I’ll put it plainly: If your “belief” in our country is so fragile and pathetic that you will lose “hope for our nation” unless Donald Trump is given free reign to cleanse the land of evildoers, then you don’t actually believe in this nation. If your love of country is contingent on your preferred faction being in power, you’ve confused partisanship for patriotism. Taken seriously, all of this banana republic talk is un-American.
I don’t mean it’s a wrong or flawed argument or simply an argument I don’t like—though it is all those things. I mean it is literally an un-American argument because it fundamentally betrays the whole idea of this country. And I’d say this if the claims were made about any politician. Indeed, I did. When Barack Obama’s boosters claimed he would fix our “broken souls” (in Michelle Obama’s words), I spared no effort in denouncing them. When Joe Biden sermonized about how “unity”—under his banner—was the answer to all our problems, I trotted out all my arguments against the “cult of unity,” which constantly threatens our constitutional system of separated powers and divided government.
If you’re worried about America looking like a banana republic, please don’t tell me that the first president in American history to defecate on the peaceful transfer of power is the antidote to the rot of Third World corruption of our regime. He is the rot.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people?
I don’t mean it’s a wrong or flawed argument or simply an argument I don’t like—though it is all those things. I mean it is literally an un-American argument because it fundamentally betrays the whole idea of this country. And I’d say this if the claims were made about any politician. Indeed, I did. When Barack Obama’s boosters claimed he would fix our “broken souls” (in Michelle Obama’s words), I spared no effort in denouncing them. When Joe Biden sermonized about how “unity”—under his banner—was the answer to all our problems, I trotted out all my arguments against the “cult of unity,” which constantly threatens our constitutional system of separated powers and divided government.
If you’re worried about America looking like a banana republic, please don’t tell me that the first president in American history to defecate on the peaceful transfer of power is the antidote to the rot of Third World corruption of our regime. He is the rot.
Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you people?
Yearning for a Banana Republic
Emboldened by fever dreams of persecution, Republicans want nothing more than to anoint a strong man to punish their enemies.
gfile.thedispatch.com
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