A Ramble on Trump by Richard Sale

I began this piece with these words.

   We are responsible for the rise of Trump. Every time we have not made the extra effort, every time we leave something undone that has moral or spiritual and intellectual value, every time we don’t do something honest or good or worthy, we provide the soil for a man like Trump to rise and flourish.

     We have allowed ourselves to become slaves to the poking of gadgets or TV news or reality shows --every time we let apathy overcome the force of effort and let us evades the effort required to read and study in order to understanding how the world works and our place in it we have created Trump. He is the mammoth created by our own laziness, ignorance and irresponsibility. Every time we tried to be just like everybody else we provided ground for the rise of Trump.

     Our country was formed by aristocrats, men of learning and man of breeding. They knew that society is by nature aristocratic. They said so. The Founders were men of the world: they were lawyers, farmers, planter-business men, speculators, investors. They feared popular uprisings (Is not the rise of Trump a kind of popular uprising?) They were suspicious of democracy because they thought individual self-interest “the most dangerous and unbrookable quality of man,” and it was their aim to control it. They gloried in the feeling that they were doing something new that benefit the bulk of the people. They did not think that the superior person is a petulant individual who thinks he is superior to the rest. In their lives, they made great demands on themselves, piling up duties and displaying the stamina to conquer difficult obstacles; they were driven by their own idea of perfection and warned against excessive self-interest and greed and self-aggrandizement. People who had no ideal of perfection were chaff, and they were the wheat. No society was possible without moral and intellectual standards. It was the effort to develop them that infused pride to people’s efforts.

“There is a degree of animal spirits and showy accomplishment which enables its possessors to get a start in the majestic world, says Hazlitt. He goes on in another essay, to describe people who “strut and swagger and bluff and jostle his way through life, and have the upper hand of those who are his betters in everything but health and strength.”

   The Founders, bewildered and speechless, would gaze helplessly at today’s political world.

     “I love the poorly educated,” Trump trumpets. In other words, he praised the commonplace mind, as if being complacent is the only goal of life worth praising. The commonplace mind has a right to rule and wield power even if it is commonplace. Talent, taste, wit, learning, culture, courtesy have no value. They buy nothing. Gone are the select, the qualified, and accomplished. The world in Trumps eyes has been mistaken all along. Never mind what civilization has worked so hard to achieve. He is going to make the Earth great again.

(At this point, I stopped and began again. What useless words!)

We Fail the System, the System Doesn’t Fail us.

 

 

   The current political strife in America is merely a symptom -- it’s not the disease itself.

     The hard fact is that all political systems, like all civilizations, are successful only for a limited time. For a time they are valid, but after time passes, they succumb to their inborn flaws. “In American politics the development of a retrospective and nostalgic cast of mind has gone hand in hand with the slow decline of traditional faith,” said the historian Richard Hofstadter in 1948. That describes American political attitudes today. No political system is eternal; it is valid for only a limited time. As time passes, the defects of the system come to the surface, and they begin to threaten the operation of the old accepted system.   The defects of our natures drag down our political accomplishments.

   What are these defects? They are born in us at birth. I like to think that I am a good person. I like to think that I am forthright, direct, and faithful to the facts. I am loyal and generous to my friends and I dislike my enemies but I dislike them on sound grounds. I abhor prejudice because it is a product of ignorance, and I labor hard not to be ignorant. (Of course, I constantly fail.) I am like most of the people on the site. Most of us conceive of ourselves as basically virtuous. In my own case, I detect all sorts of defects in my nature, but I like to think they don’t tip the balance against me. My defects are only subsidiary factors, not the decisive ones. My stubbornness in some areas: my selfishness, my moral blindness, the termination to always have my own way – these do not have the same weight as my good qualities. Every one of us feels like this, and it is that sort of self-excusing attitude that produces catastrophes in the world because I am like everyone else and everyone else, like me, overlooks that they are a mixture of evil and good. All virtuous people are a mixture of evil and good. That is a standing fact of human history.

     The political strife that we see is not a melodrama, it is drama. Both sides claim to be righteous and label the other wicked. Both are half right.

     Many of the Republicans are being told that the world has failed them, and taken advantage of them. It has ignored or persecuted them. They turn to Trump in order to see their lives transformed from a losing struggle to a triumphant one, ignoring the warning that all glory is fleeting. Of course, a political party that seethes with a sense of injustice, will uses all means to obtain victory over its rivals. In a political contest, members of one side often view the other as not fit to live. Each side convinces itself that the other side can do what it likes with impunity because when a system is unresponsive their needs and fears there is no other course left excepting aggression and overbearing brute force. The great British historian, Sir. Herbert Butterfield, points out that when it comes to competing forces, changes in a rival’s predominance, its growing strength, will tend to bring a new type of leader to the surface. Thus, we witness the rise of Trump.

