Understanding Donald Trump In American Historical Perspective.
Abstract: Donald Trump’s unseemly attacks on a deceased and distinguished United States Senator are merely a single symptom of this broadly pathological presidency. To understand the underlying “disease,” a proper historical and cultural perspective will first be required.
In 1509, famed humanist Desiderius Erasmus published In Praise of Folly. The narrator, identified as a court jester, argues ironically that she is humanity’s greatest benefactor. Nursed by Drunkenness and Ignorance, her closest followers include Self-Love,Pleasure, Flattery, and Sound Sleep. Later, in Chapter 31, the long parade of blemished souls upon whom she has conferred “special benefits” shifts revealingly.
It is, in essence, a disconcerting pivot, from those who had once been alluring, young and “hot-blooded” to the now old, pitiful and grotesque.
With Erasmus, who can help us to understand our present presidential debility, truth proceeds straightforwardly, without any hesitation or remorse. As any still-remaining illusions are stripped away, Folly extends high praise to both Ignorance and Lunacy. Ultimately, as satiric banter turns palpably to “acid,” Folly sums up her contrived frivolity with an approving citation to ancient Greek playwright, Sophocles: “Ignorance always provides the happiest life.”
Today, the American president is a painful symptom of such recalcitrant Folly. At its core, however, the truest cause of our perilous presidential affliction lies less in the personal qualities of a grievously unsuitable leader than in the surrounding political culture; that is, in the larger society that had wittingly “allowed” such a crude and shallow candidacy to be taken seriously in the first place. In concise summary, the “Trump decline” closely mirrors a bewildered population that refuses to take itself seriously.
Truth is exculpatory. America today is plainly a jarring and disjointed society, one that doggedly refuses to think beyond its most immediate and visceral satisfactions. Now we have a president who not only wraps himself in the flag metaphorically (the persisting “America First” derangement) but does so quite literally. https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a26601477/trump-cpac-2019-speech/
Should there be any doubts about this, one need merely look at what’s playing on television or at the movies. Could anything prove more revealing or humiliating for the United States than its most widely popular entertainments? What can we seriously expect from an electorate that remains wilfully immersed in shoddy and demeaning public amusements?
Stripped to its barest rudiments of meaning, our grievous “Trump problem” – which is potentially existential in its consequences – can be illuminated by an observation from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “When the throne sits on mud,”warns the philosopher’s all-seeing literary prophet, “mud sits upon the throne.”
In the main, however, it’s not just about Donald Trump. Today, no U.S. president could ever reasonably claim to “make America great again.” Ultimately, as Swiss psychologist Carl Jung understood much earlier, every society reflects the aggregate or sum total of its individual “souls,” members seeking some form or other of conspicuous “redemption.”
In the folly-centered case of present-day American society, this measureless total points less to any recoverable “greatness” than to incessantly shameless imitation. This means a pattern of conformance stemming from a literally desperate abhorrence of intellectual analyses and challenging thought. As to science, it has generally been shunted by the Trump White House to a degrading sort of ostracism, openly subordinate to the seat-of-the-pants judgments of career charlatans and venal talk show hosts.
Like the insights of Erasmus, it’s not really all that complicated. Obviously, in President Donald Trump’s declining America, the life of the mind is intentionally becoming a shorter and shorter “book.” More than anything else, even in our more-or-less vaunted universities, Americans loathe even the tiniest hints of refined intellect, especially when not expressly “practical” and have little cash value.
As a 74-year old American academic who has spent literally every year of his adult life in the university – that is a total of 56 years, as both student and professor – it’s reasonable to sum pertinent matters up like this: The celebrated American university has become just another commodity, a willing adjunct to intersecting corporate and commercial worlds and an obedient underling to prevailing interests of money and power.
To the larger point, many Americans implicitly prefer the unheroic phrase, “I follow,” to the once-still commendable, “I think.” Over time, such an ill-fated preference can lead only to an even more consummate and irremediable national declension. In historic terms, we need only compare Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels 1934 remark, “Intellect rots the brain,” to 2016 US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s strangely honest comment: “I love the poorly educated.”
Truth is exculpatory. Far too many in Trump’s stridently anti-intellectual America love to yell and scream, especially in chorus. It scarcely matters that this rhythmically preposterous dialectic is devoid of any ascertainable facts, reason or logic. To wit: The “wall” will be “very beautiful” because “barbed wire can be very beautiful.” Or: “I trust my intelligence community,” but “(Russian President) Vladimir Putin must also be trusted.” Or still more recently, “Kim Jung Un deeply regrets what happened to (US citizen) Otto Warmbier, but he surely didn’t know about it while it was happening.”
“I’ll make America great again!” At best, and on every imaginable level of assessment, this pledge remains the darkly resuscitated slogan of German National Socialism. Prima facie, no such potentially murderous claim can ever signify anything of foreseeable national value or improvement. It is, rather, the most easily recognizable omen of still latent and prospectively immobilizing national crises.
Truth is exculpatory. No American society nurtured by authentic considerations of learning could consider any such glibly illiterate promise to express more than self-parody. Nonetheless, a palpably sizable minority of tens of millions of Americans stand loyally beside a President who they know has never read a book or so much as glanced at the US Constitution, a document he has solemnly sworn to “preserve, protect and defend.”
What does this perverse species of loyalty suggest about the ongoing outlook for American universities? Can they be expected to successfully transmit even minimally core intellectual values?
