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

[Ishmael Zechariah]

Slightly? This is completely off topic.
I am delighted with the infighting between the gulen and tayyip camps. It is an excellent show. Hope it gets worse.
I am also delighted by the discomfort Trump is causing the Borg.
Ishmael Zechariah

[James Loughton]

Trump supporters see him as the alternative to the Borg. They believe that the Borg has consistently ignored and abused the interest of American workers whom the Borg refers to as consumers.

[BB]

Agreed. It's either Trump or globalist interests controlling. It is astounding how globalist forces have marshaled all of their forces against Trump. They seem to release a Trump attack every 2 minutes from HuffPo to NRO. I love the armchair arbiters of etiquette and decorum condemning Trump's temperament, but my God, how is any man-- especially an alpha male-- expected to be unfairly attacked from a million directions and not lash out?? Frankly, I don't know how Trump has been able to withstand the onslaught and continue to be positive. Even in the debate it was multiple tag team attack against Trump. Trump is our last hope to head off the obliteration of America as we know it. If it's not Trump I will no longer feel obligated to give a sh*t about domestic or foreign issues. If a high-IQ'd billionaire with a dynamic personality can't bring people around, then I certainly can't make a difference. As a two-percenter in Massachusetts, with no kids, I have a lot less to lose than Middle American conservatives supporting Cruz because of his "principled conservatism". Good luck with that.

[Kooshy]

IMO, Obama was a phony, even a phony black, his health care is a BS and another phony, someone who couldn't afford to pay $600 per month before OC now with OC, still can't afford to pay $540.00 a month. That isn't a solution for small people, that is mandating everyone to pay insurance companies.

[Grimgrin]

More the contrasting themes of incipient apocalypse and quiet pathetic death between the two poems. The rhetoric around Trump is a little overheated, for a candidacy and potential presidency that seems likely to end in a rather mundane and miserable manner rather than a some terrible conflagration.

As for loving winners, maybe. On the other hand, Trump has been winning for a wile and the only big name he's had go over to his side is Christie who would probably look more at ease on stage if someone was pointing a literal gun at his head. There are republicans already talking up a third party run against him in the Presidential election. That they're even floating that trial ballon suggests it's unlikely the Republicans would fall in line behind Trump.

[no one]

Kooshy, Just so you can know, the insurance companies aren't getting anything out of O'care. They're all losing money on it b/c it was structured so that would obviously be the outcome. The big companies are pulling out of the O'care market. O'care is dead on arrival, just nobody has pronounced yet.

[Lars]

Here is the best take on the Trump problem that I have seen:

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/1/11127424/trump-authoritarianism

[scott s.]

I suspect many people viewed the candidacy of Jackson in the same way. These for the most part tried to cobble a fusion party with other factions, united chiefly by their dislike or distrust of Jackson, into a Whiggish party.

scott s.
.

[rjj]

I am seeing a lot of headline hyperbole about big Cruz win in Maine but few numbers.

Maine has a maverick voter problem (Perot and Paul did well here and then there is Gov. LePage). Republicans had a management strategy in place - fewer polling places -district rather than local. Dems vote locally tomorrow.

[all snips from different sources below line]
__________________________________

Maine Republican Party officials say 18,650 voters turn out, three times as many as in 2012, and give the Texas senator 12 of the state's 23 delegates.

"There are 22 [other sources say 20] locations set up for Saturday's event, and large crowds are expected."

"Rick Bennett, chair of the Maine Republican Party, said this year's caucus event will be a hybrid between a caucus and a primary.

Bennett said the change comes after the 2012 caucus was a "disaster" with straw polling and chaos when Ron Paul supporters disrupted the process.

Bennett said that won't happen again.

Political analysts said the hype will likely benefit presidential candidate Donald Trump.

"Politics is filled with unintended consequences that has wound up empowering Trump; the more places that Trump wins with a larger share than others, the more delegates he's able to amass because of the winner-take-most system," said Ron Schmidt, of the University of Southern Maine."

[LeaNder]

Fred, it was superfluous in this context, no doubt. I shouldn't have added it. Reminiscences of some of our earlier clashes ...