     Unfortunately, as soon as victory is gained, his group will soon exhibiting the same hateful traits that before they despised. Success poisons. Success unbridles a group’s worst traits. Their very success will stimulate rapid jealousy in their vanquished opponents. Plus the defeated will become more defiant and restive, and each party will be locked into its own system of self-righteousness. Neither of them retains any possibility of knowing the authentic fears of the other. Both sides will return to being anxious about the designs of the other. In such a contest, the defects of both sides will come to rule and dominate, and a victory of one of them over the other will make things worse. The problem of the defects of human nature is always lurking in every situation. They just wait for their chance to deform any triumph and vitiate its effectiveness.

     Victory is not permanent. Each side plumes itself on its good intentions and believes that the defects are all the other side. Hence the bitter conflict, yet in some sense, bitter conflict is embedded in the situation from the outset. The great British historian Herbert Butterfield observed that “...even though side is aware of its own fears and apprehensions, it always fails to enter properly into the counter-fear of the other party” Neither is capable of realizing that a complete victory over the other is impossible. No political group can achieve absolute security, free from risk, exempt from threats or fears except on terms that will act to alarm its rival.

     It is easy to make judgments if you see only one thing at a time, if you aware of only one side of the issue. What is required is that we must try to see the all the sides of a conflict, which demands having a stereoscopic outlook. There is a bright side. What is ignored is that each rival party acts to moderate in the end and improve the other.

   But the chief point is that all political systems are under judgment because of the moral defects of their leaders and their followers.

     Cupidity

   Every civilization caters to the greed and cupidity of its members. Cupidity is one of the glues that hold a society together. There is a greed for glory, a greed for money, a greed for fame, and a greed to be noticed, a greed for unlimited power over others. Organizations are set up to satisfy the cupidity of a group, but again, the inner defects of a group tend, over time, to rot the system and impair or pervert its effectiveness We forget that our moral defects are always acting to undermine our ideals. If not curbed, those rival greeds act, in the end to destroy the will to do things in common for the good of all.

     Butterfield issues this warning, “History gives us glimpses sometimes of appalling things that can happen when the whole order of things breaks down,” mainly because good and evil are so closely intertwined in the personalities of all of us. When anarchy breaks out after a shooting or a police strike, people who view themselves as respectable citizens suddenly loot or burn or steal or beat other people because the social order has broken down and the restraints of conscience have been broken as well. The rule of law keeps very fallible people behaving much better than they really are.

     Edmund Burke once said that any society is better than having no system at all, the worst course resulting in a society’s inability to defend the weak against the strong. In such a case, we all would be reduced to Thomas Hobbes’ view, in which no human being is able to trust another human being because all human beings are in a state of war. But this is true – even if a society produces a new, more virile order, the defects of human nature are always there, always a work, always energetic in neglecting or weakening the good, and all of are responsible for the quiet, gradual undoing of our ideals. We endure society because it curbs weakens and limits rapacious self-aggrandizement and boundless egotism. But in history, we have all seen how political power behaves once it believes it enjoys impunity. The unspoken goal for every political group is to establish its own tyranny over others. Trump may promise all he likes, but in the end he confronts the same obstacles in human nature as the rest, even in victory.

   Whenever I think of Trump or Hillary, I remember the ominous lines of Yeats:

   Surely the Second Coming is at hand.     The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out     When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi     Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;     A shape with lion body and the head of a man,     A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,     Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it     Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    The darkness drops again but now I know     That twenty centuries of stony sleep     Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,     And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,     Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

   And be warned. As Butterfield said, “Providence may even have given you what you want, only in order to destroy you with it.”

 

Comments

[J]

Colonel,

It appears that Ankara assassinated Russian MI Head in Lebanon in early January

[AEL]

Well, I am pretty sure I understand every word in this article. However, strung together in this particular order, my head starts to spin. Sort of like looking at an overly complicated moving engine - pipes, wires and funny struts spinning in all sorts of directions, but no single thread to figure out how it all fits together.

Is there more to this article than "WASF"? If so, please take pity on me.

[Tyler]

What the hell did I even read here?

