The United States is built on the rule of law. Our system only works if everyone plays by the same rules. When a president decides the rules don’t apply to him and he is immune from accountability, what should patriotic Americans do? Or maybe we should ask, what CAN we do?
The Supreme Court has largely given President Trump and his minions the freedom to do what they want. And even when the Court rules against him, Trump ignores their rulings and does what he wants. What do we do when the executive branch becomes lawless and is no longer accountable to Congress, the courts, and the American people? As MAGA supporters are quickly learning, Trump doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself.
Congress, as long as it is controlled by Republicans will not restrain Trump’s base desire for authoritarian power and money. They want the same.
I weep as I ponder how in the hell we have come to this. Is this the end of this great country of ours? Trump alone is not to blame. He’s the full grown baby that was birthed forty years during the Reagan administration. So cute in 1980, but now this baby has morphed into a full-grown monster who will not rest until his perceived enemies are under the heels of his Nazi jack boots and fascism rules the land.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
I find it contemptible that ten House Democrats voted to censure Rep. Al Green for disrupting Congress.
Democrats had many ways in which they could have protested President Trump’s State of the Union Speech. Outside of Rep. Al Green’s protest, Democrats did little to show/voice their displeasure.
Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been holding rallies from coast to coast, condemning Trump’s decimation of the Federal Government. We need similar rallies everywhere.
Joe Biden blamed Donald Trump for the economy he inherited in 2021, and now Trump is blaming Biden for the current state of the economy. That’s politics. However, a few months from now, after Trump has caused a recession, the blame will be his alone.
Vladimir Putin is obsessed with returning Russia to the glory days of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Countries such as Poland rightly fear being invaded, especially now that the United States is no longer interested in helping and protecting their allies.
I predict Donald Trump will try to remove the United States from NATO.
Whatever one may think about Ukraine, we committed to help defend them from Russia’s immoral, violent assault on their sovereignty. Sadly, President Trump has abandoned the Ukrainian people.
“The Art of Making a Deal,” my ass. President Trump is not a deal maker, he’s a narcissistic bully who seems hellbent on destroying anyone and everyone he disagrees with. We can only hope, that as he rages against his alleged enemies and nuzzles up to dictators and fascists, he doesn’t drag us into a major war.
It’s doubtful the world will do much about global climate change now that the United States has abandoned renewable energy and electric vehicles. “Drill baby Drill” is our official climate policy now.
Americans should be concerned over Trump’s attacks on institutions of higher learning, professors, media companies, and journalists. His goal is to silence anyone who speaks ill of him or challenges his policies. In doing so, he is trampling under foot the constitutional rights of every American.
Bonus: I continue to ponder my political future. If, as I fear, the national Democratic Party is broken beyond repair, is it time for me to leave the party? Or, do I remain a Democrat and focus on local issues, even though there is zero chance of a Democrat beating a Republican in my lifetime? Or, do I act on that increasingly nagging feeling I have; that it is time for me to invest my time, money, and talent in a third party?
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
As President Donald Trump, Co-President Elon Musk, and MAGA Republicans run roughshod over the government, causing chaos, heartache, and harm, there’s little being done in opposition by those who are in positions of power to fight back. Instead, Democratic politicians, corporate CEOs, and others once known for progressive values have abandoned past diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) and other “woke” policies, revealing that they never really were committed to these things. All that matters to these turncoat politicians and executives is remaining in power, improving corporate profits, and increasing shareholder value. Who cares if people of color, working-class people and other marginalized people are hurt in the process. When my partner lost her job last year due to downsizing, I reminded her that, to the company, she was just a line entry on a spread sheet. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that most workers are just a means to an end; that when choosing between profits and what’s best for employees, companies will almost always choose the bottom line.
In the United States, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are organizational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity or disability. These three notions (diversity, equity, and inclusion) together represent “three closely linked values” which organizations seek to institutionalize through DEI frameworks. The concepts predate this terminology and other variations sometimes include terms such as belonging, justice, and accessibility.
I, for the life of me, don’t understand why a politician or corporation wouldn’t, on principle, embrace DEI. Sure, much like you, I find some DEI policies to either be ineffective or nonsensical, but that doesn’t mean the core values represented by the DEI acronym should be done away with.
The same goes for the term “woke.” The MAGA proud-loud-and-stupid-as-a-brick-crowd are against all things “woke” even though most of them couldn’t define the word if their lives depended on it.
Elaine Richardson, a professor of literacy studies at Ohio State University, defines “woke” this way: “In simple terms, it just means being politically conscious and aware, like stay woke.” [The word woke] “comes out of the experience of Black people of knowing that you have to be conscious of the politics of race, class, gender, systemic racism, ways that society is stratified and not equal.”
