An American Tragedy

 I define a dysfunctional family as a family in which one member is a god.  Such a member can be a father whose career takes them all over the world, or a mother obsessed with what the world thinks of every member, or a severely disabled or prodigiously talented child.  In each of those cases, and in others as well, the needs of all the other family members tend to give way to the chosen one's.  From 1789 onwards, the president of the United States has been, in a profound emotional sense, the father of our national family, and our emotional health depends partly on his.  We have never had a president like this one.

In relatively good times our national family functions relatively well, although like any human institution it never functions perfectly.  In such times it respects boundaries--boundaries between different branches of the government and between the government and individual citizens.  Simple courtesy, which demands that officials refer even to their political opponents with respect, is another such boundary.  The national family depends above all on a recognition of a common family interest that requires each of us, at one time or another, to sacrifice for the common good and accept that we cannot always have our own way.  And it requires respect for a relatively impartial legal system that will try to identify and punish the genuinely guilty according to relatively neutral standards.  

Our current president has built his whole career on the principle that he is unique among men and women, the best at anything he tries his hand at.  That is why he cheats at golf and proclaims his every achievement to be the greatest of its kind.  From the beginning of his career as a developer he focused on building up his image, and major media outlets cooperated because he was good copy.  At a certain point, his businesses began to fail, but he compensated by building up his brand.

Four Trump real estate properties in Atlantic City had all filed for bankruptcy by 2004, when The Apprentice first aired.  Trump seamlessly transitioned from a genuine entrepreneur who kept making bad choices, to an actor playing the role of a managerial genius to an audience of tens of millions.  The show was carefully scripted  to make him look omniscient and omnipotent, the self-image he had already created for himself.  Ratings, not the performance of the winners he picked, were its only measure of success.  Meanwhile, a big chunk of the US public got to know him every week.

I have written many times that Trump's spectacular rise in 2015-16 could never have happened if the political leadership of both parties had not lost touch with the great mass of US voters.  Only that allowed Trump to wipe the floor with a list of traditional Republican candidates and narrowly defeat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college. Trump adopted the role of savior of the country from the threats of immigration and leftist ideology.  The media establishment and the Democratic Party fought back by declaring  his election illegitimate, and the pandemic allowed Joe Biden to defeat him in 2020.  Biden failed however to restore a real bond between the president and the American people, and Kamala Harris promised nothing but more of the same.  Trump improved his standing among several key groups of voters and won both the popular vote and the electoral college.  Meanwhile, a coterie of younger Republicans planned a drastic scaling back of the federal government, a complete rejection of policies designed to halt climate change, a new crackdown on illegal immigration, and an all-out attack on certain popular ideologies that had come to dominate American universities, the mainstream media, and a growing number of corporate boardrooms.

In nine months back in power Trump and his subordinates have demonstrated a total disregard for American legal and constitutional norms, and even for the very idea of a general good which the government is supposed to serve.  The president regards the whole federal government as his own corporation, which exists for the purpose of enriching its stockholders--the economic interests that back him--and punishing his enemies.  He has staffed the highest levels of the Justice Department and certain key US Attorneys' offices with lawyers who have worked for him personally and ordered them to indict political enemies, which they are doing.  He has ordered federal troops into Democratic-led cities against the will of their mayors and governors.   He is withholding approved funds for large infrastructure projects in blue states, and he is trying to force universities to accept federal ideological controls.  He has no respect for any public official who disagrees with him, and his subordinates are purging various parts of the federal bureaucracy of people who think for themselves, including some who supported him at earlier stages of their careers.  He seems to believe, like Louis XIV, that he is the state, and he is turning the White House into his own Versailles. 

I have just finished teaching an old favorite book, Doctor Zhivago, for the first time in many years.  At the climax of the book Zhivago, whose life has been upended by the Russian revolution and civil war for several years, reflects on history.

"He reflected again that he conceived of history, of what is called the course of history, not in the accepted way but by analogy with the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under the snow, the leafless branches of a wood are thin and poor, like the hairs on an old man's wart. But in only a few days in spring the forest is transformed, it reaches the clouds, and you can hide or lose yourself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved with a speed greater than in the case of animals, for animals do not grow as fast as plants, and yet we cannot directly observe the movement of growth even of plants. The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.

"Tolstoy thought of it in just this way, but he did not spell it out so clearly. He denied that history was set in motion by Napoleon or any other ruler or general, but he did not develop his idea to its logical conclusion. No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries."

We cannot understand what is happening if we ignore the changes in our national forest which grew slowly over five or six decades.  Business interests in the 1970s adopted the ideas of the Powell Memorandum and embarked upon a long-term attack on the regulatory state that the New Deal had created.  Academics starting in the same decade and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s replaced the story of the advance of western civilization with a history of oppression and resistance based on race, gender, and sexuality.  Financial manipulation and advertising replaced manufacturing and engineering skill as the motor of our economy.  The press set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of good and evil, the role that the framers reserved for our political leadership.  And our educated elite not only assumed more and more power, but also used that power to benefit itself at the expense of the more than half of the population that does not graduate from college.  Entertainers eclipsed politicians as national figures, opening up the opportunity which Donald Trump took advantage of.

Most of all, I think, the 1960s marked the beginning of a general revolt against more traditional authority of all kinds--moral authority, legal authority, political authority, and even the authority of custom.  That is the only reason that Donald Trump, who has spoken about real and presumed enemies in utterly unprecedented ways since he entered politics, could have gotten such a hearing.  Richard Nixon's tapes revealed an inner world quite similar to Trump's. Nixon too divided the world into allies and enemies and spoke frequently of setting various parts of the federal government on particular enemies and firing any civil servant who seemed to countermand his will--but both Nixon and the men around him knew that he had to moderate these impulses in real life and hide them from the American people.  Trump has not found that to be necessary.  We have for the first time a president who rejects our political and constitutional traditions, but he could not have come to power if so many of us had not lost interest and confidence in our political system first.  There is no point in assigning blame for what has gone wrong, because we cannot rewrite history and magically undo the changes that took place so gradually that we could not see them at the time.  Two centuries of an enlightened experiment in government are giving way to something very new all over the north Atlantic world.  I turn again to Zhivago and to another paragraph from the same part of the book.

"As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a tragic joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."

Boris Pasternak, the author of Zhivago, had translated several of the most important Shakespearean tragedies.  The United States, like Russia in 1917-21, is now in the midst of a tragedy of our own, one that began, I think in the mid-1960s, as I suggested in American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War.  Any joy must come from reverence for the great things we achieved together, the knowledge that every great nation pays for its greatness in this way from time to time, and the confidence that this will not be the end of history or of progress.