What We Worry?

Many Americans  seem to be worrying more about  politics lately than is  necessary or healthy.  There are things to pay attention to and difficulties and threats  to deal with, but there is no crisis in the country.  It is not 1858 or 1940 or 1979.   Yet people  are worked up or even obsessed, some seemingly to the point of panic or mania.   

I think electing Trump was a bad idea, but in the context of 2016 electing Mrs. Clinton would have been a worse one,  given the great need to end or reverse the harmful policies and trends of the Obama years (something at which Trump and his people have done a fairly good job). Four more years of  Obama’s policies and practices  might have led to a crisis. However there are reasonable arguments for the opposite opinion on the election, and there are people I respect who hold it. Neither Trump nor Clinton  was a good choice, but having to choose between two bad  candidates is far from unusual.  It happens more often than not, and we have had ample evidence from both parties at various times in the last hundred years that even a very bad president cannot ruin the country.

Some of Trump’s supporters are totalitarian  neo-Nazis,  racist white supremacists, common thugs, and anti-Semitic bigots whose views are inimical to a free society. Some of the Democrats’ supporters are totalitarian Communist neo-Stalinists, racist black nationalists, common thugs, and anti-Semitic bigots whose views are inimical to a free society.  However such people are an insignificant minority in each case.  They should be stopped and punished when they turn violent, but they should not be imagined to be  something more powerful than they are. They are mosquitos to swat when appropriate, not wolves at  the door.

The speaker of the house is a shifty weasel. The minority leader is a mendacious ignoramus. The leaders of both parties in the senate are walking caricatures, but that too is far from unusual.  We are considering professional politicians here,  and people should keep that in mind when forming expectations.  It is not clear that  our present bunch of congress people  is much if any worse than the historical average.  

People in the traditional media favor the left and give  those in their audience a  steady flow of false or exaggerated scare stories about Trump and the Republicans, but that is nothing new.  It has been going on since at least  the  Goldwater campaign of 1964, and there is good  reason not to take it all that seriously.  Gloomy conservative  journalists and  talking heads fret over America’s supposed  moral decay and warn of impending doom in the manner of the collapse of the Roman Republic or even the fall of the Roman Empire to scare those in their audience, but  that is nothing new. It has been going on since at least the 1920s, and there is good reason not to take it all that seriously.  

So I hope people can acquire some perspective and relax at least a bit. Frightened and overly agitated people tend to make poor decisions and can be suckers for demagogues.    It is not time to follow fully the example of Alfred E. Newman, but a little of his approach (or better, an informed variation on it)  might  be a good thing just now for some people as a counterweight to Chicken Little’s.