Onetime Reagan White House (and Gen. Colin Powell) speechwriter Hal Gordon shared this post last week, at the beginning of the Ukraine shit show:
In his post today, conservative commentator Rod Dreher perfectly captured what it's like to be conservative under Donald Trump. I quote: “Last weekend I wrote about a situation in my neighborhood, in which a beleaguered 60-year-old woman lives with her mentally ill, violent, abusive son, a 6’5″ man in his twenties. It’s a nightmare for her, but she persists in it, because she’s too afraid of the alternatives …. That poor woman is a symbol of conservatives under Trump.”
As a liberal, I could imagine being in that situation, if the Democratic president was corrupt and yet a Republican alternative seemed to me more dangerous still.
During the 2016 election, I contemplated how long so many Republicans had despised the Clintons, and tried to imagine how horrible the Democratic candidate would have to be to drive me to vote for a Republican who I'd loathed for two decades—Newt Gingrich, say. When I couldn't conjure a Democrat that bad, I started to worry that Trump might win.
I'm not saying we should renounce our tribes. But at the very least, we should recognize their power in our own lives.
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