Tyler is right about this: "You really think Obamacare was anything more than a giant insurance giveaway?", of course. ...

I really did not take a closer look, thus have no idea to what extend it could have been, as Tyler seems to suggest, intended. It felt more like surrender to hyped up propaganda by special interests at the time. And yes, I read shocking personal tales from people in troubles and enormously high fees too, e.g. from one cancer patient.

[robt willmann]

This interesting photograph, usually in a cropped version, has started to appear some. Taken in July 2008 at a Joe Torre foundation golf benefit at the Trump National Golf Club in New York by a New York Daily News photographer, it shows, left to right, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Clinton, Joe Torre, and comedian Billy Crystal--

http://www.gettyimages.com/search/photographer?excludenudity=true&family=editorial&page=1&phrase=clinton%20trump%20giuliani%20golf&photographer=new%20york%20daily%20news%20archive&sort=best

No outsiders there.

Tonight, 5 March, Trump gave a press conference of sorts in West Palm Beach, Florida. You could not hear the questions asked, but the subject of waterboarding came up. Trump backtracked completely from his earlier bombast that not only was he going to do waterboarding, but more than that (meaning torture), and also his debate statement that the military will obey his orders in that regard. He actually acknowledged that there are laws and regulations that are supposed to be followed, and he said he would follow them, but that he wants to get those laws "extended", meaning, changed. Maybe his sister called him up (she is on the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals).

[LeaNder]

From "the domestic front" to "recognizing ... problems" while having "no solutions" it feels to me, there may be something much bigger ahead over here too.

I am trying to wrap my head around a critique of neo-liberalism, its genesis and its application in Russia post 1989 at the moment. With a focus on law having to serve the economy.

To not go all the way back to Modernist "poememes": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLV4_xaYynY

Recall the support for a health care reform here. A nurse surfaces on my mind. But I doubt that Tyler supported it then. Am I wrong? I cannot at this point in time imagine, he would support anything that originates in the "wrong camp".

"(note: I am not white, but someone actually told me that to my face seemingly obliviously. I was quite amused, to say the least.)"

I am pleased about that. Nutshell: I didn't like the idea of a gravestone marked with "Sic Semper Africanus" for "Saint Trayvon of the Skittles"; but I respect his personal experience may have left traces, if I recall correctly the dead of his sister ... if true.

[Valissa]

Yawn... "authoritarianism" and "fascism" are very common labels for Trump used by many liberals/Democrats. Every 4 years the left brings out those labels for Republican candidates. Typical liberal propaganda. Dog whistle politics at it's finest. No real thinking required. Meanwhile strong denial about how authoritarian the Democratic party has become. Both parties are run by their elites in an authoritarian fashion, ignoring and/or propagandizing their grass roots (into hating the "other") as much as possible. At least the little people of the Republican party are attempting to fight back.

Is Trump really any more authoritarian than Hillary? Or Obama, with all his czars and signing statements and prosecution of whistle blowers?

[LeaNder]

I thought, you may be delighted, although I sure wish I did grasp it as well as you do. Irony Alert: First the military, now the Islamic competition lots of conspiracies against poor Tayyip.

Over here Millî Görüş was the main topic in the post 9/11 universe. But it faded from attention and the news by now. I wasn't aware of the gulen tayyip struggle before reading your comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill%C3%AE_G%C3%B6r%C3%BC%C5%9F

Yes, off topic, but why not misuse Richard's comment section, while you are around. Hoping he forgives me. ;)

[Brunswick]

You need to visit DKos, and other Dem sites.

The infighting between the Dem camps has become brutal and vicious, to the point that Kos is bringing in the "ban hammer" on the BernieBro's, ( 58% of his site, but none of the "Front Pagers", on March 15th, when his site will be All Hillary, All the Time.

[William R. Cumming]

Question for the pollsters! For all!

Please rank the candidates of all parties on probable ballots in descending order of all as to whom you as a voter will never vote for as President?

IMO Trump and HRC may be the first choice but for very different reasons.

And why is Ross Perot not discussed as adversely impacting voters for Bush [in 1992] and Dole [in 1996]? Am I wrong?

[Fred82]

For me, it is quite simple.

