LA TIMES: Americans Elected a “Reckless Conman As President”

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Writing in the LA Times, author and human rights activist Ariel Dorfman took the American electorate to task for electing “a reckless con man as president,” adding the country is now facing a reckoning.

Dorfman admitted that he is tired of hearing about investigations into Russian collusion in the 2016 election of President Donald Trump when the focus should be on how in the hell did American voters let this election happen.

“What is it, in our American soul that allowed the Russians to be successful?” he asked.

“Those were not Russians voting in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, handing the election to the Republican candidate by a bit more than 80,000 votes. They were American men and women,” Dorfman wrote. “As were the 62,984,825 others who decided that such a troublesome, inflammatory figure expressed their desires and dreams. Trump could be impeached or resign, or his policies could simply implode under the weight of their malice, divisiveness, and mendacity, and the country would still be defined and pressed by the same conditions and dread that enabled his rise.”

“Now, every desperate American must gaze in the mirror and interrogate the puzzled face and puzzling fate that stares back: What did I do or not do that made the cataclysm possible?” he continued. “Did I ignore past transgressions that corrode today’s society: the discrimination, the sexism, the violence, the authoritarianism, the intolerance, the imperial ambitions, the slavery and greed and persecutions that have darkened America’s story? Did I overestimate the strength of our democracy and underestimate the decency of my neighbors? Was I too fearful, too complacent, too impatient, too angry? Whom did I not talk to, whom did I not persuade? What privilege and comforts, what overwork and debts, kept me from giving my all? What injustice or humiliation or bigoted remark did I witness and let pass? How can I help to recover our country, make it once more recognizable, make it luminous and forgiving?”

“We must vigorously protest the president’s craven actions, but above all we need to acknowledge that what ultimately matters is not what a foreign power did to America, but what America did to itself,” he lectured. “The crucial question of what is wrong with our country, what could have driven us to this edge of catastrophe, cannot be resolved by a special counsel or a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives or spectacular revelations about Russia’s interference.”

You can read the whole scathing piece here.

Many thanks to the Los Angeles Times.