The bottom line here is straightforward: Neither the courts nor the press are
going to be bullied into submission — and beyond them, neither will tens
of millions of Americans be bullied into submission.
It’s going to be ugly, for sure, but the good guys are going to prevail.
Tuesday’s exit polls tell a remarkable story: It was black voters who carried Doug Jones across the finish line and, as in the case of Donald Trump, it was white evangelicals who made Roy Moore’s candidacy plausible.
Think about that. After more than a year of serial lies and indecencies and corruption, ill-considered chicken with a North Korean madman, multiple attempts to shrink health care in order to give money to the super-wealthy like himself, a looming tax bill that will constitute the greatest wealth transfer in American history, investigations that have developed a strong prima facie case for treason … evangelicals rallied to a theocratic, mean-spirited nutjob child molester even crazier than The Donald.
I am not kidding you, and I am not wrong: The Evangelical Right are a clear and present danger to America — not quite a fifth column, but hostile to modernity itself and resolved to turn the clock back to the days of a Sunnybrook Republic that never actually existed except in picture-books.
And when it really mattered the sane, decent-minded voters of Alabama rallied-up and pushed them back. YAY! for them; we all owe them a real debt of gratitude. If Roy Moore had won, Republican lawmakers would be doubling-down on their whorish submission to the Buffoon-in-Chief and Robert Mueller would probably be cleaning-out his office.
Why is it so often the case that it is minorities, the dispossessed, the outsiders, who do the hard work of holding America to its ideals rather than those who enjoy its fruits? The question, once asked, answers itself: Because they are the ones who have to; the rest — a demographic once comprised almost exclusively of (falsely-)pious whites — are too busy plucking the grapes. That’s the real reason to support generous immigration policies, not slogans like “our strength is our diversity” et ceetera, et cetera. It is immigrants who come here believing in America’s ideals and keep them alive and give them meaning and demand that America live up to them.
The outsiders, whether domestic or daydreaming in some foreign pesthole, are our first and best line of defense against decadence.