I would have to say that if Barack Obama, during his lamentable presidency, had ever once done something, or promoted a view and a path to attaining it that I agreed with, I would have been initially suspicious. But I would have been fine with moving forward with a process that led to a goal with which I agreed.
Now, I can't say that I can think of one. I disagreed with him on most everything he did, because he was coming from a direction that made me very uncomfortable. He is an unabashed globalist and was opposed to the USA having a leading role in the community of nations, given his evident view that we were not morally capable of leading. He disliked and did not support the military, and believed that higher tax rates raised more revenues, which is simply incorrect.
But I did not "hate" him. I thought him to be grotesquely misguided, politically and economically, professorial and pompous. He was right, darn it, and you were wrong. But he seemed like a good enough fellow, to where we could have had a perfectly civil conversation in certain areas. He was a decent, if completely misguided, human being.
As for his supporters, well, I don't hate them either. I thought that they were fawning toadies, many because they were virtue-signaling that they, too could vote for a half-black man to be president. I thought that eventually evolved into making him an infallible saint, in their minds as well as his, that they could not possibly disagree with him. They lost their power of critical thinking. I pitied them, because they were incapable of thinking independently.
Let us look in the other direction, shall we? Let us look at the opponents of President Trump, not just those in Congress but the loud voices outside. Robert DeNiro. Madonna. Antifa. Democrat leaders like Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff. These people have personalized their opposition. They hate Donald Trump and the policies he stands for. And they hate his supporters as well, including, well, me. We pity them; they hate us.
Let us place all this against the background of this: Conservative policies work; liberal policies do not. The leftist, socialist efforts of Obama and his toadies anesthetized the economy for eight years. Less than two years of President Trump and growth has been restored to the American economy, allies again trust us but know we will no longer give away the farm on trade, adversaries once again fear us -- all different from the preceding eight years.
If you are a leftist, and you are trying to ensure leftists are in power, the one thing you cannot tolerate is proof that you are utterly wrong. And Donald Trump is the living, breathing evidence that the left does not know how to run a country and conservative policies actually work. The left cannot abide that, because, as was the case during the Reagan years, if they let conservatives govern, things get better for the American voter, and the left loses elections.
They hate President Trump, because while he is succeeding, they cannot successfully misrepresent his opinions because he is not a politician; he addresses the populace ten times a day on his Twitter feed and you actually know what he is thinking. He is so much the symbol of what happens when an independent non-politician exposes the corruption of the "deep state", that a different president with the exact same views could not achieve the same results. Follow?
They hate this president's supporters, because we voted for someone who proves them wrong. Hating us, they feel the need to vilify us as well, demeaning us as illiterate hicks without an education (which I find personally amusing, given that, although I do live in the South, I have over 900 reasonably literate essays online, and hold a degree from MIT, and I support President Trump). I don't quite understand how vilifying us is supposed to make us vote for their preferred candidate, but hate does blind one to reality.
It obviously says something about the values of the two sides when those whose ideas actually work take pity on their opponents, while those whose ideas fail profess hate for the leader of the faction that actually achieves productive objectives for the good of the USA -- and all of us who voted for him. Hate would appear to have all that they've got at their disposal.
That, my friends, is precisely why I pity them.
Copyright 2018 by Robert Sutton