A Bridge to the Third Decade of the 21st Century

Here's a serious question: Trump is going to be gone, one way (impeachment) or another (election, hamberder, resignation). After he's gone, then what? We had toxic politics long before he arrived. You can go back to Nixon (his infamous "Southern strategy " followed by a series of crimes for which he was about to be impeached when he resigned), or Reagan (kicking off his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi for a call for "States' Rights" near the murder site of Goodwin, Cheney, and Schwerner by the Klan), or George H. W. Bush ("Willie Horton," the "Pledge of Allegiance" "card carrying member of the ACLU.") George W. Bush (Karl Rove, the push-poll in South Carolina that asked voters how it affected their vote that John McCain had a black child (he and his wife had adopted a baby from Bangladesh, but voters weren't told that). The godawful 2000 election and the "riot" of Brooks Brothers suited Republican operatives in Miama to shut down the counting. 5-4 Bush v. Gore.

The 1994 New Gingrich GoPAC memo to Republican candidates to call their opponents "traitors," among other things.

The Ken Starr investigation (Monica Lewinski hadn't even been hired as an intern at the White House when that investigation launched).

And then there was Sarah Palin. In 2008. A celebration of know nothingism who called the question by Katie Couric "what do you read to get your news" a "gotcha question (!!!)" A poor man's Joe McCarthy: "I'm glad to be here in "Real America." Talking about Obama "palling around with terrorists." Cause the rest of us aren't "real Americans" in the Republicans' playbook.

So Donald Trump wasn't an aberration. He wasn't a bug. He was a feature. And the party fell into lock step, even those he grossly insulted and who denounced him (Ted Cruz- Trump claimed Cruz's wife was ugly and his father had helped assassinate Kennedy (!); Lindsey Graham). He was a culmination of decades of the Republican Party cultivating ignorance, stupidity, hate, tribalism, spreading lies, confusing truth when the profit margin might suffer (cigarette companies and the killing effects of tobacco carcinogens; energy companies and pollution and global warming, and so on).

So what do we do when Trump is gone? Here's one observation: Donald John Trump has done America a huge service. He's personified every awful thing about modern Republican politics and exaggerated it to the nth degree. And that has energized the good people. The real "silent majority," which isn't so silent anymore. He's energized the participation of women, as voters and candidates and as elected officials, like no one ever had before.

So here we are. On the cusp of the third decade of the 21st century. We don't have jet packs, flying cars, or a colony on the moon. We do have devices in our homes we can talk to that control the environment and our electronics (that's a cool thing).

And as for our politics? First and foremost: we need comprehensive campaign finance reform, getting all private money out of policians pockets and defanging the PAC money used to influence elections without compromising the First Amendment. (I've already written how that can be accomplished. https://buildabettermousetrap.blogspot.com/search?q=toxic

Once we do that, everything else is possible... If we can do two things: eliminate the electoral college (no Constitutional amendment is necessary, just enough States to pass legislation joining the popular vote compact to require their electors to vote for the winner of the popular vote) and get all private money- contributors, lobbbyists, et al.- out of the pockets of elected officials, the modern Republican Party will be dead. A new party will have to arise- one party politics is bad for the country. Competition is good, and you don't have to go back very far (1993-1994) to see what happens when a "do good" party controls all three branches of government yet somehow can't manage to pass any meaningful legislation, including an expansion of Medicare. We can call it the "New Republican Party." Hopefully, they will get the lying liars out of it.