My friend Keith and I founded this blog nine years ago. In
our Statement of Purpose at that time we characterized our objective as "to post opposing views on a variety of
political and economic issues and to encourage their resolution through
constructive debate."
Idealistically, we went on to enthuse that "legitimate and useful common grounds can be found when people with
different views and understandings listen to each other and synthesize new
ideas from their pragmatic contributions." Neither of us was under any illusion back
then that America's political dialogue
was likely to elevate itself dramatically any time soon. What we failed to
foresee was how dangerously instead the raucous party was preparing to
accelerate downhill.
The blog
has been mostly quiescent for the past three years. Keith can speak for himself
here, but the reason for my own passivity is that I no longer relish politics
as I once did, and hence debating is no longer as much fun. I find it painful
to watch television news anymore, and even print journalism is distasteful. All sources seem biased in one
direction or the other, some of them grotesquely so, and hidden agendas
proliferate everywhere. The "search for truth" has become instead a
search for confirmation of pre-existing opinions and for factual or
pseudo-factual weapons with which to bash the other side. "Fake News" is the defining metaphor
of our era, and each side seems
oblivious to how egregiously it has allowed willful distortion to corrupt its
own intellectual grounding.
However,
Keith has suddenly emerged from the quiet in a flurry of three postings over
the last month. As usual, he has written well and made some provocative and even partially accurate points, but then allowed
himself to wander onto less secure ground. I can feel some of the old contrarian
zeal rising back up in me and will come out of retirement here, at least
briefly. Maybe I can coax my friend back to a semblance of reason. In his three
posts he's thrown more material against the wall than what I have the patience to
address in detail, but there are couple of salient threads, so let me go after
these.
What Is Trump?
Let me
start with his 4/19/20 post where Keith accuses me of "tenacious adherence to
the tenets of Trumpism". Holy Moly! I'm
pretty sure he's just baiting me here because he knows better, but let me go through
the motions of taking the comment seriously. As Keith well knows, I didn't feel I could stomach either Trump or
Hillary in 2016 and, after considering a personal election boycott, chose instead
to cast a quixotic and half-facetious vote for Gary Johnson.
I've followed Donald Trump's career for longer
than most of his current critics, and while I feel I know him better than they
do, it happens that I mostly agree with the manner in which they size him up: He's a liar, a bully, a cheat, and, in my
opinion, seriously over-rated even as a businessman. He's also an illogical
thinker, an atrocious public speaker, a compulsive self-promoter, and probably
the weirdest man ever to hold the office of President. However, and let's be
clear about this, he's also not a Republican in any ideological sense of the label. He
opposes free trade, is a neo-isolationist, and fails to give even lip service
to fiscal prudence or limitation to the size of government. In fact, he
supported his then-friend Hillary Clinton and identified more-or-less as a
Democrat as late as 2008, even though, to be fair about it, he was no more a
principled advocate for that party than he is now for what's left mine.
He was an opportunist who understood what
was happening to the Republican Party and simply commandeered it, rather
like a bottom-feeding sea creature taking up residence in an abandoned shell.
Nonetheless,
during the Kavanaugh hearings I made the decision to vote for Donald Trump in
the next election. This twist was driven not at all by any change in my
attitude towards Trump, but rather by my growing horror at what I saw coming to
life among his opponents. The hearings
provided a public stage for what I saw as pre-totalitarian behavior.
Playtime Revolution
I
went to college during the 1960's and attended a large Midwestern university
which during my final year was almost entirely shut down by left-wing student
protests and a strike among radical teaching assistants. Professors attempting to conduct classes were
shouted down and protests turned violent, staying that way with varying degrees
of intensity throughout my final semester.
One sunny morning my girlfriend and
I walked to our local Kroger to buy groceries, only to find the store reduced
to a charred ruin. Marauding leftists had burned it to the ground the night
before. Months later, a University research center doing work for the military was bombed and
a graduate student was killed there after having chosen the wrong night to work
late.
Radical
thinking pervaded the campus, and not
only did few people speak up to condemn these crimes, but the local culture
hummed to life with enthusiasm for what was interpreted as advent for the
long-heralded Revolution about to transform America into a socialist nation. Cuba was the model and Che Guevara the
prophet.
I
myself remained mostly on the outside of all this, although my friends and
I flirted with the ideology. I read a
fair amount of radical literature and continued to do so even after I had come
to understand the problem with it all. I developed an intellectual interest in
totalitarian thinking because I wanted to understand better the weird hypnotic
hold it gains over people. I read the entire first volume of Marx's Das Capital, most of Lenin's major
tracts, some of Trotsky's work, and even several articles penned by Joseph
Stalin, who while being better known
today for his dungeons and mass murders, was also a surprisingly prolific
author. Wanting
to see the best of the other side, I then waded through large sections of
Hitler's Mein Kampf, even though I
lacked the stomach to take in this foul, rambling tome in its entirety.
The
common denominators I discovered in all this literature were a murderous self-assurance
and an intolerance for dissent of any kind or even traces of ambiguity. The
argot employed by these writers teems with demeaning imagery applied to
opponents: vermin, rats, insects, lice, filth, and so forth. The objective in
all cases was the dehumanization of adversaries, intended as the necessary first step towards their
elimination.
