Thursday, September 10, 2015

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.

3 comments:

Rain Trueax said...

Yeah, we and they have no idea what he would do if he got in. My concern is he seems like GW Bush, not much interested in researching the tough subjects and would let someone else run a lot of things as Bush did. I would not vote for any Republican as it stands with that party and totally believe it has to be a Democrat if we don't want to go backward. Listening to Jeb talk or Huckabee sermonize tells us why. It is the Supreme Court but not just it.

Hattie said...

Ahem... Hawaii has always been a "majority minority" state.

janinsanfran said...

So true Hattie -- and you've seldom had a freak out about race. Even after Pearl Harbor, the know-nothings didn't think they could get along without the Japanese-Hawaiians. :-)