Again, setting extremes such as “defund the police” aside, it seems, at least to me, that being woke is desirable in a progressive society; and that progress requires an alert, awake citizenry. While I certainly roll my eyes at some of the extremes found within DEI and woke groups, in the main I fully embrace the values expressed by these words. It is doubtful that one can be a humanist, socialist, and progressive without embracing DEI and woke values. I take that back. It is rationally impossible for someone to be a humanist, socialist, and progressive without, in general, embracing DEI and woke values. We can, must, and should argue, debate, and fight about specific DEI/woke positions, but abandoning a century of progress for the rabid libertarianism promoted by Trump and his fellow MAGA followers is not the path forward for the United States. Drunk on Christian nationalism, racism, jingoism, xenophobia, imperialism, militarism, and capitalism, Trump and his merry band of uber-rich libertarians will not rest until they bring on the collapse of federal/state governments and our society as a whole. The goal is to return the United States to a time before government regulations and progressive social programs. All that matters is unrestrained personal freedom for white Christians and record profits for American oligarchs. Once you buy into the lie that the United States is a white capitalistic Christian nation; a nation divinely chosen by the God of the Bible to rule and reign over all the earth (under Jesus, of course, though what Jesus wants and MAGA wants seems to be one and the same). Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics now control key positions within the Trump administration, and with an atheist president pretending to be Christian sitting in the White House, it’s clear that this true-to-life telling of George Orwell’s “1984” will continue unabated for at least the next two years. And here’s the thing: much of what Trump is doing is perfectly legal, the spoils of winning the 2024 presidential election. Democrats can scream all they want, but Trump won the election fair and square. We must now face the consequences of a woefully uneducated populous electing a man who is a pathological liar; a man who doesn’t care one bit about their lives; a contemptuous man who only cares about power and wealth. I can’t think of one thing Trump has done since 2015 that reflects compassion for others.
Trump’s recent comments about the Palestinian people reveals the kind of man he really is. Trump only sees a business opportunity, one that will make him look good at the expense of millions of Palestinian men, women, and children. In some ways, Trump is no different from other American presidents; men who used violence and bloodshed to advance personal and political agendas. Trump wants to use bulldozers to turn Gaza into a canvas upon which he and his fellow billionaires can paint a beautiful picture of real estate development — the Riviera of the Middle East. No thought is given to the Palestinian people; the poor, marginalized, and disadvantaged; people who have lost everything because of Israel’s genocidal war against them.
Here’s what Trump had to say at a White House news conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as reported in Al Jazeera::
Today I’m delighted to welcome Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu back to the White House. It’s a wonderful feeling and a wonderful event. We had fantastic talks, and thank you very much, with your staff.
I want to say it’s an honour to have you with us. Over the past four years, the US and the Israeli alliance has been tested more than any time in history, but the bonds of friendship and affection between the American and Israeli people have endured for generations and they are absolutely unbreakable.
I’m confident that, under our leadership, the cherished alliance between our two countries will soon be stronger than ever. We had a great relationship. We had great victories together four years ago, not so many victories over the past four years, however. In my first term, prime minister and I forged a tremendously successful partnership that brought peace and stability to the Middle East like it hadn’t seen in decades.
Together, we defeated ISIS [ISIL], we ended the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, one of the worst deals ever made, and imposed the toughest ever sanctions on the Iranian regime. We starved Hamas and Iran’s other terrorist proxies, and we starved them like they had never seen before, resources and support disappeared for them.
I recognised Israel’s capital, opened the American embassy in Jerusalem and got it built. We got it built. It’s beautiful, all Jerusalem stone right from nearby and it was – it’s something that’s very special.
And recognised Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, something that they talked about for 70 years and they weren’t able to get it. And I got it. And with the historic Abraham Accords, something that was really an achievement that was, I think, going to become more and more important because we achieved the most significant Middle East peace agreements in half a century.
And I really believe that many countries will soon be joining this amazing peace and economic development transaction. It really is a big economic development transaction. I think we’re going to have a lot of people signing up very quickly. Unfortunately, for four years, nobody signed up. Nobody did anything for four years except in the negative.
Unfortunately, the weakness and incompetence of those past four years, the grave damage around the globe that was done, including in the Middle East, grave damage all over the globe. The horrors of October 7th would never have happened if I were president, the Ukraine and Russia disaster would never have happened if I were president.
Over the past 16 months, Israel has endured a sustained aggressive and murderous assault on every front, but they fought back bravely. You see that and you know that. What we have witnessed is an all-out attack on the very existence of a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland. The Israelis have stood strong and united in the face of an enemy that has kidnapped, tortured, raped and slaughtered innocent men, women, children and even little babies.
I want to salute the Israeli people for meeting this trial with courage and determination and unflinching resolve. They have been strong. In our meetings today, the prime minister and I focused on the future, discussing how we can work together to ensure Hamas is eliminated and ultimately restore peace to a very troubled region.
It’s been troubled, but what has happened in the last four years has not been good.
I also strongly believe that the Gaza Strip, which has been a symbol of death and destruction for so many decades and so bad for the people anywhere near it, and especially those who live there and frankly who’s been really very unlucky. It’s been very unlucky. It’s been an unlucky place for a long time.
Being in its presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck.
This can be paid for by neighbouring countries of great wealth. It could be one, two, three, four, five, seven, eight, 12. It could be numerous sites, or it could be one large site. But the people will be able to live in comfort and peace and we’ll make sure something really spectacular is done.
They’re going to have peace. They’re not going to be shot at and killed and destroyed like this civilisation of wonderful people has had to endure. The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It’s right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.
They’re living under fallen concrete that’s very dangerous and very precarious. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again.
