TRUMP HATE WON’T BE ENOUGH, WRITES KEITH C. BURRIS
We socialize virtually these days. And I don’t know about you, but for me the technology gets in the way.
It beats pen and paper, I tell myself. But does it? A letter is an act of reflection — a thought exercise. And I fear the letter is dead.
But Zoom, even the phone, beats emails and tweets.
My wife and I have a family dinner on Sunday nights with our children, all in separate places. For this I am grateful.
And what do we talk about? Two things: The virus and what might happen after the virus. What else is there to talk about?
Yet these two gigantic subjects that currently devour all other subjects are the terra terribilia — the essentially and vastly unknowable.
When will this be over? What will happen then? How will we be different as a people and a republic, if at all?
No one knows or can possibly know.
Well, what do we hope for?
I hope for a kinder society. And I see some basis for this hope in the interactions I witness during my few forays into common public space and many forays into virtual public space.
In our politics, I hope for greater deliberation and more common ground.
Visiting with friends on the phone the other day, one person shared the view that Trump supporters are a cult. You cannot reason with them because they are a cult.
All of them?
Yes, the president has a base of perhaps as many as 42% to 45% of the voters. This is roughly the percentage of voters who will vote for any Democrat.
But if a base is a cult for one group, it must be one for the other. And I think the insistence that all who are sympathetic to the president, in any degree, are, by definition, hardcore, and exactly like each other, is probably wrong. Just as not all of the 42% to 45% that makes up the Democratic base insists that every discussion of the president start with ritual incantations of Trump revulsion. (That is cult-like.)
Let me tell you about three voters: An entrepreneur, an accountant and a Christian. The latter two have military backgrounds, one extensive. The Christian is not a born-again, but a progressive concerned with social justice. All are men. None are cultists. None are stereotypes. But all currently lean toward Mr. Trump.
All three like the president more for what he represents and what he is not than for what he is.
Two are pained by the president’s lack of discipline and his lack of manners — not a small thing if you are a) weary of the fraying of the American social fabric or b) a conservative.
So what do they like about the president? Two things: His willingness to go a different way; try a different course; question experts and the deep state. And, second, his America-first instinct: We don’t exist to police, employ or save the rest of the world but to, first, help our fellow Americans, our neighbors.
Those are two pretty sound American instincts.
To what extent they might appeal if promoted by a different person or organization (it will not be the Republican Party after Mr. Trump leaves the scene), who is to say?
But I am not sure these two impulses — America first and skepticism about the establishment and established norms — could have been successfully embodied in a milder version of Donald Trump, even if he existed. And even if a gentler version of Donald had existed, he might have been met with just as much venom and schoolmarmish, Margaret Dumont, outrage.
Margaret Dumont was the foil in the Marx Brothers films. She was always, always deeply shocked and appalled.
Those two instincts will bring strong reaction. Internationalists will see nativism. Global capitalists will feel threatened. And people who believe there is a correct way to do politics — political professionals and the people who support them — will want propriety and restoration.
And they are not all wrong. For the deep state is not all bad. It is the repository of custom, tradition, folkways and political craft — things for which the president has genuine and deep disdain. One of those customs would be, for example, respect for high office. The president should respect the speaker of the House, and vice versa. Another of those things would be respect for the military.
But what I want to suggest is that being appalled is not enough. Being repulsed by the president is not going to cut it — not going to pull any one of my three friends to the Democratic side; not going to attract suburban women; not going to persuade the 10% to 16% of the voters who despise tribes as much as cults and self-identify as independents.
Yes, coronavirus and a Great Recession might carry Joe Biden to the presidency. But I am not sure even of that.
Will a pitch to return to (Obama) normalcy? Or a return to decency?
These are dressed up versions of “We are not Trump.” And I think the American sense that we needed a shakeup, and that things were not working, is as deep today, maybe deeper, than in 2016.
Back to my three guys: They don’t want restoration
If Mr. Biden represented anything but a return, a fallback, I think it would be a very different race.
But you can’t beat something with nothing. You need an alternative — a positive vision and program of some kind.
Bernie Sanders did have a program — a single-payer health care system, an aggressive approach to protecting natural resources, no more stupid wars, and tax equity — for which one might have built a majority. He once bucked the party on immigration and guns, too. But his architecture was wrong. He wrapped it all in the concepts of socialism, class warfare and demonizing wealth creators.
Mr. Biden? He says the bailout — carelessly crafted and recklessly expensive — should be much bigger.
If the Democratic message is “more of what was not working” — more nanny state, more PC preciousness, more bloated ineffective government — it may out-fail the president’s anger and divisiveness.
For, meanwhile, with the exception of Jimmy Carter, Mr. Trump is the first president since FDR not to either start or continue a stupid, and unwinnable, regional or civil war somewhere in the world. And if you want something different, as the psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson notes, that’s not a bad start.