Despair is Also an Enemy, and Alliances Matter
Published at 08:21 on 21 December 2016
What we need is realism. Sometimes that means accepting an unpleasant fact, but sometimes that means refusing to fall into false despair.
One such instance of despair is assuming there’s nothing that can be done about Trump; because given how Republican-dominated the government will be, there will be little we can do about it. This ignores the reality that Trump has at least one huge easily-observable vulnerability: his sociopathy.
He’s exceedingly self-centered, small-minded, selfish, and irritable. This is war, and in war your job is to determine and exploit your enemy’s vulnerabilities.
In war, you should also in general simply know your enemy, period. Our enemy is not just Trump, it is the larger Republican Party which is deciding to ally with him. That party is overwhelmingly conservative, and conservatives tend to place great importance on nationalism and patriotism. The latter is also a vulnerability we can exploit.
When an incoming president has the foreign entanglements that Trump has, to the point that he tweets disparagingly about protesters, news reporters, parents of deceased veterans, Broadway actors, and so on — yet refuses to say anything at all about Russia, this pushes some hot buttons for your typical conservative. We can use this to our advantage to split the Republicans in Congress and turn some of Trump’s own party against him and ally instead with us.
It may sound strange for a radical leftist to advocate making common cause with conservatives, but recall that this is war and war often requires making common cause to forge alliances with people you have many disagreements with. Churchill and Stalin had disagreements that paled in comparison to those I have with traditional American conservatives, yet managed to forge an effective alliance which defeated the Nazis.
If successful, it wouldn’t be a lasting alliance (the one with the Soviets promptly collapsed after World War II ended), but that’s not the point. The point is to neutralize a common enemy; both the Left and traditional conservatism are better off if they are slugging it out in an open society rather than being brutally repressed in a fascist state.