The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too. We’ll own it and be responsible for dismantling all of the dangerous unexploded bombs and other weapons on the site, level the site and get rid of the destroyed buildings, level it out. Create an economic development that will supply unlimited numbers of jobs and housing for the people of the area … do a real job, do something different.
Just can’t go back. If you go back, it’s going to end up the same way it has for 100 years. I’m hopeful that this ceasefire could be the beginning of a larger and more enduring peace that will end the bloodshed and killing once and for all. With the same goal in mind, my administration has been moving quickly to restore trust in the alliance and rebuild American strength throughout the region and we’ve really done that.
I ended the last administration’s de facto arms embargo on over $1bn, in military assistance for Israel. And I’m also pleased to announce that this afternoon, the United States withdrew from the anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Council and ended all of the support for the UN Relief and Works Agency, which funnelled money to Hamas, and which was very disloyal to humanity.
Trump’s bulldozer approach to Gaza is a common tactic used by the United States. Remember when the first Europeans landed on the shores of what is now the eastern United States? Who met them there? Indigenous people. This was their land; their home. Did we respect their geographical boundaries and property rights? Of course not, silly boy. We are a nation divinely chosen by God; a brightly lit city on a hill. We used proverbial bulldozers and destroyed countless indigenous cultures and communities. From sea to shining sea, our forefathers claimed land for their own that belonged to others, killing anyone who got in their way. Learning nothing over the past 400 years, the United States continues to use threats of economic strangulation, violence, and death to force countries to do what they want them to do. Trump has been in office all of three weeks, yet he has already threatened to invade Panama, turn Canada into an American state, appropriate Greenland, and attack Mexican drug cartels. From tariffs to military threats, Trump intends to get his way even if it means destroying our economy and killing scores of people.
Elections have consequences. What do we do now? We either fight back or give up. We are quickly learning that many corporations who promoted DEI values only did so because it made them look good or benefitted their bottom line. Now that Trump is in office, many companies are doing away with their DEI programs, embracing Trump’s racist bigotry. Gone are courage and conviction. Where are CEOs and political leaders willing to stand up to Trump, even if it costs them financially or politically? Is no one willing to stand up to Trump and the MAGA horde? Have we given up, convincing ourselves that there’s no hope? And maybe there’s not. Maybe Trump 2024 is the gasping breath of a dying republic. Does this mean we give up? I know I can’t, even though I have been quite depressed over the past three weeks, and I suspect Trump still has a lot more harm he intends to inflict on the American people. Do we just give in? If we can’t beat them, join them?
To my progressive readers, what do we do going forward? Is our political system broken beyond repair? Voting doesn’t seem to matter much these days. We routinely elect people who say all the right things when running for office, but once elected these very same people develop amnesia, serving not their constituents, but corporate overlords. I used to disparage people who didn’t vote, but I’m beginning to understand why they don’t. Vote, don’t vote, money buys elections. Rare is the politician who has courage and conviction. This past election, I watched both Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown and Representative Marcy Kaptur morph into quasi-Republican-sounding politicians hoping to win Republicans to their side. I found their mealy-mouth cowardice disgusting. Better to lose standing courageously on your convictions, than lying just to get elected.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Democrats continue to offer postmortems for their recent election loss to Donald Trump. As I drove Polly to her physical therapy appointment today, I listened to a podcast about a recent New York Times op-ed featuring notable religious Democrats discussing the importance of making the Party more hospitable to people of faith. These Democrats, all of whom are Christians or Jewish, want the Party to become more God-friendly. The Times did not interview Democrats of secular, atheist, agnostic, pagan, Buddhist, Muslim, or other religious persuasions. This, once again, reveals a persistent bias found in the media towards religions other than Judeo-Christian sects. Worse, the media almost always fails to distinguish between the thousands of Christian sects and their wildly varied beliefs. When the media deliberately chooses only to interview sources from certain religious sects, it paints a false, distorted picture of religion’s influence and effect on the political process in general, and specifically the Democratic Party.
Some religious Democrats look at how God-centric the Republican Party is and want their Party to be the same, minus Christian Nationalism and Fundamentalism. Should the Democratic Party become more friendly towards people of faith? Should the Party speak more about God and the importance of faith?
The short answer is no. The Democratic Party has generally been neutral towards religion, stressing the value of religious pluralism. Religious and non-religious people alike are welcome in the Party. Unlike the Republican Party with its demands of fealty to the Christian deity, Democrats have promoted the importance of the establishment clause and the separation of church and state. Now, it seems, some Democrats want a more religion-friendly Party. This, of course, is a bad idea, especially since the United States is becoming more secular and less religious. Church attendance is in free fall, and people who are indifferent towards organized religion or are non-religious are a growing demographic.
Instead of becoming more Judeo-Christian (a made-up term, by the way) friendly, the Democratic Party needs, instead, to stress and advertise its big tent approach to people of all faiths, including people without faith in a deity. Democrats should talk about religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and how much taxpayer money goes toward supporting churches, clerics, religious colleges, parochial schools, school vouchers, and homeschoolers, to name a few recipients of billions of dollars of tax money. Americans need to know how much of their hard-earned money is being used to prop up religious institutions.