Show Trials
One
dimension of totalitarianism reached its
apex in Hitler's death camps. Another dimension, however, found its logical
culmination in Stalin's show trials. These, of course, were not trials at all.
They were propaganda spectacles designed to humiliate opponents - some real, most imagined - and to serve as a
warning to anyone even considering opposition to the regime or to Stalin
personally. Charges were often invented out of whole cloth or else built around
preposterous exaggerations. Victims had been browbeaten behind the scenes and
often tortured in order to extract groveling confessions for crimes never
committed. They had been dehumanized, and the verdicts against them were predetermined.
With
all this in mind, it's perhaps not hard to understand the atavistic
premonitions I experienced as the Kavanaugh hearings got underway. Triggering these inquisitions was nothing
more substantial than a 35-year-old repressed memory that had once been coaxed out
of a young psychotherapy patient! The therapist, who was a partisan
Democrat with political connections, passed the story along to activist lawyers
who in turn passed it on to politicians, who for their part were looking for
any promising angle from which to sink the Kavanaugh nomination.
The usual
drumbeat commenced and a few other seemingly collaborating stories materialized
- Kavanaugh had, after all, once belonged
to a fraternity - but there was nothing of a material enough nature to justify the
juggernaut that now rumbled into motion. The American nation was for weeks on
end dragged through a debilitating spectacle during which Kavanaugh and his
family were subjected to the most vicious and salacious kind of personal attacks
while an overwrought media blared non-stop coverage. The judge's wife had to
remove their young daughters from the hearing room at one point because of what
they were being exposed to. The entire
Kavanaugh family was being dehumanized.
Due process eventually prevailed, of course,
and Kavanaugh was confirmed. Yet the
political blood lust that had been unleashed only grew in intensity with the
subsequent impeachment hearings that targeted Trump directly. Once again, virulent
stories surfaced which revealed unsavory
behavior but failed to rise to the level needed by the prosecutors to achieve
their goal. The narrative kept shifting as
Democrats struggled for anything promising to stick. It was as though they were hoping that by making Trump appear vile
enough, lacking all humanity, any old
charge would suffice.
They finally
settled on an apparent back-door agreement between the Trump administration and
the Ukrainian government to trade aid for political favors. This was an ironic focus given, of all things,
Joe Biden's own well-documented behavior
in his role as point-man for the Obama Administration's Ukraine policy. This
hypocrisy was waved breezily aside, however, as the Democrats charged excitedly
forward.
It
was, of course, all for naught in the end. Nothing had turned up that crossed
the threshold into the realm of impeachable offence, and Trump was exonerated.
The impeachment campaign had begun literally as soon as he assumed office in
2017. It had continued for over three years, consumed tens of millions of
dollars and countless man-hours. It completely pre-occupied the news media and,
most damagingly of all, distracted all
branches of our government from genuinely serious issues in need of their attention. Yet it arrived only at the
dead end which had beckoned from the start. It had accomplished nothing.
Aftermath
What
the sorry spectacle did succeed in doing was utterly to poison political waters
that beforehand had already turned dark. There is an old spiritual adage about
the self-destructive nature of hatred. It is that hatred corrupts the hater and, without him even knowing it,
gradually turns him into the very image of his bete noire. "Hater" has, like "Fake News", became one of bywords of this destructive new era,
and we have become a nation of haters. It's just that we all seem to believe
hatred arises only from the other side. We ourselves walk around blameless and avoiding
mirrors.
I
find it alarming that we're about to hold another Presidential election in this
environment. The two-party system in this country has evolved over the years in
a manner designed to force diverse political factions to cluster around two
separate poles and to smooth out their differences before submitting rival
positions to the voters. The theory underlying this system, a good one in my judgment, is that most
factions get input into one platform or the other and afterwards have a stake
in the outcome of any elections they're able to win. The truly dangerous factions become marginalized in the process because
their potential support is co-opted by
groupings willing to eschew violence and exert influence through civil
negotiation. While still allowed free speech, the extremists remain on the
fringes where they're capable of doing only limited damage.
End Of The Democratic
Party
Our
Democratic Party has a proud heritage. A
couple of years ago in an article I posted on the origins of America's modern
political parties (American Counterpoint, 11/9/17), I said that the Democrats had come
to stand for "inclusiveness and the
application of government power to ensure everyone got a fair share of the
nation's growing prosperity". I
described the Republicans, in contrast, as champions of "responsible hard work, self-reliance and
economic freedom." I said at the time, and still believe, that the
natural tension between these two sets of aspirations is healthy. They have in
the past, when managed by responsible
and skilled politicians on both sides, strengthened the nation and made it a
better place.
Those
days appear to be long gone. As already discussed, the Republicans have turned
the keys of their party over to a man who has no principles, traditional or
otherwise, and who instead is driven by only an undisciplined strain of personal ambition. The Democrats, for
their part, have done something that in my judgment far worse - they have turned their party over to their
own extremist fringe.
(I'll continue these observations, and get back to Keith, in a
second posting soon to follow)
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