History is not going to be kind to Trump and the Republican party. That’s basically because they are now the party of lies. It’s not just Trump. It’s all of his enablers.
Heather Cox Richardson, the history professor from Boston College (who has become a voice of sanity in the run-up to the election) put it this way:
| Pundits suggest that the two different political ideologies in America are about values and principles, but it actually seems that the primary difference between the two camps is between those who are living in a fictional world, created by generations of right-wing media, and those who are living in the real world, the so-called “reality-based community.” Addressing the right-wing media’s construction of a false narrative for its supporters seems crucial to restoring sanity to the country’s politics. How that might play out is unclear, in part because Trump’s extremism seems to be driving a wedge into the right-wing ecosystem. |
Biden has already gone out of his way to say, repeatedly, how he will govern as the President for all Americans, regardless of whether they voted for him or not. That is, of course, the opposite of what President Trump has done, who for the entirety of his four-year term has looked to be the divider-in-chief.
While Trump refuses to concede, so far American Democracy is holding. The Donald is finding no recourse in the courts because there is simply no evidence of wide-spread voter fraud. Also, no recounts are going to bridge the tens of thousands of votes that Biden leads in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada and even Georgia.
I’m on record, multiple times already in this election season, as arguing that we’re nowhere close to being able to have a national healing; certainly the early evidence of the post-election environment underscores that belief.
But if you’re a Republican, you have got to be praying – as the folks at the Lincoln Project have done – that your party will soon return to a respect for factual truth, so we can resume arguing about our opinions and beliefs instead of having to argue about the facts.
After all, as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said:
People are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Amen to that.
History is now kind to Stalin, Mao, and Castro. I don’t think it’s ever uttered a bad word about Napoleon. Churchill and Lincoln were at heart bad people and inarguably white supremacists yet history is very kind to them.