Trump is an awful person, but he isn’t a competent politician. Pence is possibly a worse person and a very competent politician. There is already a conservative plan to impeach Trump so Pence can take the presidency.
A Pence presidency probably has less chance of accidental nuclear war, but a much greater chance of extremely socially conservative legislation which would be devastating to civil rights in America. Trump just wants to make money and feel important; Pence has an agenda.
Nixon was impeached for corruption. We already know Trump is corrupt. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about inappropriate sexual conduct. We already know Trump has lied about inappropriate sexual conduct.
It’s only a matter of time before he lies about something too big for his press aids to smooth over and Congress gets to have his way with him, because he is a mess of a man and makes mistakes, and makes them loud.
If Pence is allowed to take his place, Pence will not make the same mistakes.
Pence is a career politician. He’s well-spoken. He’s relatively attractive. His positions are clear and well-established. He has a law degree. He’s on the conservative end of Republicans, but he’s a committed member of the party. In everything that made Trump unpopular among Republicans as well as Democrats, Pence is the opposite.
There were jokes comparing Trump to Emperor Palpatine, and a good rebuttal of them. Compared to Pence, Trump is Jar-Jar Binks. Pence is Palpatine.
Trump is wildly unpopular because both liberals and the Republican establishment don’t like him. He’s ugly and crass and obviously incompetent, he’s the perfect figurehead to rally against.
Pence is not. Pence is dangerous in different ways, and one of the worst is that he won’t make nearly as good a symbol for his opponents. If Trump gets kicked out, we have to keep protesting, even as people try to say that we got what we wanted, that everything can go back to normal.
Remember this, when the impeachment happens, whether it’s a month from now or three years. Trump is bad. Pence might be worse.
“A Pence presidency probably has less chance of accidental nuclear war,”
“Trump is bad. Pence might be worse.”
It seems like some people are less bothered by the idea of nuclear war than my friends and I am.
This is the “flu during pregnancy doubles chances of schizophrenic children” thing. The base odds are so low we’re not really concerned by them.
Pence was extruded out of the Generic Religious Conservative Republican Machine
he is a generic religious conservative republican
if the generic conservative republican is existentially terrifying, then then problem is with you. either you are so astonishingly self-centered that dealing with any opposition makes you enraged, or you are so astonishingly bad at politics that you have no ability to oppose measures you think are harmful and no ability to convince anyone that doesn’t already agree with you to do this, or both (for today’s left it is both)
pence will not be worse. pence has some measure of control over his emotions. pence has the ability to let minor symbolic slights against him pass beneath his notice. pence has comprehension of why human beings consider it important to say things that are true.
the only things pence wants to do are roll back some portion of the political victories your side won to an earlier state. a state where your team used to be able to do the actual work of convincing people, and attain those political victories. pence is not going to do damage in ways you cannot imagine and pence is not going to do damage to things you cannot imagine being damaged. pence will not do things that benefit absolutely nobody because he cannot control his emotions. pence will not use the force of the government to hunt down and punish people for saying mean things about him on twitter. pence is capable of perceiving some aspect of reality besides “how much do people like me, and should they be rewarded or punished for it”
these things cannot be said of trump
but the left will never notice this because the left is not capable of noticing this because all is devoured and all is lost. the left is devoured. entropy cannot be reversed. they are now a machine whose sole purpose is to give social power and emotional rewards to people that already have them. they will never again do something because it is useful or because it is correct. they will never again notice anything about the world beyond “the emotions of popular people”. they will not notice how trump is actually dangerous to american democracy in real life in the world because to them “dangerous to american democracy” is just a noise, like all other noises they make, that only means “give me power and emotional rewards”. all is lost. entropy cannot be reversed. all is lost.
So, absolutely agreed and endorsed: Mike Pence is 100% Generic Extruded Religious-Conservative Republican Product. He is not any kind of new unique monster. He is not particularly different from any number of normal state-level Republican politicians.
Also agreed and endorsed: Trump is some kind of new unique monster, and his rise to power carries terrifying dangers that would not be posed by any normal politician, including his VP.
That said, I don’t think this analysis is fair. I think you are underselling the extent to which it is possible to think, with integrity and with good reason, that Normal Partisan-Style Politics really matters.
Like, there are three categories of Horrible Things that we have to fear from the Trump presidency:
1. Horrible Things that we apparently have to fear from any presidency of any party because, Christ, apparently the system will co-opt anyone, even a guy like Barack Obama is not going to be your savior (e.g.: drone strikes, total failure to rein in abuses by the financial sector)
2. Horrible Things that might arise from the personal idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump (e.g.: the streets of New York running red with blood because of a pogrom whose origins lay in a Twitter dustup with Taylor Swift)
3. Horrible Things that could be expected from any contemporary Republican administration but not from a Democratic administration
“How big is Category 3, especially compared to the other categories?” is a legitimate question whose answer is not inherently obvious.
I do in fact think that Category 3 is large. I think that, for structural reasons that are not very hard to trace, the Republican Party has collectively gone off the deep end. I think that standard Republican Party orthodoxy at this point involves policies – notably environmental, economic, and social-welfare policies – that are likely to be catastrophically bad for America and for the world (as opposed to Democratic Party orthodoxy, which is merely mildly bad). I am honestly unsure whether the low-but-still-hideously-high threat of a Trump-fueled nuclear war matters more or less than the likelihood that Trump will act like a normal Republican most of the time.
…you can point out, correctly, that we’re in a first-past-the-post system where the Republicans are one of the two major establishment parties, and therefore that they’re predictably going to win about half the things overall. You can point out that about half the voters in the US, a group that obviously includes many many many good and decent people, are going to end up voting Republican for those same standard structural reasons. None of these things is inconsistent with any of the others.
I certainly think it all adds up to good and sufficient reason for feeling existential horror.