Is Donald Trump another Schwarzenegger?

I often write about how California seems to have gone through the white freak-out about becoming a a minority twenty years before the rest of the country. This is another installment of that plaint.

Nobody else seems to have made this obvious connection, but the question seems worth asking. In 2003 Arnold Schwarzenegger, an unqualified bodybuilder and celebrity "actor" whose claim to fame was his role as the Terminator, knocked off a Democratic governor with no friends. Sometimes voters want a cartoon character because reality is just too awful.

Just because Republicans have taken leave of their senses, most of us still need to do everything we can to ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House. We need Democratic appointments to the Supreme Court, whatever else they can or can't do.

But the actual history of the Schwarzenegger governorship should encourage us. Without any real roots in the whack job cult that is the California Republican Party, that party continued its decline in the state. No other Republicans have been elected statewide since Schwarzenegger turned out to have relatively sane view on many issues, including particularly climate change, and worked fairly well with California Democrats who took over again with Jerry Brown's election in 2010. California has weathered the Bush recession well and now looks fiscally and socially more healthy than it has in years.

Moral: a cartoon character can perhaps delay, but not forever impede, the forces of justice and progress. Not that we shouldn't do everything we can to prevent a Trump presidency. The guy enables white supremacists. But the Republicans are the suckers in this.