On political scare-mongering, or, why doesn't this hand-basket ever get there?

It seems pretty clear to me that Donald Trump is going to be our president for 4 more years. I'm okay with that, simply because the leading candidates on the Democratic Party side would all be far worse for the country, in my opinion.

That having been said, I'm not a Trump supporter. His recently-proposed 2021 budget would, if passed, amount to an expansion of the federal government by 21% in 4 years. Donald Trump is as big-spending as they come!

But I come not to bash Donald Trump. I'm resigned to another 4 years and I think the Republic will survive them. What I'm here to say is, the sky is not falling.

In this sense of un-doom I am perhaps in the minority. Most of my Democratic friends are expecting the sudden onset of full-bore Fascism after the next election. Many of them, predictably, speak of moving to Canada!

All this is in part a testament to the effectiveness of what I will call "Party-line doomsaying." They regularly tell us the other party is always the proto-Fascist or the Communist vanguard, and the rank-and-file types believe it without question. People are willing to accept whatever they're told by their chosen political interpreters. Each Party will insist that this next election is the one on which the fate of the nation hangs. Apparently, you're not really politically engaged if you're not fearing the worst! I myself well remember thinking that all good things were about to come to an end because Ronald Reagan had just won the 1980 election. Ah, youth! Ah, stupidity!

The point is, they want you to be scared. It's good for them to keep you scared. But we shouldn't let their propaganda influence us. That's bad for the country. (There, now I've given you something to worry about!)

Whenever I try to tell these Chicken Littles that the sky is not falling, they look at me as if I'm the crazy one (which I don't entirely deny). It seems to show a lack of seriousness, a foolish head-in-the-sand blindness, to deny what all the apparently right-thinking people are saying.

One of the reasons that people overstate the importance of presidential elections, in my opinion, is that they believe that politics is the source and/or guarantor of most of the good that we hope for in life. Politics, they think, is upstream from everything, and so everything depends on politics.

My contention is that many things are properly upstream from politics. One of those things, for example, is the economy, which is the term we give to the cumulative decisions about money that people make by the millions every day. Politics will have an effect on that, of course. But when the inevitable recession happens we will blame the president exclusively, and never those cumulative decisions.

Strangely, if we are generally feeling good about things, we credit the president. If things are not going well for us, we blame him. Just as we look to presidents as saviors, we look to them as scapegoats. Little do we recall, with Lincoln, that usually "events are in the saddle and ride mankind."

So, for example, that debt that the president is racking up: that's going to come home to roost at some point, and people will begin to regret it, but still, it won't be the end. And in any case what are the Democrats offering as a debt-reduction proposal? [Insert side-splitting laughter emoji here]

One more thing: the character issue. Never Trumpers talked about this a lot, four years ago. I think we have seen it play out in many ways. That is, I think we have seen many instances of the effects that having a liar and a cheat in the White House would bring to pass. It's not good, and these are dangerous waters, and I'm concerned, but still, it's not the end of the world. To stick with the same metaphor, Donald Trump seems to believe that, now that he is president, he is upstream from everything. That's another way of saying he thinks he's above the law. We are not done seeing the impact that this will have on presidential behavior. Hold onto your hats!

But it's not the end, no. You would-be Canadians, go if you really want to, but I do believe that you are over-reacting (not to mention showing a decided lack of patriotism). Yes, we're all going to hell in a handbasket, but haven't you ever noticed that the handbasket never actually arrives?