Americans both love and fear outsider heroes

Try thinking about this week’s confusing Republican and Democratic primary elections in New York this way:

You’re in love with a “handsome devil” who did not exactly — or even inexactly — fit your mother’s long-term hopes for you. Not only was he “too good-looking for his own good,” as your mother might put it, but he did not come from your neighborhood or, for that matter, from anyplace that even remotely resembled it.

In fact, so far as we know, Mr. Handsome Devil came from someplace far away from your close-knit family and friends, and tended to act as though he had rolled into town not only to save you from unforeseen threats, but to save the whole town from something that only he could truly understand.

I might also mention that, as this little drama was being enacted on a national stage over the past months, I was occasionally watching old movies on TCM. And in that earlier era of American picture-making, I was surprised at how many films were also based upon the outsider who swept into town to put things to right.

I am thinking not only of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” with Jimmy Stewart and his naive ideas about taming Congress, or of “The Music Man,” with the lovable con man teaching us that there is always a band playing somewhere, or even of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” with, as it turned out, the man who didn’t do that at all.

No, it was a theme so often repeated on the classic American silver screen that one has to appreciate and try to understand these outsiders and their missions.

Indeed, at times the very word “outsider” was itself in danger — of being overused! Or, as Republican hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz said along the way to losing more deeply in New York: “This is the year of the outsider. I’m an outsider. Bernie Sanders is an outsider, both with the same diagnosis but both with very different paths to healing.”

If you watched CNN in the days and hours leading up to Tuesday night, with Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump flatout winning the Democratic and Republican primary tickets, you would see two pronounced messages.

First, Republican voters cast their votes for outsider claims on the part of Donald Trump. But second, they were, at the same time and often in the same poll or speech, frightened of a Trump presidency.

Until the final figures came out, exit polls repeatedly showed the duality that Republican voters were signaling: They wanted Trump up against the “Republican establishment,” and yet, they were also signaling that they were scared of a dominant Trump.

Perhaps the old vaudevillian question about women — “What do WOMEN want?” — should now be reconstructed to “What do AMERICANS want?”

One has to wonder further: How can we as a nation — particularly a nation that still, in its gut, thinks of itself as “the” international leader — rule the world when we are essentially scared to death of the actions of at least one of the two people we seem to be choosing to lead us and inspire that world?

Columnist Frank Bruni posed the problems in The New York Times: “American voters are displeased with the candidates they’ve been given. They’re disengaged from the process that winnows the field. And that process disregards the political center, erodes common ground and leaves us with a government that can’t build the necessary consensus for, let alone implement, sensible action in regard to taxes, to infrastructure, to immigration, to guns, to just about anything.

“Make America great again? We need to start by making it functional.”