Forget “Make America Great Again.” Forget “Keep America Great.” Let’s Just “Keep America Sane.”

Why Trump Is the Only Thing Standing Between Us and Total Barbarism

by Alexander Zubatov

I keep having to remind myself that I’m not a conservative. In the current political environment, however, it keeps on getting harder.

I support many ideas that aren’t traditionally conservative:

I’m pro universal healthcare.

I’m against allowing private insurance companies to realize massive profits while driving our healthcare costs through the roof.

I’m against the privatization of schools.

I’m against privately run for-profit prisons.

I’m in favor of better gun control.

I’m against American intervention in the internal affairs (or regional conflicts) of sovereign foreign states.

I believe we really need to do something about growing income inequality, corporate cronyism and corporations that subvert democracy and find ways of co-opting and corrupting regulators so that we get poison floating in our air, food and water.

I’m pro-choice (though I don’t mind if states where a majority isn’t pro choice have a different policy, since I don’t think I should be allowed to dictate my preferences to states where a democratic majority feels differently any more than I feel like I should be able to dictate my preferences to the people of Saudi Arabia).

I thought at the time and still think that the overconfident, know-nothing cowboy president, George W. Bush — with his disastrous and entirely unnecessary Iraq War that created ISIS and his coziness with all the big Wall St. bozos financializing and monopolizing away our economy, leading to the 2007–08 financial crisis — was the worst president in my lifetime.

I was one of those guys who’d supported Barack Obama against the neocon war monger John McCain when Obama first ran in 2008. My support very promptly evaporated after Obama, as soon as he took office, betrayed all his high-flown progressive rhetoric and started bailing out the same greedy bankers and financial industry parasites who had caused the financial crisis in the first place. Clearly, he’d been bought by his big donors, the same people Bernie routinely calls the “billionaire class.”

But Obama’s betrayal is far from the only thing the Democrats have done since 2008 to cause me to lose any allegiance I might have felt to them. Indeed, a remarkable phase shift has occurred between 2008 and today. As the recent Democratic debates made very clear, the mainstream left no longer exists. Instead, what we have is a party that has gone completely nuts over ridiculous identity politics.

It is now the party of race, racial acrimony and racializing everything. It is now the party spreading pure histrionics about non-existent white supremacy and takes seriously a seriously loony idea of race-based reparations for slavery. It is now the party that forces everyone to tow the racial line, with candidates like Bernie or Biden — whose natural instincts are in the direction of inclusive rhetoric and broad coalitions rather than erecting racial barriers — being compelled to kowtow to the fringe SJW elements of the Twitter mob. It is now the party where the best way to score points at a debate is to accuse another candidate of racism.

It is now the party of radical gender bigotry, overprotecting — and, as such, infantilizing — women and stigmatizing men, of viewing catcalls as sexual assault, of bizarrely condemning men who praise their wives.

It is now the party of pseudoscientific transgender ideology that insists we ignore the reality of biological sex, wants to police our pronouns and demands that we allow biological males to compete on equal terms in women’s sports.

It is now the party that wants to de-criminalize illegal immigration, while (unanimously, according to the raised hands of the candidates on that debate stage stage) wanting to use our tax dollars to give free health care to illegal immigrants! How is this sane? Do we actually want to create an incentive for illegal immigrants to come here? If they were talking about free health care for legal immigrants, I’d be all for it, and in fact, doing that would create a disincentive for anyone to come here illegally. Aren’t legal immigrants what we want? And doesn’t President Trump’s plan to switch over to a more merit(education and job skills)-based immigration system in an era where the economy is increasingly high-tech, while unskilled jobs are being automated away, make rational sense? Hasn’t admitting millions of unskilled, uneducated, unassimilated immigrants and migrants been an unmitigated disaster in nations like Germany, France and Belgium, where it has created impoverished ghettos where new unemployed arrivals collect generous welfare state benefits while spending their abundant free time getting radicalized? Is this what we want?

It is now the party the agenda of which is being set by the uneducated, self-promoting bartender Alexandria NoClassio Cortez, the rabidly anti-American and antisemitic Mullah Ilhan Omar and the profanity-spouting, Palestinian-flag-waiving Rashida Tlaib.

It is now the party of incivility, supporting violent Antifa thugs that beat up conservative journalists and restaurant owners who kick out Trump administration officials and MAGA-hat-sporting Trump supporters and condemning Biden for the crime of having been willing to work across the aisle with people with whom he disagreed.

No, I’m still not conservative. But given this choice, I’ll choose the (much) much MUCH lesser of two evils.

Despite all of Trump’s flaws (of which there are many) and all of my disagreements with the Republican Party platform (of which there are also many), as of now, Trump seems to be the only thing standing between us and a descent into total barbarism. So, while I’d be thrilled if he made America great again or kept America great, I’ll be happy knowing that he’ll at least keep America sane.

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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”

Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Tablet, Times Higher Education, Quillette, Areo Magazine, Public Discourse, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, Front Porch Republic, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.

He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).