Higher education ought not to be let off the hook too easily. Mustn’t we inquire about those millions of Trump supporters who graduated from one or another of our “great” universities? What exactly did they learn about science, logic, law, reason and history? How can they claim to respect the most basic elements of learning if they can simultaneously support an American president who so openly reviles erudition?
“I love the poorly educated.”
?
There is more. Repeatedly, President Donald Trump has revealed his own special heroes. In addition to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, who cheerfully celebrates his ongoing and still-planned crimes against humanity, Mr. Trump has praised former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for his “effective treatment” of “terrorists,” mass murderer Muamar Khadafy for having kept Libya “well-ordered,” North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un because he is a “good guy,” the Chinese president for dealing with drug addiction by way of capital punishment, the Philippine president for championing army death squads and an emboldened Saudi Arabian monarch who murdered a Washington Post journalist with complete and calculated impunity.
What about pertinent law, both domestic and international? Amid this strange pantheon of personal leadership preferences, Mr. Trump has been aggressively specific about his indifference to considerations of justice. For just one callous example, he has periodically advocated the torture of terror suspects and killing the families of “alleged terrorists.” Derivatively, at least for this American president, the phrase “due process of law” has become little more than an inconvenient obstruction to felonious private satisfactions.
A corollary question should urgently be raised. Does President Trump even know that the law of war (aka the law of armed conflict or humanitarian international law): (a) is comprised of codified and customary norms designed to protect noncombatants from deliberate harms; and (b) is inherently the municipal law of the United States? Could Mr. Trump ever hope to understand Article 6 of the U.S. Constitution, the “Supremacy Clause,” or the several related U.S. Supreme Court decisions (especially The Paquete Habana, 1900 and Tel Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic, 1984) that explicitly reinforce and widen Article 6 incorporations?
It’s a rhetorical question. The answer is all too obvious, and all too humiliating for the United States. International law is part of the law of the United States. This incorporation is written directly into the US Constitution and also in various authoritative judgments of this country’s highest court. Ipso facto, a president can’t ever disavow international law without simultaneously rejecting U.S. law.
Still, one can’t reasonably expect a US president to act correctly on such vital jurisprudential matters if he remains willfully unacquainted with all relevant cases and documents.
In Trump’s America – even while the president is being widely challenged on multiple dimensions of egregious policy malfeasance – the public inhabits a society that is numbingly false – so counterfeit, in fact, that even its melancholy has been anesthetized. Wallowing without serious thoughts in their twilight of near-irresistible conformance, Trump’s chanting loyalists continue to display an infinite forbearance for shallow thinking and an endless affection for starkly degrading distractions.
An American “life of the mind?” Now, this is just a flagrant oxymoron. Where, for example, is classic American theatre? Who in this cheerlessly unmindful country is left to read any real literature? Who can even remember what was once proudly called “The Western Canon?”
To answer, one need only look at what one’s fellow passengers are reading on airplanes, trains or cruise ships these days. Is it any wonder that an intrinsically ridiculous candidate like Donald Trump could have gained the American presidency?
A few years ago, I visited Fanning Island in the faraway South Pacific Republic of Kiribati. Although the people who came out to meet our tender boat were astoundingly poor and absolutely without any modern conveniences (including electricity or indoor plumbing), they seemed somehow better off and more content than the millions of disaffected Americans who now struggle to stay alive amid impressively modern social media and associated “advanced” technologies.
Insidiously, Mr. Trump has sought to capitalize on this far-reaching disaffection, but neither his concocted diagnoses nor his Folly-based therapies make any conceivable sense. Yet, by certain plausible benchmarks, this destructive effort has been wildly successful.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson called wisely upon this nation to embrace “plain living and high thinking.” For President Trump, the preferred mantra might now just as well be the exact opposite. “Plain living and high thinking?” Hardly. Such a still-commendable imperative is nowhere to be found in this president’s crumbling architecture of American “greatness.” In this hideously fragile construction, citizen aspirations are fiercely driven by what sociologist Thorsten Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class) earlier called “pecuniary envy.”
Now we are more apt to describe this Folly-driven species of “envy” as “conspicuous consumption.”
The American people can be lonely in the world, or lonely for the world. Somehow, however, our insistently crass culture has now managed to generate both. Before a more sustainable America could ever be born from such a bifurcated loneliness, someone other than a lascivious presidential gravedigger would first have to wield the “forceps.”
Stepping back in time in order to recover original national hatreds and prejudices is hardly an optimal path to “greatness.”
Ironically, we inhabit the one society that could have been different, perhaps even exemplary. Once, before the evident triumph of presidential Folly, we still possessed potential to nurture individuals to go beyond a docile mass, to offer more than an obedient herd, to represent more than a cowardly crowd that yearns to wear unifying red hats and to chant pure nonsense in dissembling unison.
Then, Ralph Waldo Emerson had actually described us as an enviable people, one spurred on not by nonsense, but by “self-reliance.”
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” exulted our most purely American poet, Walt Whitman, but, today, the American Self remains under multi-pronged assault by a repressively vast mediocrity. Without such a debilitating assault, Donald J. Trump could never have been elected President of the United States. Red hat promises of greatness notwithstanding, Folly has very deep roots in the United States.
Truth can be complicated. To restore this nation to some decent measure of long-term health and prosperity, and to ward off even more morbid supplications to intellectual mediocrity, we the people must first learn to look beyond our easy satisfaction with trite and simplistic explanations. Only when such an essential swerve of consciousness has become an irreversible gesture could we ever hope for durable national security and well-being.
Only then could we reasonably expect to deflect the potentially lethal embrace of Donald Trump’s presidential “Folly.”
Desiderius Erasmus would have understood.