Trump is the best realistic option being offered in 2016. I won't vote for HRC, am not enamored by Cruz, and Webb is off the table.

[Stephanie]

As you say, the Federalists gave as good as they got:

"... the profound and fearless patriot and full-blooded Yankee, [who] exceeded in every possible respect his competitor, Tom Jefferson, for the Presidency, who, to make the best of him, was nothing but a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father, as was well known in the neighborhood where he was raised, wholly on hoe-cake (made of course-ground Southern corn), bacon, and hominy, with an occasional change of fricasseed bullfrog, for which abominable reptiles he had acquired a taste during his residence among the French in Paris, to whom there could be no question he would sell his country at the first offer made to him cash down, should he be elected to fill the Presidential chair..."

Damn that Southern corn.

However, the Founding Fathers had more than enough political virtues to compensate for their political vices. Mr. Sales' central point is surely correct.

[Valissa]

That's typical behavior for those sites. Once upon a time I hung out at those sites when Bush was prez thinking that they would be part of the much needed "political change." Hahahahaha... boy did I learn my lesson. I remember 2007 it was OK to discuss all the Dem candidates (there were 6 or 7 of them IIRC), and then as 2008 came along and the heavy campaign season and fewer and fewer of the candidates were acceptable to talk about. Until finally came the big rift between the Hillary supporters and the Obama supporters, when many people left DKos and started their own political blogs. It had finally stopped being OK to support Hillary at all and it was only Obama all the time. I haven't been back to Dkos since early 2008 when I left in disgust at all the tribal bullshit and increasingly obvious propaganda, but I can see the same games are still going on. I guess all the reasons why Hillary was so bad, bad, bad in 2008 are no longer true and history was been rewritten.

Now that I am an avowed nonpartisan and realist, and no longer participate in non-rational partisan discussions about politics, I am a much happier person.

[rjj]

and Nader.

[Swampy]

Try this:

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/02/28/the-lion-and-the-sheep/

"If Trump gets the Republican nomination the neocons are through as a viable political force on the Right. That’s why National Review devoted a whole issue of their magazine to the theme “Against Trump.” That’s why the neocons’ allies in the media are going after him hammer and tongs. That’s why neocons like Robert Kagan are openly declaring they will support Hillary Clinton, while others – including the formerly libertarian network of organizations funded by Charles and David Koch – are financing a “Stop Trump” campaign. There is even talk of the (impractical) idea of running a third party candidate in order to take votes away from Trump."

[ex-PFC Chuck]

Au contraire, the rebellion of the progressives is very significant, and pose just as much of a threat to the party, and maybe even more so, than the Trump phenomenon does to the GOP. The reason is that the Democratic Party’s nomenklatura (federal and state elected officials, senior paid party operatives, wealthy donor/activists, etc) and its volunteer activists (caucus & convention goers, door knockers, phone bank folks, etc.) either aren’t aware of the depth of the disaffection among their grass roots supporters or don’t give a damn. The grass roots tacitly showed their disgust in 2010 when they didn’t bother to show up to vote in the off-year elections enabling the GOP to take over both houses of Congress and many state houses. If Sanders is perceived to have been denied the nomination because of a tilted playing field I expect many of his supporters to either voter with their butts on the couch again or cross over for Trump. Hilary, on the other hand, will probably get crossover votes in the other direction from various flavors of disaffected Republicans.

[ex-PFC Chuck]

My favorite example of electoral campaign invective from that era is from John Randolph, IIRC, although I don’t recall what he was running for. “My opponent is very competent but utterly corrupt. Thus, like a rotten mackerel in the moonlight he both shines and stinks.”

[Lars]

The point is that authoritarian regimes never end well. Not that I believe Mr. Trump will ever get to implement any policies, but he will be followed by others with the same inclination. We may even see an re-enactment of the 1852 election.

[Tyler]

Lars,

These are the same people who support Obama when he decides who to kill via robot sky assassin over his Monday morning corn flakes.

"Vox.com" lmao. Hopefully Emperor Trump executes the entire staff of that fishwrap by making them do deadlifts until their hamstrings explode.

Up your game Lars.