Democrats and others who aren't particularly fond of President Donald Trump expressed feelings of outrage and aggrievement on social media in response to conservative pundit Glenn Beck's recent assessment of what's at stake in the 2020 election. If Trump loses, Beck told Fox News' Sean Hannity, "We are officially at the end of the country as we know it."
The reaction was interesting, given the way prominent Democrats, and their activist cheerleaders on social media, have been describing the stakes of the election in similarly apocalyptic tones. Their message is clear: If Democrats don't win in 2020, the world is going to end. Literally.
Predictably, much of the doomsday rhetoric is focused on the issue of climate change. The United State must act now. Eliminate the filibuster. Enact the Green New Deal immediately to authorize trillions of dollars in new spending to reduce our country's 15 percent (and falling) share of global carbon emissions, even though most Americans say they are unwilling to spend even $10 a month to accomplish that goal.
But absent some ambitious military campaign to carpet bomb Chinese and Indian industrial centers, it's unclear how eliminating cars, euthanizing the U.S. cattle population, and installing solar panels on every single building in America is going to forestall the end of the world, should the most dire predictions prove accurate.
The predictions don't need to be accurate, though. The voters just need to be afraid. So it is with that aim in mind that Democratic presidential candidates have been warning that a vote for Donald Trump is literally a vote for the apocalypse, an outcome many of us will presumably be praying for by the time Election Day finally arrives.