The Democratic Party should be a place for everyone, religious or not. That said, we should not listen to voices clamoring to be more like the Christian God-obsessed Republicans. God is not the solution for any of the problems the United States currently faces, or will face in the future. As we are fixing to find out with President Donald Trump and his administration’s theocratic agenda, more God will only bring chaos, violence, persecution, and death.
Democrats risk alienating secular and non-religious Party members if they become more like the Republican Party. I, for one, will leave the Party if it does so. By all means, the Democratic Party should be the party of inclusion and pluralism. However, this should not come at the expense of secular and non-religious Democrats, people the Party cannot afford to lose. The Democrats have a short amount of time to figure their shit out before it’s time to give Trump and MAGA a devastating mid-term defeat. If Democrats lose secular, non-Christian voters, their fate is sealed. Losing Muslim voters during the 2024 election materially hurt the Party. It remains to be seen if these voters will return. Democrats need to return to being a big-tent party, and not more like the Republicans. I’m sure God, whomever he/she/it is, will understand.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 record two different creation accounts. They cannot be reconciled without resorting to Bible gymnastics. Evangelicals, of course, love gymnastics.
Donald Trump is threatening to seize the Panama Canal unless Panama reduces the fees charged to go through the canal. I thought Trump was a capitalist.
Donald Trump, once again, is demanding Denmark sell Greenland to the United States. Evidently, he doesn’t understand the concept of sovereignty. This is understandable since the founding of our nation was built upon ignoring the sovereignty of indigenous people.
I am troubled by how many atheists think it is okay to commit murder, as in the case of Luigi Mangione’s murder of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Is anyone surprised that Matt Gatez had sex with an underage girl, hired prostitutes, and used illegal drugs? I’m not. What surprises me is that Gaetz is married and his wife hasn’t divorced him.
Donald Trump plans to go after transgender people, banning access to gender-affirming care, not permitting them to serve in the military, and forbidding transgender women from playing women’s sports. These issues deserve a vigorous science-based debate, but that’s not Trump’s approach. He thinks he is a king, and citizens must bow to his edicts.
I predict Donald Trump and his current co-president Elon Musk will have a falling out. Musk is a publicity whore, and if there’s anything we know about Trump, he will quickly push Musk out of the limelight. In MAGA World, only Trump can be in the limelight.
It’s high school basketball time in Ohio, my favorite time of year. I miss photographing local high school games. I had to retire from doing so due to being unable to hold my camera properly. The weight of my professional camera and lenses put a strain on my neck and back, causing me increased pain. One thing I don’t need is more pain.
I feel bad for our feral/stray cats. Temperature lows are now in the teens. We have four inside cats — all stray/shelter cats — and that’s our limit. So we do what we can. We feed and water them. I also bought three oversized storage tubs, cut holes in their sides, and put straw in them, hoping they shelter the cats from the worst of winter. So far, five cats have been using the shelters.
The Democratic Party is headed for a nasty split as centrist, corporate Democrats continue to disparage and marginalize progressives. Nancy Pelosi and her gang of corporate shills need to go.
Bonus: MAGA Republicans in Congress have made it clear that they plan to reign in “entitlements,” including Social Security and Medicare. Instead of raising taxes, they plan to cut benefits by raising the retirement age. The suggestion that the Social Security Fund is insolvent is a bald-faced lie. How about demanding Congress pay back the trillions of dollars it has borrowed from the fund?
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Come January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the forty-seventh president of the United States. A grossly unfit, vulgar man, Trump won both the popular vote and the electoral college. Worse, Republicans took back the U.S. Senate and will likely continue to narrowly control the House of Representatives. With full knowledge of Trump’s racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, and criminal conduct, a majority of voting Americans voted him into office. Rational, thoughtful people saw Trump as unfit for office, but tens of millions of rural white working-class people and Latinos thought differently. Even women, knowing Trump is a sexual predator who routinely and frequently dehumanizes women, voted for him. We want to blame white Evangelicals for blessing the United States with a second term of Trump’s lunacy, but the fact is, Trump won virtually every demographic category that matters.
Kamala Harris had a hard road to walk in her attempt to defeat Donald Trump:
Harris, largely an unknown candidate, had 100 days to mount an effective campaign. Trump has spent the past nine years, from the trip down the escalator to today, campaigning and promoting the MAGA/Trump brand.
Harris refused to distance herself from Joe Biden, saying that there wasn’t anything she would do differently from President Joe Biden. Hooking her wagon to a President with a 40 percent approval rating was a bad idea.
Harris is a woman. Some men won’t vote for a female candidate regardless of her party and policies.
Harris is Black. Many Americans won’t vote for a Black candidate regardless of his or her party and policies.
Both Harris and Tim Walz failed to adequately address the skeletons in their respective closets.
Harris made several mistakes that cost her votes.
First, Harris chose to ignore and distance herself from Israel’s war against the Palestinian people. Not allowing pro-Palestinians to speak at the Democratic Convention was a big mistake. Not supporting an Israeli arms embargo was a bad idea.
Second, Harris flip-flopped on numerous policies, abandoning the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and attempting to position herself as a centrist (as Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton before her).
