Three Online Essays about Donald Trump’s Presidential Candidacy — Provide Insight into the Psychological Workings of Our Dead Democracy

02 March 2016

Citations — to 3 essays worth reading

Andrew J. Bacevich, Don’t Cry for Me, America, Unz Review (01 March 2016)

Amanda Taub, The rise of American authoritarianism, Vox (01 March 2016)

Aaron Barlow, This is a War For America’s Soul: Donald Trump Reflects Frustrations of an Embittered White America, AlterNet (28 February 2016)

I single these three out because . . .

They go beyond Mainstream Brainlessness in evaluating what underlies the Donald Trump political movement.

Andrew Bacevich — democracy is dead, let’s be entertained

Regarding today’s American context:

American democracy has been decaying for decades. The people know that they are no longer truly sovereign.

They know that the apparatus of power, both public and private, does not promote the common good, itself a concept that has become obsolete.

They have had their fill of irresponsibility, lack of accountability, incompetence, and the bad times that increasingly seem to go with them.

Exactly so.

This is the point that Bacevich’s “celebrity journalists who . . . specialize in smirking cynicism” regularly miss in their pretended discussions about Trump. I confess to enjoying The Donald’s narcissistic genius in hanging those incessantly annoying twits out to dry. Which, I think, is part of Bacevich’s implied point about our culture’s prevailing nihilism. When everything is already shot to hell, at least we can enjoy some of the people who wrecked it all getting their due.

If Trump (or someone like him) wins the presidency:

[T]he United States will cease to be a constitutional republic.

Once President Trump inevitably declares that he alone expresses the popular will, Americans will find that they have traded the rule of law for a version of caudillismo. Trump’s Washington could come to resemble Buenos Aires in the days of Juan Perón, with . . . plebiscites suitably glamorous stand-ins for elections.

[I]n disturbingly large numbers [Americans] have turned to Trump to strip bare the body politic, willing to take a chance that he will come up with something that, if not better, will at least be more entertaining.

As Argentines and others who have trusted their fate to demagogues have discovered, such expectations are doomed to disappointment.

Well, maybe not.

The American security state is already so deep that it will be difficult for any one commander in chief to occasion appreciable change in the way things are done. Plutocrats and the government bureaucracy that they have bought will continue to run America, pretty much the way they do now.

The threat is not that Mr. Trump would become dictator, but instead that his id-like passions would too often harmonize with the repressive authoritarian corporate and government bureaucracies that already control the United States.

What more could the Oligarchy ask for than a “leader” (a) who insists on making American both “great” and “safe” and (b) who is so skillful at getting a significant portion of the electorate to support his essentially unachievable goals?

Achieving the impossible calls for endlessly profitable capitalistic endeavors. For example, no border wall can be too high. No debt collector sent to Mexico too well armed. No bureaucratic barrier against browns, reds, yellows and blacks too impermeable. No religious test and application too stringent. And no foreign challenge too minute for Proud America to (literally) combat.

People familiar with the collapse of Germany’s Weimar Republic before the World War II era may begin to see some faint, but disturbing parallels in much of our public’s current temper.

Amanda Taub — it is fear, combined with much of the public’s authoritarian tendencies

Ms. Taub, a former human rights attorney, wrote that:

Authoritarianism was the best single predictor of support for Trump. . . . [T]he relationship between authoritarianism and Trump support remained robust, even after controlling for education level and gender.

[A]uthoritarians tend to fear very specific kinds of physical threats.

Authoritarians . . . tend to most fear threats that come from abroad, such as ISIS or Russia or Iran. These are threats . . . to which people can put a face; a scary terrorist or an Iranian ayatollah. Non-authoritarians were much less afraid of those threats.

[N]on-authoritarians who are sufficiently frightened of physical threats such as terrorism could essentially be scared into acting like authoritarians.

That's important, because for years now, Republican politicians and Republican-leaning media such as Fox News have been telling viewers nonstop that the world is a terrifying place and that President Obama isn't doing enough to keep Americans safe.

[R]esearch on authoritarianism suggests it's not just physical threats driving all this. There should be another kind of threat . . . pushing authoritarians to these extremes: the threat of social change.

Amanda Taub, The rise of American authoritarianism, Vox (01 March 2016) (extracts).

Aaron Barlow — it’s the powerless white guys

Mr. Barlow’s take is more conventional, but it is elegantly (if ultimately unpersuasively) argued. I give Mr. Barlow an “A” for working in some pertinent sociological history:

Trump is a vehicle for angry whites who feel invisible to elites.

[T]hey are people who have felt forgotten for generations. They are not descended from the American identity as was it imagined and written in New England and imagined and crafted separately by the Southern white elite.

While New England and New York were developing the first real American intellectual and artistic culture and the South was building its antebellum “paradise” on the backs of slaves, the poor Americans of the Appalachians and then of the West were busily engaged in a genocide of Native Americans that no one wanted to praise or even admit was happening.

At the same time, they were eking out a living on land that often, as soon as they tried to lay claim to it, turned out to be “owned” by someone from the East.

Whatever garden these poorer Americans could find or create or conquer or defend was not often even theirs for very long. More frequently than we imagine, they were forced once again to move farther west and to start from scratch—again. Poverty breathed down their necks; little of their lives would ever qualify as “pastoral.”

The manipulated among the conservative Americans have finally found their voice. Unfortunately for the rest of us, its articulation comes through a circus entertainer of little substance.

Barlow arguably goes astray in defining Mr. Trump’s support too narrowly. It is more than just these poor “white guys.”

I also take mild offense at Barlow’s implication that his defined group of Trump support is apparently too stupid to detect the circus entertainer in their candidate. Why can’t they just be mad about the status quo like the rest of us? Anger tends not to be thoughtful, no matter who experiences it.

Of the three essays, Barlow’s is evidentiarily the weakest. But, being a former historian, I like the thrust of his insight. He is not wrong, merely short of being more broadly right.

The moral? — Trump, so far, is a manifestation of subterranean tumult

These essays’ implications go much beyond Mr. Trump — who may or may not disappear from the political forefront (metaphorically) tomorrow.

Something in our money-murdered democracy is stirring.

PeteFree.com

Three Online Essays about Donald Trump’s Presidential Candidacy — Provide Insight into the Psychological Workings of Our Dead Democracy