There is no point in getting all hot in the amygdala over the fact that Time has named the president-elect of the United States its Person of the Year. I will grant you that some of the prose explaining the choice is very purplish beat-sweetening, indeed, especially with regard to El Caudllo del Mar-A-Lago's palatial New York digs. There is some remarkable explanatory soft-pedaling of what it means to hand the republic over to a demagogue. There are the usual cookies tossed to the white working class, who apparently are the only voters who matter, the only voters who are "struggling," the only voters who have been victimized by the globalized economic order against which progressive politicians have been railing for 20 years or more.

(I am particularly fond of the young white lady from Michigan who voted for Trump because Hillary Rodham Clinton "would go out of her way to appeal to minorities, immigrants, but she didn't really for ordinary Americans." No, put the Enigma Machine back in the closet, mother. I won't be needing it.)

There are the tortured attempts to dress up the national Id to replace its Ego. And then, there is this remarkable passage, which is completely accurate, but strangely fails to cite how popular all this wonderful content was among the executives who run large media conglomerates.

No presidential candidate in American history had done or said so many outlandish and offensive things as Trump. He cheered when protesters got hit at his rallies, used sexist insults for members of the press, argued that an American judge should be disqualified from a case because of his Mexican heritage. He would tell an allegory about Muslim refugees entering the U.S. that cast those families fleeing violence as venomous snakes, waiting to sink their fangs into "tenderhearted" women. And he would match those stories with bloody tales of undocumented immigrants from Mexico who murdered Americans in cold blood. "His disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous," Clinton argued. His rhetoric had in fact opened up a new public square, where racists and misogynists could boast of their views and claim themselves validated. And to further enrage many Americans, Trump regularly peddled falsehoods, without offering any evidence, and then refused to back down from his claims.

The obvious conclusion—that we have well and truly fcked ourselves as a nation—is left unsaid.

(Here's Kellyanne Conway's explanation: "There's a difference for voters between what offends you and what affects you." In other words, the Klan was merely a debating society until it started hanging people.)

And this is just unmitigated nonsense:

The irony of this conclusion is profound. By seeking to condemn the dark side of politics, Clinton's campaign may have accidently validated it. By believing in the myth that Obama's election represented a permanent shift for the nation, they proved it was ephemeral. In the end, Trump reveled in these denunciations, which helped him market to his core supporters his determination to smash the existing elite. After the election, Trump's campaign CEO Stephen Bannon—the former head of a website known for stirring racial animus and provoking liberal outrage—explained it simply. "Darkness is good," he told the Hollywood Reporter.

This is the theorizing of folks who never will get shoved down a flight of stairs because they're wearing a hijab. This is the "ignore it and it will go away" argument, which history tells us never works, brought to its apotheosis: This poison is worthy of study and grudging respect, simply because they worked.

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But the fact remains that the president-elect is the only obvious choice for the award. There simply was no figure more important in shaping the news and the nation than he was. And, all rosy dreams of an elector-ex-machina rescue aside, he's going to be the President of the United States on January 20, 2017, a prospect that seemed positively hallucinatory on January 20, 2016.

Which brings me to another thing that has begun to bother me: Whatever you think of the president-elect, he's going to be president, and that means that people are going to seek to curry his favor and his support. Some of those people are going to be Democrats. We are all going to have to make peace with that.

For example, I think folks got a little hysterical when Al Gore dropped by the Fortress of Soliciting in Manhattan the other day. I will grant you that what he said about his meeting with Princess Ivanka was a bit fulsome, but Gore has one cause in his life—fighting against the climate crisis—and he'd have to be very stupid not to make his pitch to the guy who's going to be President of the United States very soon.

And, believe it or not, I even cut the execrable Rahm Emanuel a little slack for stopping in as well. The guy is a big city mayor, albeit a fairly incompetent and duplicitous one. It would do neither him nor any of his constituents any good for him to simply ignore the guy who's going to be at the head of the executive branch in a little over a month. There are a hundred good reasons to despise Rahm Emanuel, but meeting with the future President of the United States isn't one of them.

(Besides, Chicago seems to have figured this whole resistance thing out on its own. Giant pig balloons!)

Whatever resistance there is to be mounted against the catastrophe that's hurtling toward us is going to have to come in the Congress, in state governments, and in the streets. In other words, it will be mounted using the now-rusted tools of self-government that the Constitution gives us. (This obviously includes the media, which has to do a better job covering President Trump than it did covering candidate Trump.) Want to oppose the new regime? Don't piss at Al Gore on Twitter. Run for school board. Want to fight against the encroaching oligarchy? Don't wait to laugh with John Oliver. Get on your congressperson's ass and stay there. Get out in the streets. Michael Moore is dead right about this.

You want a cause? OK, here's a cause. Medicare.

There are a number of hills worth dying on, but Medicare is Cemetery Ridge. It is a program fundamental to everything that the Democratic Party is supposed to be about, and it is a program fundamental to the progressive vision of government. It is facing its ultimate test; Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, wants to kill it because he believes in what's left of his soul that government has no business doing for its citizens what Medicare does. He will propose an inadequate replacement system that he will call Medicare. The government should be stopped, immediately, until he is forced to withdraw it. There are other, harder calls, but this one should be easy.

But there really isn't any argument as to who the Person of the Year is. It's all you, big fella. Now how about you start, you know, acting like it, or I can safely predict that the Person of the Year in 2020 is going to be whoever runs your sorry ass out of Washington.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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