Third, Biden, Harris, and the Democratic Party as a whole, ignored the economic plight of working-class Americans, telling them that their struggles with inflation and never-ending price increases were not a big deal; and that the U.S. economy was booming. Democratic politicians and cable news pundits — especially on MSNBC — ignored the plight of the poor and working-class people, choosing instead to tout and preach up Bidenomics.
Fourth, Americans are tired of endless wars. The United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan was, by any measure, a debacle. Harris uttered not a word about the American war machine, the military-industrial complex, and runaway defense/security budgets. My God, Harris climbed in bed with Dick Cheney — a war criminal.
Fifth, Harris provided no comprehensive answer to the illegal immigration crisis at our southern border. Trump is right to point out we have an immigration problem even if his “answers” are racist and immoral.
I do not doubt that Trump will cause untold harm to our Republic and standing in the world. With Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as trusted advisors, it is likely the American people have hard times ahead. How Democrats respond remains to be seen. Personally, I am unsure of my continued support of the Democrats. I need time and distance before I decide who I want to support with my vote and money. As of today, I wonder if I should refocus my efforts on local/state issues. It’s been three presidential elections since the Democratic candidate for president was someone I voted for in the primary. Clinton, Biden, and Harris were not my first, second, or third candidates. I increasingly think that I have become too progressive/liberal for the Democratic Party.
In the end, the election was about despair. Despair over futures that evaporated with deindustrialization. Despair over the loss of 30 million jobs in mass layoffs. Despair over austerity programs and the funneling of wealth upwards into the hands of rapacious oligarchs. Despair over a liberal class that refuses to acknowledge the suffering it orchestrated under neoliberalism or embrace New Deal type programs that will ameliorate this suffering. Despair over the futile, endless wars, as well as the genocide in Gaza, where generals and politicians are never held accountable. Despair over a democratic system that has been seized by corporate and oligarchic power.
This despair has been played out on the bodies of the disenfranchised through opioid and alcoholism addictions, gambling, mass shootings, suicides — especially among middle-aged white males — morbid obesity, and the investment of our emotional and intellectual life in tawdry spectacles and the allure of magical thinking, from the absurd promises of the Christian right to the Oprah-like belief that reality is never an impediment to our desires. These are the pathologies of a deeply diseased culture, what Friedrich Nietzsche calls an aggressive despiritualized nihilism.
Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay. He expresses a childish yearning to be an omnipotent god. This yearning resonates with Americans who feel they have been treated like human refuse. But the impossibility of being a god, as Ernest Becker writes, leads to its dark alternative — destroying like a god. This self-immolation is what comes next.
Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, along with the establishment wing of the Republican Party, which allied itself with Harris, live in their own non-reality-based belief system. Harris, who was anointed by party elites and never received a single primary vote, proudly trumped her endorsement by Dick Cheney, a politician who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic, and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base – 77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.
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The American dream has become an American nightmare.
The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care, and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness, and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger, and a sense of worthlessness.
“When life is not worth living, everything becomes a pretext for ridding ourselves of it … ,” Émile Durkheim wrote. “There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness. … For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs.”
Decayed societies, where a population is stripped of political, social, and economic power, instinctively reach out for cult leaders. I watched this during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. The cult leader promises a return to a mythical golden age and vows, as Trump does, to crush the forces embodied in demonized groups and individuals that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous cult leaders become, the more cult leaders flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders seek total power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the desperate hope that the cult leaders will save them.
All cults are personality cults. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment, and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
We will not convince those who have surrendered their agency to a cult leader and embraced magical thinking through rational argument. We will not coerce them into submission. We will not find salvation for them or ourselves by supporting the Democratic Party. Whole segments of American society are now bent on self-immolation. They despise this world and what it has done to them. Their personal and political behavior is willfully suicidal. They seek to destroy, even if destruction leads to violence and death. They are no longer sustained by the comforting illusion of human progress, losing the only antidote to nihilism.
….
We must invest our energy into organizing mass movements to overthrow the corporate state through sustained acts of mass civil disobedience. This includes the most powerful weapon we possess – the strike. By turning our ire on the corporate state, we name the true sources of power and abuse. We expose the absurdity of blaming our demise on demonized groups such as undocumented workers, Muslims, or Blacks. We give people an alternative to a corporate-indentured Democratic Party that cannot be rehabilitated. We make possible the restoration of an open society, one that serves the common good rather than corporate profit. We must demand nothing less than full employment, guaranteed minimum incomes, universal health insurance, free education at all levels, robust protection of the natural world, and an end to militarism and imperialism. We must create the possibility for a life of dignity, purpose, and self-esteem. If we do not, it will ensure a Christianized fascism and ultimately, with the accelerating ecocide, our obliteration.
As you might surmise, I will have a lot more to say on these issues in the days/months/years that lie ahead. Today, I am depressed, filled with despair and anger towards millions of stupid Americans. In time, I will reorientate myself to the present reality. I am not ready to quit fighting, though I do plan to rethink my methodologies and support of the Democratic Party.
It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.
Today, while the very rich are doing phenomenally well, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and we have more income and wealth inequality than ever before. Unbelievably, real, inflation-accounted-for weekly wages for the average American worker are actually lower now than they were 50 years ago.
Today, despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents. And many of them worry that Artificial Intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.
