Francisco Goya’s ‘Que viene el Coco’ (Here Comes the Boogeyman/The Boogeyman Is Coming), c. 1797. Wikipedia.
The bogeyman is a mythical creature, used to frighten children. It can take many forms. One form may be a loud, big, tumultuous man.
I’ve been thinking about this creature after spending time with friends, all of us obsessed with fear and terrible foreboding about the next administration and especially its head.
It worries me that our fear may disable us. Certainly our preoccupation with this figure is not in any way helpful. So I’ve been going through a few ideas that may help us—if we want—to detach and preserve our peace of mind.
First, it’s not an easy thing to dismantle the federal government or fire any of its thousands of employees, each of whom has a contract spelling out terms of engagement, benefits, firing, and due process. Not even the bogyman of our imaginations can simply run over these contracts, and the time and effort consumed in trying to do so would wear out someone whose attention span is notoriously short.
As to the various government agencies, their heads and their workers will fight tooth and nail against their destruction, with powerful entities like the American Civil Liberties Union strongly supporting their continued existence, with lawsuits if necessary.
As for deporting 13 million people here who don’t have legal status, and their families, this is another nearly impossible task. There will never be enough law enforcement—and our Constitution prohibits the military being used in this way—to round up, prosecute, imprison and fly out even a fraction of this number.
The threat to the economy would be enormous since something like forty to sixty percent of the workers in construction and harvesting are the so-called illegals. The threat may occur anyway when many of those threatened, who can, choose to leave rather than waiting to be rounded up. A number of Mr.Trump’s supporters would find themselves unable to run their businesses and a number of upper-class women would find they would have to do their own gardening and housekeeping. Something comparable happened in the South after the Civil War when the slaves who had done so much of the work were freed and chose to depart.
Finally, I view this particular boogeyman as largely an invention of my imagination, wrought up by the endless round of media photos, interviews and stories—and my first decision is to limit my news input to thirty minutes a day, relying on NPR and my local newspaper and avoiding television altogether—as I have for years.
After I put these measures in place, I may be able to see Mr. Trump for what he really is: an old, overweight white man, not in the best of health, who might perhaps wake up in the middle of some dark night, terrified of the size of what he has taken on. How can someone so unskilled in communication (for I don’t count shouts and rants) deal effectively with sophisticated, highly educated world leaders?
Instead of a bogeyman, Mr.Trump is an object of pity—even if laced with a little scorn. Even his army of flatterers can’t shield him from the pain of his inevitable failure.
Change is hard, radical change dramatically more so.
As a lifelong Democrat from a family of Democrats, the Democratic party is quite likely finished for some time. This was a sound rejection of their policies and agendas particularly over the last 4 years, but also going back all the way to Bill Clinton.
With the Republican party you have vision and youth. Not a vision of woke ideologies, men competing in women’s sports, lawfare, media manipulation and spend spend spend but a rejection of everything the last 20+ years have brought us – declining health, freedom, education and prosperity individually and declining military and economic might internationally.
This view on how a Portuguese journalist saw America shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, but I bet it is: https://www.newstatesman.com/us-election-2024/2024/10/letter-from-michigan-no-one-i-know-is-voting-kamala-harris
Ending these expensive, ridiculous wars and putting America first – “Peace through Strength” and “Make America Healthy Again” are not empty slogans, these are rallying cries to rebuilding our businesses, our cities, our energy, our health and our independence both personally and internationally.
We must stop the rot and it’s urgent, with the recent meteoric rise of BRICS mostly thanks to – once again – a self-inflicted wound by the U.S. in terms of our policy to weaponize the dollar against Russia.
In Republicans you also have youth: Vivek, Tulsi, Musk, Vance, Gaetz and many others – who are successful, vibrant and angry, many of whom (Musk, Tulsi, Gaetz in particular) have personally experienced the recent Democratic (or should we say anti-democratic?) policies of lawfare, threats, media slandering and the powers of government against those who speak up against their power.
The youth of the leaders are mirrored in the shifts of the electorate and minorities – shifts to the right occurred in Latinos, black men and the youth who have seen their futures darken and their lives impacted by the policies of the Democrats, particularly since Covid. Many in these demographics, and many of us outside them, have given up any hope of an independent media in the U.S. – the reason it’s referred to now as “legacy media” is because like the Democrat party it must change or die, and return to its non-partisan roots of actually giving facts rather than opinion and manufactured consensus. To those obtaining news from truly independent sources, nothing about this election was surprising at all.
In the wider picture, the idea of liberal democracy and a globalist future too is done. It failed us. It decimated the American manufacturing industry, rural economies, inner cities and people’s physical and psychological health. Liberal journalist Chris Hedges has possibly chronicled this better than anyone in his books. Open borders and mass migrations have caused major issues with crime not just in the U.S. but in Europe as well.
Financially, cities are in debt, counties are in debt, states are in debt and the U.S. starts the fiscal year with the highest deficit since 2020, which was caused by the pandemic. The way Kamala has run her campaign – unsuccessfully blowing through a billion dollars and leaving a $20 million deficit to the party in just 3 months – is the way Democrats have run the Federal government. In 2024 the U.S. has spent over a trillion dollars on interest alone.
With the election you see the overwhelming rejection of business as usual. A more competent candidate running a more competent campaign would perhaps have fared better but this is a sea change that signals a major long-term change in direction. This change is not only in the U.S. but is happening in Europe now as we speak (Germany, France, Austria and others).
But who would this competent candidate have been? Gavin Newsom? Running a state to which people have been fleeing since 2019 exactly because of these same policies of soft-on-crime, high taxes, excessive business regulation and the tolerance of homelessness?
The migrations to red states from blue for years now have signaled these election results and with the election it became clear even recent blue states internally have seen dramatic shifts in many counties – like in California and Virginia.
It seems as though what’s left of the Democratic party will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. But the good news is it’s going to be prosperous, free and abundant once again.
Ms. Bingham, I’ve never left a comment on your pieces before: a fact you left out of the personal life of His Orangeness is that even his wife is unwilling to live with him at this point. Ignoring him has been my action of choice, because I was raised by a therapist mom who gave us tools to deal with people we couldn’t do anything about. The hardest thing for me: accepting that about half of the voters made this awful thing happen. Who do I trust? With whom do I exchange eye contact? I, too, am an NPR and PBS consumer, and even those even-handed reports are unnerving.