[SmoothieX12]

"The political strife that we see is not a melodrama, it is drama."

With all due respect, and I am an avid reader of Federalist Papers, if you call this a "political strife", you ain't seen nothing yet. Some points this essay makes are great and I agree with them, but they are not new. Trump is a symptom but is anybody out there better? Then again, how do we define "better"? Until United States identifies itself as a nation (and I am not going to go into it now), this "strife" will continue. But, then again, Federalist Papers are not politically correct today--no diversity at all. Right now, the US is in the process of shedding last properties of a nationhood.

[cynic]

The 18th century has ended, even in America.

[annamaria]

Thank you. It is not easy to admit that aristocracy is more than breeding but the state of mind, self-discipline, and striving for the ideal through work.

[bks]

"It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat." --Richard Hofstadter

[Valissa]

LOL... thank goodness for that! Those aristocratic men had a fashion sense that is thankfully only available to view in museums and, of course, short YouTube videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEjcQb8Fdyc

Also for your viewing enjoyent, a great sketch from the Jimmy Kimmel show... “Trumped" Starring Matthew Broderick & Nathan Lane https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OemqVWi_R0k

[Ishmael Zechariah]

Richard Sale,

Mayhap you should add "Hillary" after every "Trump" in the first section: "Every time we have not made the extra effort, every time we leave something undone that has moral or spiritual and intellectual value, every time we don’t do something honest or good or worthy, we provide the soil for a man like Trump or a female like "Hillary" to rise and flourish."

After reading your essay I re-read the "Gods of Copybook Headings". http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm

"Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more."

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Your essay was a pleasure to read... Thanks.

Ishmael Zechariah

[leCashier]

Ben Franklin to J Shipley March 17, 1783. He writes about the problems with England in 1783 but sounds so much like the US today

"Let us now forgive and forget. Let each Country seek its Advancement in its own internal Advantages of Arts and Agriculture, not in retarding or preventing the Prosperity of the other. America will, with God’s Blessing, become a great and happy Country; and England, if she has at length gain’d Wisdom, will have gain’d something more valuable, and more essential to her Prosperity, than all she has lost; and will still be a great and respectable Nation. Her great Disease at present is the Number and enormous Salaries and Emoluments of Office. Avarice and Ambition are strong Passions, and separately act with great Force on the human Mind; but when both are united and may be gratified in the same Object, their Violence is almost irresistable, and they hurry Men headlong into Factions and Contentions destructive of all good Government. As long therefore as these great Emoluments subsist, your Parliament will be a stormy Sea, and your public Counsels confounded by private Interests. But it requires much Public Spirit and Virtue to abolish them! more perhaps than can now be found in a Nation so long corrupted."

[Bill Herschel]

"In interviews, even lifelong Republicans who cast a ballot for Mr. Romney four years ago rebelled against his message and plan. “I personally am disgusted by it — I think it’s disgraceful,” said Lola Butler, 71, a retiree from Mandeville, La., who voted for Mr. Romney in 2012. “You’re telling me who to vote for and who not to vote for? Please. There’s nothing short of Trump shooting my daughter in the street and my grandchildren — there is nothing and nobody that’s going to dissuade me from voting for Trump,” Ms. Butler said."

"William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, said he would work actively to put forward an “independent Republican” ticket if Mr. Trump was the nominee, and floated Mr. Sasse as a recruit. “That ticket would simply be a one-time, emergency adjustment to the unfortunate circumstance (if it happens) of a Trump nomination,” Mr. Kristol wrote in an email. It “would support other Republicans running for Congress and other offices, and would allow voters to correct the temporary mistake (if they make it) of nominating Trump.”

Freedom! Freedom! Fight for Freedom! Give Freedom to the Syrians! To the Libyans! Uh, but remember you are not free to decide who to vote for. A clique of ideologues and plutocrats will decide that for you.

[xbrowning]

Thomas Jefferson on a constant peril:
"I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion."

[optimax]

Trump's plan to make America great again is brilliant. Our countries population will reduce enough, through involuntary and voluntary (Hollywood will move to Matamoro, the neocons, Beijing), emigration that our country will return to its pre-Columbian Eden, with clean solar electricity.

[oofda]

Source? Interesting.

[Tel]

The situation is somewhat different to what has been described.

People do not feel that "the system" as a whole has failed them (i.e. democracy has failed them). What has happened here is that conservative voters feel that their own party and the political media have failed them (i.e. a particular group of people sold them out).

