For Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, here’s a
piece that was written ten days after the US election of 2016. It appeared
first on The Stringer, a blog that punts around in its own little backwater
with no outlets to social media.
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Let's hope this is wrong. It would be a
pleasure to re-read these lines in mid-November of 2020 knowing that the
American ship of state had righted itself after all and was on course to
inaugurate a normal president.
Already, people have begun hoping against
hope that Donald Trump's presidency will not do great harm to America and the
world — not necessarily catastrophic harm, certainly not overnight, at least
not if —. But it's another matter to hope that Trump's election will not prove
to have done great harm already. Let's review how that came about, in three
stages.
1) Trump publicized himself without
spending much money by being "good copy" of the worst kind for the mass
media, by rewarding cameras and microphones with spectacle and verbal violence.
2) He became a major political commodity
without submitting to any broker by means of grassroots activism, which was
dramatically amplified and elaborated into fanciful forms by social media.
Again, the mainstream media retailed his directly-marketed messages for free.
3) He exploited a demand for change without
telling how he'd supply it by whistling up a host of demons: racism, bigotry,
generalized anger and fear, fascination with the grotesque, and the fugitive
urge to poke a hole in the membrane of civilization and see what happens.
This is the story of a demagogue. The harm
in demagoguery is not limited to that which is done in office by the knave or
fool who used it to get there. The individual may be an efficient tyrant or an
inefficient one or no tyrant at all, but only an infant politician who
recklessly used the tricks of demagoguery for political gain. Those differences
are not trivial. But in any case the demagogue has done unforgivable harm,
possibly epoch-making harm, in the process.
The ten days following Donald Trump's
victory have brought hundreds of reports of hate crimes, some actually invoking
his name. His demons seem to think the witching hour is come. Though they're
probably mistaken if they believe that the federal authorities will be on their
side now, it's all too likely that the electoral process will be. After this,
what incentive will produce a field of candidates who soberly vie to prove
themselves the best prepared and most level-headed? What hope is there that
Trump's proven formula for success won't become the new standard and send the
Republic spiralling downward until a very painful lesson has been learned, or
until it's too late?
There is hope, but the way ahead can't be
painless in any case. The best hope of a speedy recovery lies in finding
President Trump to be neither more nor less than a harmful charlatan. It would
be foolish to hope and work for disaster, but it would be less than wise to hope
and work for a largely tolerable Trump Era. In order for America to get
demagogues out of its system in short order, people who reluctantly chose Trump
must come to rue the day. It's those people, precisely because they are not
fanatics or zombies, who bear the heaviest moral burden and also hold the power
to restore their country to political health. They must not come through this
with any sense of vindication.
Two days after the election, Senator
Elizabeth Warren (Democrat) addressed the AFL-CIO Executive Council. Many
people had wished that Warren herself would run for president. No doubt she is
worthy of that wish, but in her speech she made an ill-considered start on
retrieving the souls of marginal Trump supporters before they're ready. She said
they "did not vote for Donald Trump because of the bigotry and hate that
fueled his campaign rallies. They voted for him despite the hate." The
apparent idea here is to let those people save face as a first step back from
the choice they made last week. But the fact remains that they voted for a man
whom they knew to be an agent of hate and bigotry. They bartered acceptance of
those things for change. In other words, they sold their souls. Good people who
wish to remain good people will not do that. They'll accept any amount of
stagnation rather than accept bigotry and hate. By all means, let those
Americans who chose to follow in the dust of Trump's army turn their steps
toward home. But let them do so when they've had enough, in a spirit of
revulsion and eager self-redemption. These are adults. They should be allowed
to shoulder full responsibility for what they have done.
Trump's legions can boast that their prince
has won the presidency barring a mass revolt of swing-state electors, which
would throw the country into chaos and exalt the powers of evil all the more.
The boast they cannot make to their anti-Trump compatriots is, "There are
more of us than there are of you." It's clear now that Hillary Clinton has
a plurality of popular votes. The ballot-counting is still going on, albeit in
the context of a definite electoral victory for Trump. At this writing,
Clinton's margin is more than one million votes and growing. Trump won the
election because his smaller number of votes was spread across state lines more
advantageously. Still, these must be trying times for liberals who grew up
thinking of the People as a reliable wellspring of wisdom, goodness, and votes.
When the defeated Hillary Clinton spoke to
the nation, she unwittingly turned a spotlight on the greatest error of her
long quest for the presidency (as distinct from the errors of a lifetime). She
urged women and girls, as women and girls, to pursue their dreams and to
shatter "that highest and hardest glass ceiling" which has historically
kept women from becoming president. There's nothing wrong with that except that
it's irrelevant to the subject of Clinton's defeat. From the beginning, the
attempt to sell her candidacy to women as the Making of the First Woman
President was an insult to their intelligence. Women were expected to keep
their eyes on this political Nativity star and raptly follow it as a bloc — an
unbeatable biological bloc, if one assumes that human beings will consent to
behave like mere organisms. In the event, many women looked at Clinton herself.
They noted her character traits. They noted a relentlessly self-seeking,
issue-harnessing go-getter in contrast with Bernie Sanders, who clearly was
motivated by the will to right wrongs and make the world a better place. They
noted ties to Wall Street bankers and noted what the FBI called "extremely
careless" handling of classified information in email. On election day,
exit polls revealed that 42% of women and a majority of white women with
college degrees, whom Clinton and other marshals of women-as-women tend to
mistake for their own shadows, preferred Donald Trump. One wishes they had
swallowed Hillary Clinton in spite of everything, but they must have found her
too big a pill.
And so the world, through no fault of its
own, and America, through various faults of its own, are to see how things
change after an ignorant, lazy, irresponsible blowhard goes to Washington and
straight into the president's office. More troubling still is the change that's
already afoot because of his demagoguery. If Donald Trump were given to
reflection, a habit which he explicitly scorns, the thought of it might trouble
even him. Surely it must trouble his running mate, Mike Pence, a deeply
religious man who should know his Bible. He stood by, smiling through a grim
visage and mechanically clapping, while Trump sowed the wind. Now they and we
will reap a whirlwind of unknown force and duration.
As Martin Luther observed,
The mad mob does not ask how it could be better, only that it be different. And when it then becomes worse, it must change again. Thus they get bees for flies, and at last hornets for bees.At this rate, the most inspiring slogan of the next election cycle could be, "Bees or hornets. The choice is yours."
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To jump ahead three months for some observations on the way the whirlwind blows with President Trump in office, please see "Bound for Treason".
