If
nothing else, Trump affords commentators and critics the opportunity if not necessity
for extravagant language. I don't often, if ever, find Andrew Sullivan worth
quoting, but his concluding words about Trump (from "America Has Never
Been So Ripe for Tyranny" a recent piece in nymag.com) are blustery enough
to stick with me:
He [Trump] is not just another candidate to be parsed and
analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our
liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event.
It’s long past time we started treating him as such.
"Extinction-level
event?" Enviable turn of phrase, I admit, but is it so? Is Trump the
killer asteroid and American democracy, flawed as it is, the massive,
slow-moving, out-moded thing awaiting impact?
Based
on his histories of American conservatism — e.g. "The Invisible Bridge:
the Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan" — I take Rick Perlstein more
seriously than I do Sullivan. In a recent piece for The Nation ("Is the
American Party System About to Crack Up?"), Perlstein writes of Sanders:
He is running as a “revolutionary.” But governing is a team
sport. If, by some miracle, Bernie Sanders entered the White House in January,
he would do so naked and alone—in command of a party apparatus less prepared
ideologically, institutionally, and legislatively to do great things than at
any other time in its history.
This is
not exactly what Sandernistas want to hear, of course, though it's inarguably
correct.
Perlstein
sums up Clinton v. Sanders this way:
"One
side promises competence. The other promises the impossible. This is the
Democratic Party in 2016."
Moving
on to the more charged subject of Trump, Perlstein writes:
If Donald Trump loses the presidency, we’ll still be left
with those millions of followers—many of them violent—trained by Trump to
believe that their American birthright has been stolen from them once more. The
only thing that will stand in their way is the strength of our constitutional system.
One must hope it proves very strong indeed. The alternative is a sort of
realignment that none of us want.
***
I beg
to differ with Sullivan. I don't think America is as ripe for tyranny as he
says. The United States is not suffering anything like the shattering of a
Great Depression. Nor have we lost the sort of major war that throws all values
into doubt.
Germany
lost its Kaiser at the end of World War I, Russia its Romanovs. Japan lost a supposedly
divine ruler at the end of the World War II.
I think
American democracy, as per the Constitution, less absolute and more flexible
than the above regimes and traditions: to put it another way, it's more
secular.
Both
Sullivan and Perlstein underline new media as one of the reasons traditional
political discourse has given way to irruptive forms and figures. Who needs
violence in the streets when violence online and in social media suffice?
That's
worth coming back to. Suggestions welcome.
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