I don't address most of the usual post-election squabbles and recriminations because I think it serves to create a misleading air of normalcy. I do not think that engaging in politics-as-usual is appropriate in the wake of one of this country's historically great failures of politics-as-usual.
But I do want to address Mike Pence, and I think the things people say about Mike Pence point to a certain failure of differentiation, as well as a failure to recognize the unique threat to democracy Donald Trump poses. People say that Pence is "as bad" as Trump or "worse" than Trump, and I don't think that's a meaningful statement because I consider the two categorically different.
Mike Pence was my governor for four years. I didn't like him at all. I didn't agree with his policy positions. He had the support of Republican majorities in both houses of Congress statewide, and he used that power to push through some fairly socially regressive legislation. He pushed through legislation against women, he pushed through legislation against the LGBTQ community, I'm pretty sure he pushed through legislation against workers' rights (though most of the damage there had already been done by previous administrations).
And those of us who were not happy with this worked within the political process to stop him. After he came heavily under fire from the business community for his legislation stripping LGBTQ protections, he backtracked on it, which is something, I will note, that Pat McCrory, who signed similar legislation in North Carolina, did not.
So I didn't like him, I disagreed with pretty much all of his policies, I didn't vote for him for governor, and I certainly wouldn't have voted for him for President. But if he was President now, if he had been elected over Hillary Clinton in an election as fair and free as the election we have gone through, I would not be reacting to him the way I am reacting to Trump.
I would, I think, be playing my part in the usual post-election squabbles and recriminations. I would be complaining about third-party voters, and about bad polling, and about the electoral college and the ineffective campaign Clinton ran and all of that other horse-race stuff.
And I would be working to build bridges the way all the politicians say to do after every election. The equivalent of a friendly post-game handshake. I would be rolling my eyes at my conservative relatives who voted for him rather than declaring them dead to me.
Because electing President Pence over President Clinton would be a repudiation of Obama's policies and of Clinton personally. Electing President Trump over President Clinton was a repudiation of the principles and values which have been the core of this country since its inception. A President Pence would delay or reverse progress. The election of a President Trump forecloses the possibility of progress under our current system.
To me, the single scariest thing about Trump is what you see when you look at him through a historical-critical lens, the people who say the kinds of things he said when running for office, and the kinds of things those people do when they reach office. And people who don't have a historical-critical understanding are not going to see that. You compare him to Hitler and they say "Oh, pshaw! Everybody gets compared to Hitler," and they're right. You compare him to Mussolini, and they have no idea who that is.
Mike Pence does not require us to change our values. You can respond to Mike Pence the same way you would respond to Sam Brownback, or George W. Bush, or Dennis Hastert, or Ronald Reagan. There is a continuity between them. We can disagree with them, we can say that they present a certain threat, but Trump requires us to re-examine our assumptions about what America is as a country and who we are as humans.
There is an upside to this, which is that by going through this process of examination we better become able to confront those injustices which we blind ourselves to, or write off as the cost of our freedoms.
More significant, though, is the downside, which is that those of us who fail to respond to this challenge to our implicit values - which will inevitably be most people - are at risk of losing entirely the protections afforded by those values, as the systems into which those values are encoded come under attack.
So no, I don't think Mike Pence is "as bad" as Donald Trump.
