America’s Troubled Politics
Writing in the February issue of The Atlantic, staff contributor Mark Leibovich looked back to the beginnings of the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump was gaining traction in the contest to succeed Barack Obama. Invited to deliver the commencement address at the City College of New York that year, Michelle Obama used the occasion to criticize candidate Trump’s incendiary rhetoric. “That is not who we are,” she admonished her audience. “That is not what the country stands for.”
As Trump’s third quest for the nation’s highest office unfolds, Leibovich questions the accuracy of the former First Lady’s statement: “Who is ‘we’ anyway? Because it sure seems like as lot of this ‘we’ keeps voting for Trump. Today the dictum seems more like a liberal wish than any true assessment of our national character.”
The man has a point. Over the last year, Donald Trump’s poll numbers have held steady, and as of today this inarticulate, twice impeached, cruelly misogynistic, insurrectionist grifter is slightly favored to reclaim the office he lost by an alarmingly slim margin just three years ago.
Trump’s stump speeches feature a crazy mix of invective and gibberish, but his followers still lap it up and beg for more. Brian Karem, who writes for the on-line journal Salon, attended a recent rally and asked members of the MAGA crowd whether they approved of their hero’s prediction of a “bloodbath” if he’s denied the presidency. Oh, our man was just triggering the liberal snowflakes, they assured Karem. He shouldn’t be taken literally. Karem responded that he was less worried about liberals being triggered than he was about “gun-hoarding lunatics who would shoot others based on what Trump says.”
“They deserve it,” one Red-Hatted interviewee told him calmly.
Over the past decade or so a whole lot of ink has been devoted to explaining why such a large segment of the American electorate is so aggrieved and angry - almost to the point of apoplexy – over the way the country’s affairs are being managed. People insist their voices aren’t being heard, we are told; that they feel a lack of respect from the “elites”, that shifting demographics has resulted in a loss of status, and that, of course, the whole system (economic, political, juridical) is rigged. Yes…inflation, immigration, crime, are also mentioned as sources of frustration, but even as inflation and crime trend positive, discontent remains stubbornly high.
Part of this can be attributed to Americans’ lack of historical memory. Asked by a CBS interviewer if the economy was stronger in 2020 than it is today, a voter leaning toward Trump replied “yes,” despite abundant evidence to the contrary. Polls continue to show that most Americans believe their own economic futures would be better with The Donald rather than Uncle Joe at the helm.
Seeking a breather from this steady stream of commentary, I recently pulled a novel off the shelf that I hadn’t looked at since graduate school. Albert Camus’s The Fall was published in 1957, and the entire book consists of a one-sided conversation between a former Parisian attorney, Jean-Baptiste Clamence, and a nameless man whom he buttonholed in a seedy Amsterdam bar. Over the course of several days Clamence natters on about his own personal history and philosophical outlook, spurred on by occasional prompts and questions from his patient interlocutor.
The Fall is regarded as an existentialist classic, but in light of recent political tribulations I found several passages that spoke to our own dilemma. Writing in the aftermath of World War II Camus, a former French Resistance fighter, wonders why so many Europeans – German, Italian, French, Austrian, Romanian, and even American – found fascism attractive? Why did they allow themselves to be co-opted by such a ruthless gang of thugs? Camus’ protagonist explains: “The truth is that every intelligent man…dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone. As it is not so easy as the detective novels might lead one to believe, one generally relies on politics and joins the cruelest party.”
This seems spot-on, and so does another of Clamence’s aphoristic observations, delivered near the end of the narrative: “Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” I would hazard that these two comments help account for Trump’s – like fascist strongmen everywhere - uncanny appeal. Or, as the conservative political scientist Charles Murray approvingly observed: “He’s our murder weapon.”
