The first presidential election I can remember is the one in which Dwight Eisenhower ran against Adlai Stevenson. I was in elementary school, and Eisenhower was the clear favorite in our little political world. We chanted on the playground, “We like Ike. He’s our man. We threw Stevenson in the garbage can.” Fast forward through 16 more presidential campaigns and we’re now living in that garbage can, thanks to a campaign that has dragged us so low into the political gutter that it’s hard to see how we can ever climb out.
Sunday night, October 9, the world watched in horror as an orange fascist strongman degraded a debate for the high office of President of the United States of America to a playground fight. Things that have never before happened in a U. S. presidential campaign—things we thought could never happen here—unfolded before our eyes in a nightmare scenario that has left sane voters reeling and running from the orange terror.
But not all voters. And that’s the frightening part. That there could be even one person left in this country still planning to vote for Donald Trump is beyond belief, but in fact there are millions who look at the same information you and I look at and see him as their messiah. How the hell did we, the United States of America, reach a point where sewer politics seems normal to a large contingent of our population? How is it possible for millions of Americans to be so oblivious to facts that no matter how much evidence mounds up, they stand by their man to the end?
These are some things I jotted down on my note pad as I watched Sunday night’s debate. Donald Trump said to Hillary Clinton at least twice, and I think more, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” At one point, he churlishly responded to her, “Yeah, because you have nothing to say.” He called her the devil. He asked the moderators more than once, “Why don’t you interrupt her? You interrupt me all the time. Why don’t you interrupt her?” He accused them more than once of siding with her: “Yeah, three on one. That’s real fair.”
In the 56-year history of televised presidential debates, beginning with the 1960 debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, Americans have never witnessed anything close to the churlish, fifth-grade, school playground language that we heard from the candidate representing one of our two major political parties. In past debates, did candidates clash? Of course! Did they have extreme differences? Plenty of them! Did any of them ever call his opponent the devil or whine about the moderators or directly attack the moderators? No! Dignity is dead.
Donald Trump, throughout the debate, resembled an angry, defiant child who has been chastised and is determined to reassert his bully stance and subdue those who have humiliated him. His face was expressionless, his posture stiff. The body language expressed rage and hatred. These things don’t happen in the U. S. A. But most menacing of all is not the childishness and fifth-grade bullying; we’ve been watching that for over a year. What has often been referred to as “scorched-earth politics” was the thing that made this second debate particularly ominous, and Americans have never before seen anything that comes close to Trump’s gutter tactics and strongman persona.
Before the debate began, as we all know, he gathered four women who have made past allegations against former President Bill Clinton and broadcast a video of himself sitting at a table with them. He then took them into the debate hall to sit facing Hillary Clinton to unnerve, humiliate, and intimidate her. This is NOT the America any of us have ever known! Even worse, according to CNN’s Dana Bash, Trump’s plan was to seat those women with his family and have them enter with his family, meaning that Bill Clinton would have had to greet each of them face to face and shake each of their hands (or not), as he greeted and shook hands with Melania Trump and the rest of the Trump family members. Fortunately, word of this plan reached the debate co-chair in time for him to stop it from happening. Who would have believed we’d see such strongman tactics used in American politics, with the whole world watching us? That stunt is stunning.
Then there was Trump’s physical intimidation and menacing behavior on the debate platform itself. When Trump was taking his turn at speaking, Clinton sat respectfully on her chair and laid her microphone on the table. She picked it up and rose to her feet only when it was her turn to speak. She also looked at him and listened to him while he was speaking. In stark contrast, when she was speaking, he roamed the stage, spent little time looking her in the eye, at times lurked menacingly behind her, invaded her space, and clearly intended to unnerve and intimidate her. His microphone was always in his hand, making it convenient to interrupt her 15 times. Several times, he snapped his mic to his mouth while she was speaking, ready to pounce at the first opportunity. These are bullying and intimidation tactics the likes of which Americans have never before witnessed.
But we’re still not to the low point of the night: his direct threats of prosecution and implied threat of jail for her if he is elected president. Wow! Russia, Venezuela, Taiwan, Chile, Egypt, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Iran—all of these places have in their history examples of leaders killing or imprisoning their political opponents. But those things could never happen in the U. S. A. Or so we thought. However, we’re now one step closer: the threat has been made in front of an international audience. That’s enough to keep every citizen awake at night.
Respected journalist Dan Rather’s takeaway from Sunday night’s debate is “I suspect . . . that this is a man who, at a fundamental level, does not understand what it means to be an American.” To be qualified to lead this country, one must understand who we are as a people; and that requires knowledge obtained through years of study, reading, observing, and understanding. Trump has done none of these.
Intelligent people who have been listening to Donald Trump since July of 2015 have observed the lack of specifics in his “policy” speeches, such as they are. He claims he will deport 11 million people, build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, ban an entire religious group from entering our country, clean up the inner cities, make everyone obey the law, and a lot of other things; but we have heard barely a word about HOW he would make these things happen. That’s because Trump is what’s known as a strongman. Ed Kilgore, in an article entitled “Trump’s Strongman Politics” published in the Daily Intelligencer,” explains:
Trump’s whole platform is himself, a strongman in the ancient tradition of tribal chieftains whose very presence is a guarantor of safety and prosperity. Whatever the problem is, he’ll “fix it,” and that’s particularly true of challenges where “strength” is, in theory, of inherent value, such as maintaining a credible deterrent to foreign aggression, negotiating trade agreements, or in general threatening law breakers with violence. Adopting policies like other politicians actually undercuts this message, so Trump doesn’t bother with them. The convention managers last night might as well have emblazoned on the screen behind him Pontius Pilate’s words in presenting Jesus to the people of Jerusalem: Ecce homo! Behold the man!