Today, despite spending far more per capita than other countries, we remain the only wealthy nation not to guarantee health care to all as a human right and we pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs. We, alone among major countries, cannot even guarantee paid family and medical leave.
Today, despite strong opposition from a majority of Americans, we continue to spend billions funding the extremist Netanyahu government’s all out war against the Palestinian people which has led to the horrific humanitarian disaster of mass malnutrition and the starvation of thousands of children.
Will the big money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.
In the coming weeks and months those of us concerned about grassroots democracy and economic justice need to have some very serious political discussions.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Welcome neighbors! You have likely come to this site because you saw the website address for my blog on a Trump 2025 sign I recently put in my front yard. Thank you for taking the time to check me out.
I am a registered Democrat, one of nineteen in the Village of Ney. I am also a party official, representing Ney. If you have any questions about Federal or State Democratic policies, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me and I will try to answer your concerns. You may also text me at 567-210-1145.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump has made all sorts of unfounded claims about race, immigration, the border, legal immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, abortion, and transgender healthcare. I would love the opportunity to talk with you about these issues or any other issue you feel Democrats are wrong about. Contact me via email and I will gladly respond to your questions. Maybe, if you are up to it, we could go to one of Ney’s two restaurants and share a meal, coffee, or beer — on me.
As neighbors, we both want a better tomorrow for our children and grandchildren. Surely, we can find common ground by which to achieve this goal. I am not your enemy. I am the man sitting next to you at Fairview High School sporting events, eating at the same restaurants you do, and frequenting the same local stores as your family.
Thank you for visiting my website.
Be well.
Bruce Gerencser
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
Supposedly, Democrats are (generally) people of science and reason. Conspiracy theories and cultism are largely the domain of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. That is, until a man tried to assassinate ex-president Donald Trump. I am shocked by how many of my fellow liberals and progressives have turned into conspiracy theorists. They think that the attempted assassination of Trump was a false flag; a staged event. In their minds, the whole event was political theater orchestrated by the Hollywood actor Donald Trump.
Imagine, for a moment, how many people would have to be involved in the attempted assassination for it to be a staged event. Right up there with fake moon landings and a flat earth. Do you realize how absurd such thinking is?
Please stop. There’s enough crazy in the world without adding to it.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
The Republican Party is pretty much a monoculture, with little, if any diversity, among its members. Thanks to the influence of fascist, criminally-indicted former president Donald Trump, MAGA (Make America Great Again) policies dominate and control the Republican Party. I suspect there are more than a few Republican politicians who personally despise Trump and the MAGA wing of the Party, but they know that without Trump’s and MAGA’s support, they can’t win. These spineless Republicans know that just one social media post from Trump can sink their election/reelection chances. So they say nothing when Trump espouses policies that are not only hateful, racist, and anti-democratic, they pretend the man is not a narcissist and pathological liar. (All politicians lie, but Trump lies multiple times every day, eight days a week.)
There was a time when the Democratic Party was considered a big-tent political group, but some within the Party are now demanding loyalty to President Joe Biden and any and every policy deemed “Democratic.” Granted, the Democrats don’t have people such as Marjorie “Moscow” Taylor-Green, Matt “Child Molester” Gaetz, Tom Cotton, Ted “Cancun” Cruz, Paul “Nazi” Gosar, Lauren “Hand Job” Boebert, and Josh “The Cowardly Lion” Hawley demanding fealty under pains of political execution, there are those within the Democratic Party who marginalize and denigrate those who dare hold positions contrary to those of the Biden Administration. Democrats such as John Fetterman, Jon Tester, Joe Manchin, Bernie Sanders, and The Squad (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Tlaib, Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Greg Casar, Summer Lee, and Delia Ramirez) face increasing pressure from mainstream and centrist Democrats to toe the party line. For example, I oppose John Fetterman’s pro-Israel view, but I reject the notion that Fetterman is not a “real” Democrat.
Joe Biden needs the various factions within the Democratic Party to vote for him if he hopes to win the 2024 presidential election. Disparaging and marginalizing pro-Palestinian, anti-war, socialist, or pro-environment Democrats is a sure way to drive these voters to the open arms of the campaigns of Robert Kennedy, Jr., Cornel West, and Jill Stein (or could lead to protest votes for Marianne Williamson). Young voters, in particular, are more likely to be anti-war, pro-environment, and have socialist tendencies. Pretending these people don’t exist will only ensure that Biden goes down to defeat in November. Young voters may not have much real-world experience, but they know hypocrisy when they see it. They “hear” the pathetic challenges from Biden and his feckless cabinet to Israel’s genocidal slaughter of over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, while, at the same time, seeing the President and Democrats in Congress give Israel $18 billion to continue its immoral war. These young folks make, as they should, a direct connection between U.S.-funded and supplied bombs, bullets, drones, and missiles and daily reports of bloodshed, violence, and death in Gaza. They see the mutilated bodies of Palestinian children and know that the United States is directly responsible for their deaths.
