U.S. has history of electing agitators
It’s said that on Oct. 15, 1793, all of Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white. It’s because she was so worried about what was going to happen the next day. She was going to be beheaded.
Science tells us this story cannot literally be true. No amount of worrying can change your hair colour overnight. But stress or worrying can do it over weeks or months.
Which means that if you are paying attention to electoral politics in the United States, you might look to stock up on home hair-dyeing products.
That’s because Donald Trump could yet be re-elected president. That is despite his major legal troubles (charged in four criminal cases), his growing incoherence (“You know Argentina, great guy…”) and his open promises to become a dictator (“… for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”)
There’s still a certain reluctance to believe Trump can win because we retain a stubborn confidence that the American people can’t possibly choose such a repulsive figure to lead them. Yes, they’ve done it once before, but surely now they know better.
That is misplaced confidence. Our American friends have a long history of dancing with demagogues. They’ve often fallen for people who pander to passions and prejudices. For people who build their own popularity without giving a damn about the public good. For people selling simple solutions to complex problems. For people who scapegoat and name-call.
In the 1930s, there was Father Charles Coughlin. He was born in Hamilton, graduated from the University of Toronto, but made his way to the Detroit area, where he became a brilliant, if scary, radio broadcaster. He was openly antisemitic and supported fascism. He called Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Franklin Double-Crossing Roosevelt.” Yet he had 30 million people listening to him every week, and 10,000 people writing him letters of support every day.
There was William Dudley Pelley, who believed “Mussolini and his Black Shirts saved Italy and Hitler and his Brown Shirts saved Germany.” Pelley declared himself “The Chief” of a Christian militia group called the Silver Legion, whose followers wore silver shirts, and believed Blacks should be made slaves again and Jews deported.
There was Gerald L.K. Smith, who led several hate-filled organizations including The Committee of One Million, The America First party, and The Christian Nationalist Party. He once called the United States government, “A slimy group of men culled from the pink campuses of America.”
In 1964, when the Republican party
picked Barry Goldwater as their presidential nominee, Smith was ecstatic. He wrote, “For the first time in my mature life, a major political party has nominated a candidate for President worthy of respect.”
Smith died in 1976, but he’d have been thrilled to vote for Donald Trump. He’d be thrilled that extremism had become normal.
There’s a remarkable novel that was published in 1935 that should be required reading today. It’s “It Can’t Happen Here” by Sinclair Lewis.
Lewis saw what was going on in Nazi Germany, and immediately realized that too many people living comfortably in secure democracies took their good fortune for granted. Too many people were saying, “Sure, we have our fringe fireballs spewing hateful nonsense, but our system of government is so strong, those extremists could never come to power.”
Lewis imagined a fascist U.S. president, Berzelius Windrip, elected on a platform of representing, “The Forgotten Men.” Windrip denounced the “lies” of the press. His adviser said, “it is not fair to ordinary folks — it just confuses them — to try to make them swallow all the true facts.”
The novel isn’t subtle. Its hero, a newspaper editor named Doremus Jessup blames himself, and everyone like him, for not doing enough to stop Windrip. He blames the conscientious, respectable, lazyminded electorate, “who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”
It can happen. And if it does, white hair will be the least of our problems.