'Watch What You Say...Words Can Hurt' was the sign posted over the doorway of Hurst Elementary, a public school in a leafy corner of Washington, DC; and the one in front of the Westover Methodist Church of Christ, reprising the hundreds of lawn signs in the neighborhood which said, 'Hate Has No Home Here'.
University Park was a safe place, patrolled by watchful parents, uniformly progressive in both ideas and attitude, welcoming of others, and while not itself diverse - it was one of the last all-white neighborhoods of the city - it was was more so in spirit than its counterparts in the deep slums of Anacostia.
During COVID, block superintendents were selected to call out those who did not wear masks or keep social distance. During the Black Lives Matter affair, festoons celebrating black pride, black rights, and the rightful place of the black man atop the social pyramid were on every other lawn.
Electric vehicles had replaced Priuses and before them Volvo station wagons as the cars which symbolized progressive concern for reasonability, the environment, and social integrity.
Neighbors spoke to each other with empathy and sympathy for the state of the nation. Democracy itself was under threat as the specter of Donald Trump was again abroad.
The neighborhood was a redoubt of progressivism, a community of likeminded, forward-thinking citizens who endorsed and embraced every social reform, every policy and program which accelerated progress towards a verdant, peaceful, tolerant Utopia.
Looked at another way, University Park was a gulag - a place of internment, harsh laws and harsher punishment, Stasi-like informers and mind police, group-think and a mindless, perpetual desire to cleanse, expunge, and defy anyone or anything that disturbed the status quo. It was a parody of every settled, self-assured community - an ironic reprise of the Fifties, the hated decade of pompous self-assured righteousness.
The progressive era of the first quarter of the 21st century has been as punitive and censorious in its ethos and approach as any. It was sanctimony writ large. State-sponsored revisionism and the rewriting of history to conform to the happy trajectory of the new age. No longer would the names of enslavers, war-mongering profiteers, and patriarchal autocrats be seen on schools, public buildings, or streets. Every last trace of America's horrific, brutal, past must be removed and only the names of its latter day heroes - the black, brown, and gay men and women who fought injustice and rose to the top of American society and culture.
University Park was the microcosm of the new ethos - a community of social vigilantes all inspired by progressive ideology and all enthused to be part of a neo-spiritual revival. For that was what 21st century progressivism was - a holy crusade, a self-assured, righteous campaign to rid the nation of evil, the outlier, the sadistic reactionary, and now, first and foremost Donald Trump.
The hatred of the man knew no bounds. He was the devil incarnate, Beelzebub, the Evil One. The residents of University Park would lay down their lives in any crusade against him. They would stop at nothing to destroy him, to drive a stake into his heart, to tar and feather him, to string him up, to garrot him, and burn him at the stake. No one nor anything had ever inflamed the people of University Park like him. Death would be too good for him. Only dismemberment and gory disembowelment would satisfy and suffice.
Of course half the country loves the man for his bombast, his braggadocio, his outrageous, untamed, intemperate lambasting of the Left - the sanctimonious, prudish, ignorant revisionists and faux Utopians that were no more than salamanders and newts, poking their little reptile noses out of the dark and ducking for cover when a real reformer came along.
His campaign events were as loud and raucous as he was. They were Ohio State football, revival tents more wild and exuberant than any ever witnessed, all wrapped up in one, and Donald Trump was carny barker, preacher, lion tamer, huckster, clown, Punch and Judy, Borscht Belt tummler and locker room jokester - and the crowd loved every ironic aside, every palsied imitation, every ad hominem, on-target, vilifying personal attack, every wild assumption, and every exaggeration.
He was not the anti-Christ as his critics claimed, but the anti-woke, the anti-sanctimony, anti-smarmy, self-assured, presumptuous Left. At every epithet, every barb, and every poison dart aimed at his attackers, the huge crowds cheered.
Only here did everything and anything go. Not on the social media, or in the workplace, at schools and universities where censorship was the rule, and Soviet-style lockstep uniformity was enforced; but here in the Trump crowd there was not one scintilla of political correctness, not one drop of preachy wokeness, not one iota of enforcement.
It felt good to be in a Donald Trump crowd, very good - away from the badgering, hectoring yells of 'racist, homophobe, misogynist' far from the censorious looks, the dismissiveness, the classist assumptions about bass boat idiots. It was release, catharsis, renewal, and confidence in the future.
While the Left calls foul, and doubles down on its hatred for the man, becomes more shrill and insistent, and gathers in groups to condemn the retrograde insensitivity of him, Trump supporters rejoice. Once their man is in office again, all the hateful, vengeful, and spiteful calls against him, and all the hysterical worries about everything will be gone once and for all.
This election is not about Left and Right so much as it is about ethos, zeitgeist, and culture. No matter how much the coastal elites may claim that progressivism is the only hope for America, the rest of the country denies even the suggestion that it is. We are still and always a nation of gunslingers, snake oil salesmen, touts, revivalists, and loudmouths. The very idea of an Orwellian state is heinous and unthinkable, and the vision of it embodied by Kamala Harris and her Washington claques is too devilishly, goddamned close.
We're almost there and the suspense is killing us - the race is tight, the stakes high; but if Trump wins, the lid of the pressure cooker will be blown off and a party of untold proportion will spill into the streets. After four years of an American Sevak, Stasi, and the KGB culture of mind-control and cultural hegemony, it will feel good to let it all hang out.
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