The enablers of Trump's dangerous presidency
By E.J. Dionne Jr. Opinion writer October 18 at 7:24 PM
Permit me to confess: I am one of the very last people in the United States who does not consider the word “politician” to be an insult. On the contrary, the work politicians do is important because politics is a good and essential thing in a free society. It’s the degradation of politics in the Trump era we need to worry about, not politics itself.
“The business of politics is the conciliation of differing interests,” Bernard Crick wrote in his still-valuable 1962 book “In Defense of Politics.” Note that word “conciliation.” It’s the alternative to outright warfare. Politics in a democratic republic assumes that we can find ways of living, working and progressing together even when we disagree. That’s why we need politicians who take their vocation seriously.
Politics, at its best, is about creating a decent society, a task that can only be accomplished when citizens find ways of cooperating. One of the best descriptions of what our aspirations should be was offered by the political philosopher Michael Sandel. “When politics goes well,” he wrote, “we can know a good in common that we cannot know alone.”
President Trump has always prided himself on being an anti-politician. This is supposed to be one of his greatest assets. But he has thrown our government into chaos and our country into tumult precisely because his disrespect for politics and what it requires leads him to debase our public life. He offers a torrent of lies, willfully tries to tear the country apart — his tweet on Wednesday continuing his verbal war on kneeling NFL players epitomizes his eagerness to polarize — and puts everyone else down because doing so is the only way he knows how to lift himself up.
Trump takes no responsibility for — well, anything. “We’re not getting the job done,” Trump said in a very brief moment of truthfulness on Monday. But he quickly added. “And I’m not going to blame myself, I’ll be honest.” That “I’ll be honest” might have been accompanied by a laugh track. Yes, Trump honestly believes that everyone else is to blame for everything.
more
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-enablers-of-trumps-dangerous-presidency/2017/10/18/b4738e3a-b43f-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html