Mr. Kilgore goes on to say that the strongman is reassuring to some, terrifying to others. This helps to explain the loyalty of Trump’s base and finally sheds a small glimmer of light on the ever-perplexing mystery of his popularity among evangelical Christians, whose stated beliefs are so starkly at odds with his rhetoric and life history. Central to Trump’s hold on his base is their authoritarianism. Matthew MacWilliams conducted a national poll of 1800 registered voters and published the results in Politico Magazine, titling his article “The One Weird Trait that Predicts Whether You’re a Trump Supporter”:
If I asked you what most defines Donald Trump supporters, what would you say? They’re white? They’re poor? They’re uneducated? You’d be wrong.
In fact, I’ve found a single statistically significant variable predicts whether a voter supports Trump—and it’s not race, income or education levels: It’s authoritarianism.
That’s right, Trump’s electoral strength—and his staying power—have been buoyed, above all, by Americans with authoritarian inclinations.
The problem with the strongman and authoritarianism is that it’s so starkly at odds with our better nature as Americans. To be sure, we have a long, dark history of human rights abuses, beginning with our robbing Native Americans of their ancestral home and continuing with kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, followed by another century of Jim Crow laws and oppression. Collectively we’re not exactly saints, but there is what we like to think of as our better nature: the part of us that promotes justice; that has fought against racism and extended equal rights to oppressed people; that hears the voices of Native Americans trying desperately to protect the remnants of their ancestral places from being raped by more corporate greed; that rushes to the aid of suffering people around the world; that says “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”; the part that has made us—with all of our sins—the shining example of democracy and human goodness.
The world is changing. Even in the country where we’ve always thought we were safe because we had abundant resources and power, and we’ve always come out on top in international conflicts, we’re now seeing other countries developing nuclear capabilities; we see leaders who don’t like us and who have not only the desire but potentially the ability to do us great harm. Our feeling of security is being threatened, and many now see the strongman as our only hope for peace and safety.
As ludicrous as the Orange Man’s promises are to many of us, many others see a system that has been increasingly rigged against them, that has ignored their ideas and needs and pandered to the richer and more powerful. The problem, and the enemy, in their minds is the government. Now someone who could possibly become the leader of that government has become their spokesman, voicing their sentiments, admitting that the system is rigged against them, and in true authoritarian fashion is assuring them that he will change it all and make their lives better.
Dan Rather wrote:
It was John Adams who penned the phrase, “a government of laws, and not of men.” This is how our Founding Fathers saw our national destiny. This is the spirit that our citizens, over the ages, have demanded of our political leaders follow. I suspect it is something most Americans still believe.
A government of laws. That’s our Constitution, the document which assigns power and authority to lawmakers and with which all of their actions must agree. Our Constitution calls for a separation of powers, our founders’ plan for making sure our nation would never be at the mercy of a strongman. The executive branch of our government must work with the legislative and the judicial branches; a president has limited power to act independently; but he can’t build 1900-mile walls, ban religious groups from entering the country, or deport 11 million people on his own. And such things can’t be accomplished within a week of a new president’s taking office; there’s a protocol in place for congressional action, which as we all know, can be a tortuous process which can takes months or even years. Donald Trump doesn’t know any of that, because he doesn’t read and has no experience with government; he knows only his own need for power.
A government not of men. That was the promise of our founders that our system of government would never allow for a strongman, a dictator, but that power would always rest on the will of the people expressed through their representatives who would be guided by our Constitution, “the Law of the Land.” And we’ve always felt secure in the belief that the atrocities we’ve seen happen in other countries couldn’t happen here.
Until now. Now we have a strongman who has captured the hearts and minds and unwavering loyalty of millions of our fellow citizens. According to MacWilliams, authoritarians “respond aggressively to outsiders, especially when they feel threatened.” Sound familiar? This tells us that at the root of authoritarianism is fear: fear of government, fear of oppression, fear of attack, fear of one’s own powerlessness against hostility. What’s the answer? The strongman: the person who “alone can fix it.” What authoritarians fail to recognize at the outset, however, is that such protection—even if it is real—comes at a high price. The problems they see in the current situation are nothing compared to the system that will be created by the strongman once in charge.
But that can’t happen here. This is the U.S.A. We don’t do things like that. Really? An authoritarian leader has a rabid core of supporters who will vote for him even if he grabs every single one of them by the crotch; and there are millions of them. He won the nomination of one of the two major political parties in the U.S.A. He’s polling in the 30% and 40% range for winning the presidency of the United States; unless he increases that percentage, he’ll lose, but let it sink in that over a third of your fellow citizens plan to cast their sacred vote for this empty suit. And last of all, the threat has been issued: this person plans to punish his political opponent if he is elected. It couldn’t happen here? It’s already happening. And we alone can fix it, through the power of the vote.
Since the root cause of attraction to authoritarian leaders is fear, we’d do well to remember these words from Martin Luther King:
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”