Emetic For the Body Politic
Emetic for the Body Politic
In one important way, Donald Trump’s candidacy and his Presidency of the United States may be one of the better things that has happened in national politics in decades. Start out thinking of it as a political version of The People v. Larry Flynt, and it can be seen as an equally unpleasant and therefor textbook celebration of the First Amendment. In the one nation on earth where the freedom to say any thing we want is our primary right, there has not been a free market of ideas on the national political scene. Actual debate on many critical issues has been deadened by a stifling political orthodoxy. On those issues, it has been as if there is no difference between the two major parties. In terms of the American body politic, Trump is an emetic or a laxative or an enema. And, some cleaning out has been needed.
Some would say that the rise of Donald Trump and of Bernie Sanders was fueled by the loss of well paying industrial jobs, growing income inequality, and changing American demographics, but those things have not changed all that dramatically. The radical change this past election cycle is that each of those candidates had punctured the political orthodoxy that existed at the Presidential level. Voters had rushed to these candidates because they did not seem like they were cautiously reiterating what they have been told by their advisers and pollsters. To state it more bluntly, the people were and are tired of being lied to. The irony is that President Trump appears to be genuine because he clearly blurts out radical statements that are certainly not processed and canned, whether or not they are factual.
Until this past election, between the Presidential candidates of the major parties there has been no real debate or difference on issues such as the war on terror, on paying for being the world’s police, on the war on drugs, on a carbon tax to quickly reduce carbon emissions and take back the funds that go to the people who fund terrorism, on the high cost of health care for those in the last year of life, or on the religious nature of the terrorist threat facing our freedoms. Trump’s supporters relish that he is raising questions no President or candidate ever has. Why does the worker at the Ford plant in Louisville pay taxes that fund the military defense of the worker at the Volkswagen plant in Dresden? In the land of the free and the home of calling a spade a spade, why have our leaders bowed to prior restraint when it comes to even beginning a dialogue on a religion that is obsessed with exercising political control?
It is fashionable to excoriate Trump. The fault is not in our political stars, but in ourselves; we are underlings. Moving the paraphrase from Shakespeare to de Maistre, each nation gets the leadership it deserves. Some in the press will say that the media created Donald Trump, but they are too clever by half. It is not only that they covered Trump too much or not critically, but that they had helped create and maintain the cultural and political orthodoxy that he has profited from puncturing. This alone makes the Trump phenomenon a strong medicine for what has been blocking up the body politic.
Henry James once said that Americans are alone in acting on their first impressions, and though it is unlikely that many in the media have read our greatest novelist, they know how to profit from this observation. Three hundred and thirty million people live in the most peaceful and safe nation in the history of the planet, yet any incident that one hundred years ago would have filled two columns in a local newspaper now becomes a national media orgy that lasts for days. Two questions are always asked: Why was it allowed to happen? And what will be done about it? A local event becomes a national issue. No Presidential candidate will take a different stand on the war on terror, on the war on drugs, or on defense spending, because it only takes one incident for the media to turn that first question against him. No politician wants to let a Willie Horton out of jail. Hundreds of millions of travelers remove their shoes, because of one inept attempt at a shoe bomb.
A future Presidential candidate is out there. She is paying attention. She will say that we should have a carbon tax, that our taxpayers should not fund the defense of our wealthy competitors, that when a faith needs to use the worldly power to enforce its tenets it is expressing a lack of faith, that the war on drugs has created a massive federal police apparatus and is racist in its effect, that we need to rethink our approach to the military war on terror because it will never be won with guns and force, and that we should invest in educational infrastructure. Her attack on the old political orthodoxy will be seen as honest and she will be seen as being a leader. Ironically, Trump will have lit her path.
(Gerald Weaver is the author of the novel, The First First Gentleman, August 2016, London Wall Publishing. It is among other things a sly tribute to almost all the novels of Charles Dickens. His well-received first novel, Gospel Prism, was published in May 2015. Each of its twelve chapters paraphrases a great work, by Cervantes, Montaigne, Shakespeare, etc. Harold Bloom said it was “remarkable” and “charming but disturbing.”)