I am a member of the local Democratic Party’s executive committee. I was elected to this position in March. I made it clear to Party leaders that while I am a proud Democrat, I have policy positions that run contrary to that of the Defiance County and State Democratic Party. I made sure they understood that I was an atheist; a humanist; a pacifist; and a socialist. They knew or should have known, anyway, that I am an outspoken writer who uses this blog and letters to the editor of the local newspaper to advance my cause. I will gladly support the Democratic Party at every level, but I will not silence my voice just to give the Party the appearance of MAGA-like unity. I grew up in a home with a mother who spoke her mind on political issues; and who was unafraid to voice her opinion in public forums. I continue to follow in her footsteps — thirty plus years after her suicide — albeit from the other side of the political aisle.
The Democratic Party has my support, but it does not have my loyalty. I refuse to say the Pledge of Allegiance because it is a loyalty pledge. I am grateful to be an American. I can’t imagine living in any other place than in the good ole USA. That said, I reject demands of political conformity and fealty. Nations and governments come and go. My objective is to work towards making the United States a better place to live. Most of all, I want my six children and sixteen grandchildren to have promising, prosperous, happy futures. When Democratic (or Republican) policies meet my desires and expectations, they can count on my support. When they don’t, the Democratic Party can expect to hear from me. Demands for Party loyalty will be rejected. If the Party’s tent is not big enough for someone like me, that’s their loss, not mine. I will do all I can to promote and advance Democratic policies and candidates, but what I will not do is abandon my political beliefs just so the Party can present to the public a facade of unity. Political debate and diversity are important for the health of the Democratic Party. The moment I’m told to be quiet or tone down my opinions or rhetoric is when I (and scores of other like-minded people) exit the tent.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
There’s been a lot of talk on mainstream news and social media about “white rural rage.” Supposedly, rural communities are hotbeds of racism, misogyny, violence, and rage. Supposedly, rural communities are awful places to live, populated with ill-bred, uneducated, knuckle-dragging Neanderthals. Rural people are hopeless and helpless, with wrong ideas about the world.
As I read these caricatures of me and my neighbors, I wonder if the people making them have actually talked to rural people? When I hear Chris Hayes and other talking heads on MSNBC say that my people don’t understand economics; that the economy is booming; that the macroeconomic numbers say that life is grand for rural folks, I want to scream. Again, I ask Hayes and his fellow liberals, “Have you actually talked to people you think are too dumb or too influenced by Trump to really understand what is going on?” I doubt it.
I will soon turn sixty-seven years old. I was born in the rural northwest Ohio community of Bryan. I have spent most of my life living in rural communities throughout northwest and southeast Ohio. I am 100 percent country — proudly so. There was a time when rural Ohio was decidedly blue. Democrats routinely won state and local elections. Those days are long gone, and have been years before the fascist Donald Trump arrived on the scene. So what’s changed?
There was a time when well-paying union jobs were common. Those days are gone. Scores of factories have closed their doors. Factories that once had thousands of employees, now have hundreds. Who is to blame for this? Not the workers. The blame rests solely at the feet of federal and state officials. International trade agreements signed first by Bill Clinton and continued by every president since then, have destroyed rural economies.
There was a time when rural downtowns were booming. Those days are gone, and have been since the late 1980s. Who is to blame? State and local politicians, who sold their souls to big box corporations and restaurant franchisees. Politicians handed out billions of dollars of tax abatements and free infrastructure improvements to these predatory corporations, all the while letting their downtowns and small businesses die.
There was a time when small family farms dotted the rural landscape. Those days are gone. Corporate farming and concentrated animal feeding operations (factory farms) dominate the scene, often polluting the air and fouling waterways. Who is to blame? Capitalistic-driven politicians who think “bigger is better.” Now farmers are forced to get bigger to survive, turning a blind eye to animal welfare and the destruction of soil.
There was a time when rural high school graduates went to college and returned to work in their home communities after graduation. Those days are gone. Now our children leave and don’t return. Why? A lack of well-paying jobs. My oldest son is an upper-level manager at a large local manufacturing concern. He has numerous employees with four-year degrees running machines for him. They left, got an education, and triumphantly returned home, thinking well-paying jobs awaited them. Instead, they make $15-20 an hour while trying to pay off $50,000-$100,000 or more in student loan debt. Their school guidance counselors sold them a bill of goods. Education is the door to prosperity, they were told, only to learn that their counselors, teachers, and parents lied to them.
How people often view country folk
Every aspect of rural life has changed. Wages are stagnant or in decline, but prices, across the board continue to increase — especially healthcare. Our only saving grace is that housing, food, and transportation costs are generally lower than in cities or urban areas. But even here, housing prices are increasing, making it harder for people to find affordable apartments and homes. Corporate healthcare companies have scooped up local hospitals and medical practices, driving up prices and making it harder for residents to get care. Poor people, in particular, face long wait times to get appointments with doctors who take Medicaid — if they can even find one. Need a dentist? Good luck with that. Not one dentist locally accepts Medicaid, forcing poor people to go to Toledo or Fort Wayne for care, often waiting months to see a dentist.
Rural people share some of the blame for what has happened to them. Slash and burn Republicans have repeatedly cut taxes, destroying local tax bases, yet rural residents continue to vote them into office. It infuriates me that so many of my neighbors vote against their own self-interest. Why don’t they vote for Democrats? Would you vote for people who routinely disparage you, talk down to you, and call you names? Democrats have lost all touch with rural America, and in doing so, ceded the rural communities, counties, and states to right-wing extremists.
