It's Evening in America: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

Part 5 of 8

Can I tell you something more?

Amid grassroots discontent and anger, whipped to a fever pitch by Republican rhetoric, when Hillary Clinton was nominated by the Democrats to take Barack Obama’s place in the Oval Office, the stage was set for a populist uprising in America. And we were not alone.

Around the globe, heretofore stable democracies were being shaken to their foundations by surging nationalism and isolationism. This was partly due to rapid cultural change but largely brought on by an unwillingness and inability to assimilate immigrant populations. That the vast majority of these people were not criminals but poor souls trying to escape the horrors of famine, poverty, pestilence and violence, or merely seeking a better life, mattered little to native populations fighting for their own survival or striving for their own better life.

Here in America those forces were clearly at work. Sparked by social and economic alienation, the flames of hatred and bigotry were fanned by disinformation on social media, so the political path was now clear for a morbidly narcissistic billionaire con artist and reality TV star to trample an experienced but uninspiring, dispirited primary field and claim the Republican presidential nomination.

It is said that hate will fill any empty vessel and there can be no emptier vessel than Donald John Trump. Famous American journalist and essayist H.L. Mencken, who died the year I was born in 1956, was sadly prescient when he wrote, “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Mencken also wrote that, “The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” And in the age of internet and cable ‘news’, and the sewer of social media, telling the difference between daring lies and detestable truths became not only more difficult but for many plain folks of the land just plain unnecessary. Quoting someone else who predicted this day and also never lived to see it, the German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt said, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

Driven by technological change – a tip of the hat to Kellyanne Conway as well – perhaps unwittingly but unquestionably we had entered a world of ‘alternative facts’ and the post-truth era of our history.

Obviously that suited Trump just fine, but the truth – I claim to still know the distinction – is that when he famously descended the fool’s-gold escalator to announce his candidacy, he had no desire to win the presidency and absolutely no expectation he would, only the need to burnish a tarnished brand and revive his moribund company and career. Indeed, all the polls at the time pointed to Hillary Clinton winning easily in a head-to-head matchup with Trump. But despite all his faults, which time and space do not permit me to list, he is possessed of a keen instinct for showmanship and an uncanny sense of crowd mentality, and as he swept through the Republican primaries, the ill wind at his back became a gale.

The people attending his large raucous rallies, many still hungover from the Tea Party, were all cut from the same cloth. Overwhelmingly religious and rural, culturally conservative and economically blue collar, they shared a common sense that the America they love and remember from the last half of the 20th Century was disappearing before their eyes.

Suffering from gaping inequality in both income and wealth, exacerbated by the decline of an aging manufacturing sector and lost jobs, they were flummoxed and offended by the woke identity politics of the left, and alarmed and angered by a large influx of dark-skinned foreign nationals, many in the country illegally and undocumented.

Bolstered by a steady stream of disinformation and lies spewing out of right-wing media outlets, Trump tapped into this huge reservoir of resentment and quickly became besotted with the rabid enthusiasm and adoring attention he received.

His simplistic and not-so-subtle racist and sexist campaign slogan that he would ‘Make America Great Again’ was the perfect inspiration and aspiration for tens of millions of voters, while the standard stump speech chant of “build that wall” gave voice to feelings of isolationism and vent to fierce jingoism.

Since the Reagan Era, Republicans have been immoral but brilliant by waging culture war to get poor people to vote for them even though their policies – tax cuts for the rich and large corporations, deregulation of industries, shredding the social safety net, etc. – do nothing to improve the lives of their frenzied followers, instead making them much worse. In 2016, aided and abetted by sexism which makes it impossible for many to see a woman as president, and though he lost the popular vote by nearly three million, just enough people rich and poor voted for Donald Trump to tip the Electoral College in his favor. Including a stunning sweep of the so-called Democratic ‘Blue Wall’ of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

Clearly Trump and the GOP had plugged into a powerful political force and the MAGA movement was more than just a slogan, though Democrats deserve blame for caring more about pronouns than productivity, legislating liberal orthodoxy, and abandoning blue-collar workers in favor of highly educated urban elites.

As P.J. O’Rourke once wryly observed, “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass from your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn’t work and then get elected and prove it.”

Still, it’s hard to blame Dems for their greatest political liability – they are ruthful people concerned about the common good, burdened by conscience and compassion, and crippled with honesty and integrity, therefore mostly incapable of fighting political fire with fire of their own. Their campaign strategy was to suck the thumb of favorable polls and cling to the hope that Americans would see through deranged demagoguery to stay the course of democracy and decency. So convinced were they of victory that Hillary never set foot in Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania during the campaign.

The American ethos is to prize individualism and personal grit over community and caring, and Trump ushered in a new era of our politics which conceded, if not demanded, that our two tribes never again agree on anything. And that ad hominem attacks take the place of policy debates.

Which was fine with the GOP as long as it kept them in power to protect their own wealth and social and religious beliefs. Liberals and conservatives became sworn enemies and intolerance for differing views no longer a political problem but a broader societal one. Hate now clogged our pipes like toxic sludge, destroyed friendships, divided families, and caused people to rip up their roots and move to more like-minded communities.

But that’s not all I wanted to tell you either.

To be continued next week…