Republicans are thieves. They have stolen our democracy, but even more despicably, they’ve stolen a great deal of our language.
After eight years of impotently crying wolf at an incredibly smart and effective Democratic president, Republicans have successfully desensitized us to the language of rebellion, and to a certain extent, due process. When Republicans continuously bandied about terms like “dictator,” “authoritarian,” “impeachment” and so forth, they inured the public to these terms rendering them moot and meaningless, principally because of their inappropriateness and inapplicability to the 44th president (although the true believers on the right no doubt believed that these terms really did apply to President Obama). The shear volume and magnitude of their kvetching vastly reduced the impact of many critical words that we need for dissent.
But by continuously assaulting President Obama with their extremist, meaningless and unfounded accusations, the Republicans did our country a horrendous disservice, and one that I’m not entirely sure wasn’t intentional. They created the space now occupied by Donald Trump.
Consider first of all that I’m putting aside the whole concept of their alternate reality, which is an entirely different dissertation altogether. My frustration is that now when Democrats and other thinking independents, (and yes, a few on the right) make those accusations against President Trump, the vast majority of which truly are deserved, the public can react by saying, “oh, it’s all just politics,” and “yeah, but both sides do it.” The Republicans managed to defang these important terms , and a good bit more of the language that we now desperately need in order to describe and to call out a uniquely corrupt and abominable administration, simply because of their wretched and petty racist subset and their hallucinatory paranoia.
How do we take our language and our country back? I’m not sure, but we need to figure it out pretty quickly. This presidency is spiraling out of control on an hourly basis and if we are to restore our democracy from these sinister forces that do not cherish our democratic institutions as we do, we truly will, to borrow a phrase that was denatured by the right, not recognize our own country in just a few years.