uninterested in, the real concerns of the American people. A victory by the Democratic Party would have been proof of the "irreversible decline of the U.S.," which he indicated would have been much like the end of the Roman Empire. Luckily, we are not there yet, says Mamet - and the fact that we aren't there yet is to be completely credited to Donald Trump, and to his supporters, the way Mamet sees it.
Candidly, most of the people with whom I am regularly in contact see things in an absolutely opposite way. Trump's election, many of them believe, is the "End of Democracy." My "liberal" and "progressive" friends are perplexed that so many people could have voted for a person whom they believe is "beneath contempt." While that is a strong statement, I think that this is a fair and basically accurate statement of their feelings.
As I thought about my blog posting from yesterday, it struck me that the November 23, 2024, editions of both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times carried a number of other articles - besides that opinion piece by Mamet - that expressed views that were somewhat like those advanced by Mamet in his article. For instance:
The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, "Is the Ukraine War Stoppable?" That article was authored by opinion columnist Holman Jenkins, and it expressed great disdain for President Biden, further suggesting that things had been so mismanaged by the president that it would be hard for Mr. Trump, when he becomes president in late January, to do anything really positive with respect to the war in Ukraine. Jenkins opined that what is most likely is that Ukraine will "become Afghanistan in the middle of Europe."
Another commentator writing in The Journal also heaped scorn on President Biden, but this commentator had a somewhat different prediction. According to Barton Swaim, who described the views of former Soviet dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev, it seems quite likely that Trump, as president, will help Ukraine beat Russia.
Congress Member Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat just reelected to the House of Representatives, outlined her thoughts to Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent for The New York Times. In The Times' article linked here, Gluesenkamp strongly criticized her party for being "dismissive" of working class voters, and being out of touch with their main concerns.
Similar thoughts appeared in a Guest Essay by Samuel Moyn, which appeared in The New York Times. Moyn, who is a law professor at Yale, said that the Democratic Party took exactly the wrong approach in searching "for political salvation primarily through the law." Those legal prosecutions against former president Trump all backfired, in Moyn's view. To oppose Mr. Trump in his second term, Moyn says, "liberals must learn the lesson of this defeat, which is that there is no alternative to persuading our fellow citizens of our beliefs" (emphasis added).
That phrase from Moyn's essay that I have just emphasized is a message that I think we all need to acknowledge. And when I say, "all," I mean both Republicans and Democrats alike, Trump supporters and Trump opponents, alike.
Moyn's advice is directed to Democrats, but the advice he gives definitely goes both ways. If a new Trump Administration wants to be successful in governing the country, and in dealing with the very real crises we confront, it is going to have to work with those on the "other side."
We really are "all in this together," and that means that where there are differences of approach, and different values (and both are certainly present in our current politics), the way to effective action will not be found by "defeating" those with whom we disagree.
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