Tennessee WordSmith: A Liberal Dose, Sept. 26, 2024 "Hopefully We Are Turning a Corner"

A Liberal Dose

Sept. 26, 2024

Troy D. Smith

“Hopefully we are turning a corner”

Remember a couple of weeks ago, when I outlined all the momentous political events that had unfolded in a span of only two months? Then I said things had kind of come to a standstill, with polls in a dead heat, and it felt like we were in the eye of a storm.

BUT, I then pointed out, the Harris/Trump debate was only a couple of days away at that time, and who knew what seismic shifts THAT could bring.

Well… yeah. Turns out that shook things up a good bit.

It was a doozy of a debate. It was kind of like the Biden/Trump debate, but in reverse. Trump had his keister handed to him. This time HE was the doddering old man (and, in reality, were he to be elected he would be the oldest person ever elected president in U.S. history). Harris really threw him off his game when she criticized his crowd sizes- he came unglued, as she knew he would. Next thing you know, he was following J. D. Vance down that ridiculous rabbit hole about Haitians in Ohio eating people’s pets (something Vance himself admitted, a few days later, was untrue but something he was repeating anyway).

I was cruising around Facebook during the debate, watching my conservative friends’ reactions. “Is this really the only choice we have?” said one die-hard local Republican friend of mine. Several others were complaining that Trump was killing his own chances.

In other words, they were reacting like many of my liberal friends on the night of the first debate, sent into a state of panic over Biden’s poor performance.

Of course, being Trump supporters, this did not last long. Before the debate was even over, many of them were blaming the moderators, saying they had ganged up on him and that the debate was actually three-against-one… because they “fact-checked” him (something the Trump team tried unsuccessfully to forbid in the debate rules). “Fact-check” is a polite way of saying they corrected his blatant lies. “They didn’t fact-check Harris!” they complained. Well, Harris wasn’t spreading unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about cat-eaters, or saying ridiculous things like executing babies after they are born is perfectly legal in blue states.

Trump did a fair job of controlling himself in the Biden debate, but he went off the rails in this one. While Trump’s fans quickly got over their initial panic and returned to their standard approach of pretending that what they saw with their own eyes didn’t happen, independent and swing voters were reminded of just how unstable (and yes, weird) Donald Trump is. On the night of the debate I could feel it happening, just as we could all feel it with Biden. I found myself wondering if we were witnessing the same sort of moment America saw when Joseph McCarthy was finally challenged on live television and asked, “At long last, sir, have you no decency?” and swiftly tumbled into irrelevancy (side note: Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s biggest defender, was later Trump’s mentor). We’re seeing the polls now, and Harris is pulling ahead- in general, and in several swing states. It is still very close, mind you, but the trend lines are favoring her. And you can feel the Republican panic (you can tell when the Republican Party is scared, they try to prevent even more people from voting).

And that is ultimately the difference between the present-day Democratic and Republican parties. Democrats do not hitch themselves with blind devotion to one person and march to their orders no matter what- they attach themselves to the good of their party, and beyond that to the good of the nation, and beyond that to the ideals the nation was founded on. Anyone who remains a Republican has attached themselves to a cult of personality - to one crass, blasphemous, autocratic con artist -no matter what, and no matter what the damage to their party, their country, and their ideals.

Here’s hoping Trumpism, like McCarthyism, is on its way to becoming a historic side note of a bad time in our country that we are all embarrassed by, but which we got beyond.

Troy Smith, a native of White County, is a novelist, a member of the Tennessee Democratic Party Executive Committee, and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His views do not necessarily reflect those of TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE