A Few Quick Thoughts On the Case Against Tyrant Trump Crusade

Donald Trump is, according to the incredibly trustworthy & totally unbiased Fox News, now leading Hillary Clinton in voter preference by 3pts.; it’s w/in the poll’s margin of error, but still. Early polling qualifications aside (and let’s not forget it’s Fox we’re talking about), this should concern you. Because Donald Trump is not a human being, or not really. He’s a brand. He exists to advance his own interests. That’s a fact. It’s why he’s refused to release his tax filings & it’s why he’s on record as saying he tries to pay as little in taxes as possible & it’s why he’s got no real record of public service beyond leading the absurd birther movement. It’s why he said, yesterday, “Who the hell cares about a trade war?”

In the coming weeks & months you’ll hear lots of smart, concerned writers quoting de Tocqueville & Plato & possibly the Federalist Papers; the gist of these articles will be: Tyrant Trump is threatening democracy, he’s hijacking the system, we need to please take his candidacy seriously & not assume Hillary Clinton will win so easily. You may be tempted to view these articles (tons of which are coming, I promise), as fearful Establishment push-back against a late-perceived threat (especially when they take potshots at Bernie Sanders & say stuff like “elites still matter in a democracy”). And they are, to some degree. And too, both Trump & Bernie Sanders have a legit case to make against what Andrew Sullivan calls elite mismanagement (of pretty much everything) in the above-linked essay.

I’d like, actually, to recruit a lesser known writer & tome in the Case Against Tyrant Trump Crusade (let’s shorthand it to CATTC). The writer is Rebecca West, once a super-famous British author but now pretty much forgotten by all but the most hardcore academics & fans. The book is called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, “one of the supreme masterpieces of the twentieth century,” according to Geoff Dyer. The book is ostensibly a straightforward travelogue (stitched together, actually, from three separate trips): West & her husband are motoring through the Balkans in the early 1930s, & West is dutifully, as they go from place to place, recording all the sights & sounds & tastes & scents (and I do mean ALL), plus she’s giving you a little bit of the region’s ancient & recent history in this appealingly conversational & digressive way (Dyer: “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has the unity and fluidity of a sustained improvisation in prose”). But it’s also not-so-subtly about the rising regional tensions & increasingly nationalistic rhetoric & policies which would, very soon, lead to WWII. Traveling along w/West & husband for much of the book is a charming & buffoonish Serbian official named Constantine & his German wife Gerda, who is insufferable, who hates her husband & the Balkan lands, & who takes every opportunity to insult West & her husband.

After Gerda leaves, finally, at around pg. 800, West’s husband attempts to put her extremely oppressive presence in perspective, and in his words, we hear the larger geopolitical situation echoing:

It seems to me that it appears wherever people are [they’re] subject to two conditions. The first condition is that they should have lost sight of the importance of process…that they should be able to look at a loaf of bread and not realize that miracles of endurance and ingenuity had to be performed…the other condition is that people should have acquired a terror of losing the results of process, which are all they know about; they must be afraid that everything artificial is going to disappear.

Now, yes, this is West using her husband as mouthpiece to take a shot at 1930s Nazi Germany, but I think, too, it’s relevant to Donald J. Trump, who has “lost sight of the importance of process,” — i.e., his fervent insistence that he’ll make things great again & it’ll be so easy to do, & fuck the details: “And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time,” writes Sullivan in his great CATTC essay in New York mag. “Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.”

Trump is also stirring up that “terror of losing the results of process,” in pursuit of policies that would directly benefit him (and please note the word terror, because that’s important): he is actively courting trade wars w/both China & Mexico, & he’d like to dramatically slash taxes (a policy which would have far, far greater benefits for those rich people he likes to rhetorically vilify, according to the Tax Policy Center), & too he’d be okay w/nuclear rearmament taking place, as long as it meant a much cheaper foreign policy for America. He’d also like to deport 11 million Mexicans, which instituting such a policy would likely involve internment camps, according to a recent New York Times article (from 5/20/16). Just ethically, that’s nearly indescribable, but the Times also reports an estimated cost of $400 billion — the estimate was provided by the “conservative leaning” American Action Forum. And let’s not forget the Great Wall of Trump, which many estimates put at $20 billion+, twice what Trump promises it’ll cost. Plus, as with Bush’s fence, there’ll be lots of eminent domain battles, in which people living on or near the border lose their homes & receive in return little or no compensation — eminent domain is something Donald Trump is already good at.

What should concern you, as it concerns me, is that he will, if elected, very possibly have the power to enact some of these policies. G.W. Bush expanded the interpretation of “executive action” considerably, as has Barack Obama. We are facing a potential slide into what would be, effectively, tyranny.

Dyer, in his essay on Rebecca West & Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, quotes her recognition of a sort of Manichean split in the human personality:

Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

Dyer writes that “West had enough of the disagreeable in her nature to realize that an affirmation of the agreeable is part of an ongoing personal and political struggle.”

Framing this overtly as a Good v. Evil argument, as many CATT Crusaders will undoubtedly do, is probably not the correct tactic. Instead, maybe we should consider what West & Dyer call the agreeable: what exactly does that mean to us these days, & then are we willing to continue to try & engage in democracy to achieve it, or is Trump’s rise indicative of a now-stronger preference for a darker night?