Mike James
It’s past midnight, and the mood of the now finished GOP convention still hovers in the room – its derision of Hillary Clinton, its dark portrayal of American life, its glossing of fact, its absence of precise alternatives to the present – and with it the sense, a foreboding, of a turning point in our history.
A political party of business, trade, governmental restraint, of an established order, skeptical of grand promises, now stands cheering its candidate as he attacks all of it while presenting himself – in a phrase not heard at a convention in our recent history – as “the single most qualified person” to make America “great again.” “I alone,” he said, “can fix it.”
Time to sleep on it now, so let Andrew Sullivan, blogging the conventions for New York Mag, sum the message of Trump’s long hour at the podium:
“Everything is terrible. I alone can solve. Just don’t ask me how.”
On the larger threat – beyond a Trump, who is only its political manifestation – I want to read with care this Sullivan muse of a few weeks back about the dangers to democratic life in a time of unrest.
It’s worth asking, “where are we now?”