‘Basket of deplorables’ could wind up running the country — and SLO County
Editor’s note: This column was edited to remove a misstatement regarding Jordan Cunningham’s position on climate change.
We get what we vote for.
This unforgiving American truism very well could be about to deliver us a basket full of deplorables — jesters masquerading as serious-minded candidates — elected to local, state and national offices, emboldened to wreak havoc for years.
These jokers offer no serious policy positions. They do lust for legitimacy and power.
Unacquainted with the concept of “the public good,” their mission would be attending to their ideological and financial masters’ agenda to loot government of its public purpose and societal benefit at all levels.
This brazen takeover attempt comes in broad daylight — in front of us all with eyes wide open — under the color of making us “great again.”
Their tactics include turning Americans against one another, scapegoating foreigners and the weak, badmouthing our country at home and abroad.
Our friends across the globe worry we’re about to abandon them while discarding our core principles of democracy, decency, fairness and justice. Our enemies — hyenas circling a wounded animal — see opportunity in the madness.
Office-seeking nihilists have denigrated our government and civic institutions — science, academia, the press — so deeply and continuously that hardly anyone trusts them or anything they do. Cracking a history book and foreseeing trouble by studying the past makes us weak, soft, unpatriotic.
Those who challenge their notions as un-American, as against our individual and national interests, are dismissed as losers, wimps and worse — liberals.
The consuming desire for political power and military control by these scoundrels, sociopaths and would-be despots comes with a paradoxical price — the destruction of our nation’s global perch, and with it our social and moral underpinnings. These profiteers want to rule with a wrecking ball and foist the cost on the rest of us.
A rich guy running for president — manifestly unqualified for the job — wants us to elect him despite his serial lying, habitual marital and business cheating, and megalithic misanthropy.
Strength, Donald Trump calls it. Many voters buy it.
A young guy running for our congressional seat, Justin Fareed, wants us to elect him apparently because he was a high school football player. He’s supported by the coal industry and wealthy medical device-makers looking to score favorable federal policies.
“Fresh,” he calls it. Some voters buy it.
Fareed is the prototypical, modern-Manchurian candidate: wholly unqualified, well funded by special interests expecting payback, slick at making hash from raw and/or spoiled ingredients. His embarrassing television commercials seem to convey his belief that running around with a football, airing old high school game clips, substitutes for experience, knowledge, wisdom and policy gravitas.
A guy running for state Assembly, defense lawyer Jordan Cunningham, wants us to elect him apparently based on a law-and-order, lock-up-bad-guys platform.
Conservative, he calls it. We’ll see if voters go for pretense over pragmatism.
Two guys running for the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors — John Peschong in District 1 and Dan Carpenter in District 3 — want us to elect them apparently because they promise to say “no” to everything except unbridled development.
Leadership, they call it. Some voters might buy it.
None of these local candidates has denounced Trump’s race baiting, white supremacy coddling, Muslim and Mexican bashing, birtherism pushing and hate mongering. Their silence says they agree with his rhetoric.
That so many political candidates across the nation do the same says much about their collective soul, none of it good.
None of these candidates appears to be running for the betterment of their communities, state or nation.
Rather, they appear to be running to impose their narrow, trickle-down, let-’em-eat-cake government philosophy on a population too intellectually lazy, disengaged or both to be wary of charlatans selling snake oil in place of enlightened governance.
We can make smart choices or stupid ones. If we elect all this rabble, we’ll own their mess.
Forewarnings about Trump have been recorded for posterity. His election would be a mistake as catastrophically historic as the ascendance of Italy’s National Fascist Party and Germany’s National Socialist Workers Party preceding World War II.
The national and global consequences will be just as dire, if not worse. Anyone who doesn’t see it coming is blindered only by their own hands planted firmly over their own eyes.
It won’t be the fault of “the media.” There’ll be no one to blame for the resultant social and economic carnage but us.
We’ll get what we vote for, and we’ll deserve it.
Liberal columnist Tom Fulks is a former reporter and opinion writer. He has been a political campaign consultant for many local races. His column runs in The Tribune every other Sunday, in rotation with conservative columnist Matthew Hoy.
This story was originally published September 24, 2016 at 5:56 PM with the headline "‘Basket of deplorables’ could wind up running the country — and SLO County."