Rural people are largely religious — Christian. Most of them don’t attend church on any given Sunday, but when asked they will affirm their love for God and the Bible. The current culture wars loom large in rural communities, and this helps fuel discontent (though not to the degree that MSNBC would have you believe). Instead of engaging rural folks on these issues, what do Democrats do? They largely ignore them or call them names.
Most of the blame for what has befallen rural Americans rests on the shoulders of local, state, and federal politicians. Laws and policies routinely cause harm, as money for school and infrastructure improvements dries up. If rural people feel forgotten, it is because they have been.
If Democrats ever hope to effect change in rural America, then they must come to where we live and talk to us. Senator Sherrod Brown is running for reelection. Great guy. I will vote for him in November. Yet, at a community meeting in support of Brown’s election on Friday, Sherrod will not be in attendance. Instead, his brother will speak on his behalf. That doesn’t cut it. I want to see the guy who wants my vote. Of course, Brown knows that he will likely only get 30-40 percent of the local vote. Why bother, right? If Democratic politicians don’t “bother,” they are, in effect, giving up, consigning us to more Republican rule. This is the kind of thinking, by the way, that lost Hillary Clinton the 2016 presidential election.
The reasons for the decline of rural America are complex and many. However, telling us that we are racist, misogynistic violent, rage-filled county hicks is not helpful, and it only fuels the disdain rural folks have for liberals, progressives, and city folks. It is doubtful that rural northwest Ohio will turn blue any time soon, but inroads can be made through honest interaction, debate, and discussion. At the very least, opposing sides will understand where the other is coming from.
Let me conclude this post with a letter to the editor written in 2017 by essayist and agrarian Wendell Berry (my favorite author):
To the Editors:
Since the 2016 election, urban liberals and Democrats have newly discovered “rural America,” which is to say our country itself beyond the cities and the suburbs and a few scenic vacation spots. To its new discoverers, this is an unknown land inhabited by “white blue-collar workers” whom the discoverers fear but know nothing about. And so they are turning to experts, who actually have visited rural America or who previously have heard of it, to lift the mystery from it.
One such expert is Nathaniel Rich, whose essay “Joan Didion in the Deep South” offers an explanation surpassingly simple: over “the last four decades,” while the enlightened citizens of “American cities with international airports” have thought things were getting better, the “southern frame of mind” has been “expanding across the Mason-Dixon line into the rest of rural America.” As Mr. Rich trusts his readers to agree, the “southern frame of mind” is racist, sexist, and nostalgic for the time when “the men concentrated on hunting and fishing and the women on ‘their cooking, their canning, their ‘prettifying.’…”
This is provincial, uninformed, and irresponsible. Mr. Rich, who disdains all prejudices except those that are proper and just, supplies no experience or observation of his own and no factual and statistical proofs. He rests his judgment solely upon the testimony of Joan Didion in her notes from a tour of “the Gulf South for a month in the summer of 1970.” Those notes contain portraits of southerners whom “readers today will recognize, with some dismay and even horror” because (as Mr. Rich seems vaguely to mean) southerners have not changed at all since 1970. The Didion testimony alone is entirely sufficient because she “saw her era more clearly than anyone else” and therefore “she was able to see the future.”
What is remarkable about Mr. Rich’s essay is that he attributes the southernization of rural America, and the consequent election of Mr. Trump, entirely to nostalgia “for a more orderly past,” without so much as a glance at the economic history of our actual country. The liberals and Democrats of our enlightened cities, as Mr. Rich rightly says, have paid little or no attention to rural America “for more than half a century.” But it has received plenty of attention from the conservatives and Republicans and their client corporations. Rural America is a colony, and its economy is a colonial economy.
The business of America has been largely and without apology the plundering of rural America, from which everything of value — minerals, timber, farm animals, farm crops, and “labor” — has been taken at the lowest possible price. As apparently none of the enlightened ones has seen in flying over or bypassing on the interstate highways, its too-large fields are toxic and eroding, its streams and rivers poisoned, its forests mangled, its towns dying or dead along with their locally owned small businesses, its children leaving after high school and not coming back. Too many of the children are not working at anything, too many are transfixed by the various screens, too many are on drugs, too many are dying.
In a New York Times Op-Ed, A. Hope Jahren writes: “Farm policy hasn’t come up even once during a presidential debate for the past 16 years.” But the problem goes back much farther than that. It goes back at least to Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture, Ezra Taft Benson, who instructed American farmers to “get big or get out.” In effect that set the “farm policy” until now, and thus sealed the fate of the decent, small, independent livelihoods of rural America. To that brutally stated economic determinism I know that President Clinton gave his assent, calling it “inevitable,” and so apparently did Mrs. Clinton. The rural small owners sentenced to dispensability in the 1950s are the grandparents of the “blue-collar workers” of rural America who now feel themselves to be under the same sentence, and with reason.
It is true that racism, sexism, and nostalgia have counted significantly in the history of rural America until this moment. But to attribute the approximate victory of Mr. Trump only to those “southern” faults, and to locate them only in rural America, is a driblet of self-righteous ignorance.
Wendell Berry Port Royal, Kentucky
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
