U.S. must rise above Trump’s reign of fear
Donald Trump’s secret is out. The U.S. president let it slip to journalist Bob Woodward, when he confided: “Real power is fear,” a quote that inspired the title to Woodward’s book on the Trump administration.
Fear will be released on Tuesday.
The future of the free world might now depend on America’s answer to the existential question raised by Trump’s presidency: Will Americans choose fear — or love?
Historically, what truly made America great has been its choice of optimistic love, a choice that the pioneers’ Bible urged: “Three things will last forever, faith, hope and love — and the greatest of these is love.”
Indeed, the primacy of love is embodied in the classic American credo inscribed at the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, “The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. “I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” The cherished anthem America the Beautiful captures the central role of love in the American enterprise:
“America, America, God shed His grace on thee,
“And crown thy good with brotherhood
“From sea to shining sea.”
From Abraham Lincoln imploring the nation to act “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” to Will Rogers famously defining a stranger as “a friend I haven’t met yet,” the American choice was love and hope.
Of course, the promise of fraternity fell short for many — for women, Indigenous people and blacks. But the country evolved. For example, segregation was dismantled by a unique act of love — by Martin Luther King’s visionary message that every human being is part of one “beloved community.”
The choice of love made America one of the most admired nations on Earth. Instead of seeking revenge after the Second World War, it used the Marshall Plan to build up former enemies and make them into fast friends. Instead of retreating into fearful “America First” isolation, it invited the world’s brightest minds — including Barack Obama’s father — to U.S. universities to build a better world together. The friendly, generous, open, confident, democratic approach created the world’s most successful economy and superpower — and an imperfect, but often inspiring, City Upon a Hill.
However, Trump rejects the power of love. In Trump’s world, love is for suckers. Money is what counts. There is no real community — there is only self-interest, colliding greeds, the art of the deal. In the place of love, Trump explicitly promotes the power of fear.
Accordingly, this man sows fear, so that he can command the mob. Like every demagogue in history — such as Senator Joe McCarthy, George Wallace, Jean-Marie Le Pen — Trump knows that inciting fear of “the other” gives the bully power. So he adopts the language of Goebbels to decry the “infestation” of the country with alien “animals.” Then he claims that only he — the Strongman — can destroy the threat.
The media that questions him is the “enemy of the people,” Stalin’s most infamous epithet, a phrase that even Khrushchev denounced as too totalitarian. Freedom of the press and rule of law must surrender to fear. All trust must go to the Strongman.
This cannot end well. During the height of the Great Depression, president Franklin D. Roosevelt warned that fear was the most profound threat to America: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes.”
Fortunately, in 1933, the U.S. rejected fear, and chose love and hope. At the same time, Germany succumbed to fear’s dark counsel. It’s worth noting that more than 50 million people died.
For the sake of the world, I pray that America will again choose love and optimism. For the sake of my family in the Canadian Armed Forces, I hope that a new fear-driven autocracy does not shatter the western alliance that has kept general peace since the Second World War. I hope that all sides in the U.S. can turn off Fox News and MSNBC, turn off their Twitter feeds, and simply sit down for coffee and an open-hearted chat with their neighbours who disagree politically. I hope they will realize that they have more in common with their fellow Americans than with Vladimir Putin’s fear-based police state.
Republican Abraham Lincoln’s advice to a divided country is more relevant than ever:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
For the sake of our grandchildren, America must again heed its better angels — and choose love over fear.
Calvin Sandborn is the author of Becoming the Kind Father, a book on men and anger, and teaches law at the University of Victoria.