On the "Progressive" side of things there might be elements of this as well, with the rise of Sanders, but not enough to be significant. The "Progressives" are satisfied with their gains and willing to follow the "more of the same" option.

[Grimgrin]

"What is hateful is not rebellion but the despotism which induces the rebellion; what is hateful are not rebels but the men, who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power; they are the men who, having the power to redress wrongs, refuse to listen to the petitioners that are sent to them; they are the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone."

- Wilfrid Laurier

Trump has chosen his moment, wether by accident or design, almost perfectly. He's riding a wave of people who do not trust a goddamn word out of the mouths of the press or politicians, because they feel they've been betrayed, over and over by those same institutions. Watching the powers that be criticize Trump is like watching someone punch smoke. You cannot attack if you cannot connect, you cannot connect if you have no credibility with the people you're trying to convince, and all their thrashing serves to to is spread the smoke around.

As for where it all fits in the grand scheme of things; maybe I'm just cynical, but I think that there's something profoundly enjoyable in imagining yourself at the end of the world, or on the precipice of catastrophe. Clinton will just be Obama with more dead people in the middle east and less goodwill from the left. Trump will be a president with no support from his own party. Not so much a lame duck as a duck that's being basted with hoisin sauce on a rotisserie somewhere. As for the Hitler comparisons floating around: a few followers scuffling with protestors does not a Sturmabteilung make. All said I'd answer Yeats with Eliot: "Not with a bang, but a whimper."

[William R. Cumming]

Thanks Richard as always for your insights. I would argue that demographics not policies has wreaked havoc on the parties, both DEMS and Republicans. It is actually all a battle to sustain the incumbency party that rules Washington with few notions of sacrifice and sharing IMO.

One reform that might help is President not picking their running mates. Perhaps an open convention.

Another might be a modification of the system to require candidates for President to pick top ten choices for each cabinet position and announce the same. Presidents should not use their Presidential picks as a jobs program for friends and family [JFK was in error picking RFK for AG IMO].

But while the seeds of destruction mat well rely on each of our errors the Washington game of picking sides underlies our political destruction.

BTW I would argue the ages of the various candidates is instructive in its own way.

[annamaria]

Here is an illustration of the ziocons' hysterics: "Neutrality or peace in the Middle East." https://www.aei.org/publication/neutrality-or-peace-in-the-middle-east/
The bloody ziocon lot prefers to keep their children closer to home but wants other peoples' children to die for the Project.
"And what about the "New Israel", is it not a creation of the Rothschild slave bankers and the law firm run by Lloyd George, who later became Prime Minister of Great Britain?" http://www.voltairenet.org/article186019.html

[LeaNder]

Richard, I hate any type of basically psychological assessment on any text, but after I read your first passage I somewhat wondered about the impact of your mother, never mind how much you struggled with her.

In any case as I may have told you somewhere else, I did and still do struggle with mine. Never mind my mother was a humanitarian versus someone on rigid religious ground. ;)

But yes, "democracy" is somewhat more difficult then some of us would like it to be. Which no doubt may make it exploitable.

[Mark Gaughan]

"Federalist Papers are not politically correct today--no diversity at all." What are you saying here? The population then, wasn't diverse. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were gentlemen and they were courteous.

[Bobo]

ARamble it was......
Change is upon us and that agent of change is Mr. Donald Trump. Yes, we have done this to ourselves in allowing good men and women to represent us in Congress who then turn into neutered instruments of stagnation as they forget what they are there for and covet the worldly goods thrust upon them to vote in someone else's direction that has no bearing on those who elected them. A perfect example is that good man from Kentucky who upon the election of the present president tossed out "you will only be a one term president" now he tosses out "we will not let you have a SCJ". Yes, change is upon us or a little give and take will occur.
Williard of the nine car garage fame tells us not to vote for him but others and he will get screwed in the convention....wow...the American people have been proven right again in not electing that individual. He does not realize he just tossed the red cape in front the front of the bull.
The best thing for us all is that we will finally see the masses come out and elect a new president and the participation of the masses will be the most of all time. What could happen as it is only for four years. Change is Coming.

[Mark Gaughan]

A little bit more from Yeats's poem: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

[Mark Gaughan]

Seriously?

[J]

http://m.jpost.com/Middle-East/Report-Russias-military-intelligence-chief-killed-in-secret-operation-in-Lebanon-446755%23article=6017NjcyMEIyMTE2Q0IyODZFOURFQzJERTMyNUY1NzcyRDI=

[J]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Sergun