I occasionally joke that men of a certain age, shall we say, tend to walk in ruts with edges roughly at the level of their eyebrows, and even if they generally believe change can be a good thing, they’re still muttering Change is bad! Change is bad! when it comes to themselves.
So I’m sort of wondering as to the age of Michael Gerson, who believes that, post-Trump, our Republic will never be the same, as published in WaPo:
But the broader influence of celebrity culture on politics is to transform citizens into spectators. In his book “How Democracy Ends,” David Runciman warns of a political system in which “the people are simply watching a performance in which their role is to give or withhold their applause at the appropriate moments.” In this case, democracy becomes “an elaborate show, needing ever more characterful performers to hold the public’s attention.” Mr. Madison, meet Omarosa.
Trump is sometimes called a populist. But all this is a far cry from the prairie populism of William Jennings Bryan, who sought to elevate the influence of common people. Instead, we are seeing a drama with one hero, pitted against an array of villains. And those villains are defined as anyone who opposes or obstructs the president, including the press, the courts and federal law enforcement. Trump’s stump speeches are not a call to arms against want; they are a call to oppose his enemies. This is not the agenda of a movement; it is the agenda of a cult.
Will the republic survive all this? Of course it will. But it won’t be the same.
Whether this is good change or bad change will depend on how our leaders, liberals and conservatives, treat the aftermath of the Trump Administration. We can already see the broad outlines of the tremendous mess that’ll be left behind, from a healthcare system that had promise for reducing health care costs to unbalanced taxes, an overweight military to trade wars that benefit only the very few positioned to take advantage of them, and so much more.
But this can be an opportunity for a civics education. Some of it is already taking place, as evidenced by high turnouts for the mid-term primaries here in the Midwest, as well as far more women running for elective office than ever before. But that is the easy, reactive stuff. When the full results of the Trump Administration comes into view, how will we convince a substantial portion of the conservative base that there’s a serious problem when a large group of voters devote themselves to an obvious liar, braggart, and business failure? That they were conned?
No one likes to admit they’ve been conned.
But it’s become evident that there’s a serious dysfunction in the electorate. “Dyed in the wool Republican” doesn’t cut it anymore, if it ever did. Nor does “dyed in the wool Democrat,” because membership does not connote honesty, integrity, or competency in matters of government.
One of my hopes is obvious, I’m sure, for long-term readers: the expungement of the notion that a successful businessman will be a successful politician. (See here for more elucidation.) He can be, as George Romney, father of Mitt Romney, demonstrated a long time ago. But I suspect Romney spent a lot of time studying and thinking about the differences between the private and public sectors, and was willing to learn as he went along. But a businessman unwilling to acknowledge and work on these subjects is going to be a failure, and it’s the electorate’s responsibility to determine if a politician has made the effort to understand how our government works and the issues that it faces.
Secondly, I’d like our electorate to become more self-aware, to understand their particular triggers and how to learn to ignore them properly. A story about a family with the names obscured to protect the innocent: when the mother was quite ill, her doc, quite the cheerful and voluble sort, gave an upbeat report and then took off on vacation. A few days later, his partner, a rather dour fellow, called the family into a conference and gave another report in his own style.
One of those family members became upset.
The reason for the panic was because they were reading the body language and non-verbal signals and all those other things that make for charisma, or lack thereof. The first doc had lots of it, the second did not.
And that panic was unwarranted. The rest of the family calmed their family member by simply noting that the second doc had delivered the same information as the first doc, plus one minor detail. The facts hadn’t materially changed. But because that family member naturally tried to gather all the information they could, they picked up irrelevant information which actually just reflected the personality of the doctor, rather than relevant to the prognosis at hand. Because the doc was less upbeat than his partner, his delivery made the prognosis seem much less optimistic than had the first doc. The lesson here is to discard all those non-verbal signals and simply listen to the content of the message. In Trump’s case, discard the “fact,” dubious as it is, that he acts like a “great boss” (a quote from an article I read a while back, which made me slightly ill). What is he saying? Is it true? As well all know, or should know, the odds are considerably less than even that he’s going to tell the truth anytime he opens his mouth or Twitches his thumbs. This will be a prime, if unhappy, opportunity to learn the results of voting for a confirmed liar, boaster, and braggart.
Finally, and perhaps hardest of all, it’s clear that a lot of folks were desperate to hear certain phrases from any prospective leader. “Clean coal” is the iconic example, the cry of an industry in a death spiral, and of the workers who viewed their work in it as deeply honorable and important, and they didn’t want to leave that industry. My general interpretation is that a lot of people quite understandably fear change. There’s no surprise there. It’s not true of everyone, but a lot of people see the world as essentially static. Consider the coal miner who, upon being offered free educational opportunities, decided to study business practices connected to the coal industry. Definitely a WTF moment for someone who embraces change, but this makes sense for those who believe strongly in the status quo.
That desperate need, that fear of change, led a lot of people down the road to a bad decision, even if they do not yet agree with me. It’s not enough to acknowledge that and move on, but to also consider how to improve ourselves, collectively and individually, so that this doesn’t happen again. It’s not as if we were not warned, because a lot of pundits on both sides of the spectrum were horrified as Trump advanced through the Presidential campaign – but obviously a lot of voters voted for him when the time came. How do we, as the electorate of a signal democracy, find a way to improve ourselves and not go into a quagmire like this again?
This is one of the tests for democracies, one of those tests that will either indicate that democracy is a good governing model – or is on the way to the junkheap, to assume a place next to such models of madness as absolute monarchies and communism.
This is our chance to change. So stop that muttering and get on with it.
