2016 Popular Vote: Clinton, 65,835,514 Trump: 62,984,828 Winner: Trump
“‘This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves: finally just lay back and say it – that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable” (Thompson).
“But Thompson wrote another phrase immediately after the bitter requiem above. He remarked on ‘what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race [this country] might have been.’ I would add, ‘and has been, and may yet be'” (McCollum, “War All the Time,” My Checkered Career).
So I wrote not even twenty years ago, with a Shrub in the White House. Today, I marvel at my ability to marshal even that meager portion of optimism. Now we’ve put the salesman incarnate in the White House, with the aid of an electoral system able to magically transmogrify a loss by well over two million popular votes into a victory.
Nearly sixty-three million of my fellow citizens chose to put Donald Trump into the highest office in the land, chose him to represent their country to the world. I must ask myself how this came about. I couldn’t imagine any sane person of voting age viewing this man as qualified to lead the country, and I still can’t.
I’ve been meeting guys like Trump for most of my life. I can’t say I’ve gotten to know them, exactly, since I never spent more time around them than I had to. But I’ve seen the act over and over. The loud bray, the bullying bluster with no vestige of courage behind it, the overstatement of the simplest assertion to make it sound Important, the pathetic swagger meant to portray “confidence.” The apparently sincere conviction of irresistibility to women, the consequent casual pawing and crude verbal expressions of contemptuous lust for them.
One of the writers who first taught me how to name what I saw in people, Philip Wylie, recognized a 1950s version of Trump accurately: “I knew the type . . . successful real estate man – Ivy League – New Yorker – daughter – adored. He had no reason to doubt his excellence. He was rich, which proved it. He had graduated from a superior university, which guaranteed his intelligence, knowledge and culture. And his success had been achieved in a tough game in the biggest city on the earth. Moreover, he was, apparently, a churchman. Hence not only the tradition of America, as a whole, and the judgment of upper-class America, but God Himself, attested to his superiority. On top of all that he, he was, no doubt, a good guy” (Wylie). The modern version has jettisoned the education and, mostly, the pretense to a religion other than self-worship, but otherwise Wylie’s character closely resembles our current President.
Another writer, Hank Greenspun, an authentic American hero who knew the type well, wrote, later in that decade, “It doesn’t take much experience in the political woods to recognize the trail of a tyrant. All who have tramped through history have left the same footprints. They have appealed to the passions and trampled down reason. They have preached blind patriotism, played on public fears, inflamed hatreds and prejudices. They have struck down their critics with charges of treason. And they have all worn the same disguise; they have posed as patriots.” Greenspun was thinking about Joe McCarthy, with whom he’d tangled, and probably also of the Nazi dictatorship he’d fought. But he had Trump and the Republican Party’s methods down clearly and succinctly.
Such men have been around for a long time in America. Henry Adams’ brother, Charles Francis, who’d known Jay Gould, Pierpont Morgan and most of the other early robber barons well, toward the end of his life wrote of them: “Indeed, as I approach the end, I am more than a little puzzled to account for the instances I have seen of business success – money-getting. It comes from a rather low instinct. Certainly so far as my observation goes, it is scarcely met with in combination with the finer or more interesting traits of character. I have known and known tolerably well, a great many “successful” men – “big” financially – men famous during the last half century, and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again either in this world or the next; nor is one associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive (Josephson).
Trump’s – and his most lately adopted party’s – utter lack of political principle or commitment is hardly a novelty. In 1911, Frederick Townsend Martin, a “traitor to his class,” (a far deeper traitor than Franklin Roosevelt ever thought of being), wrote: “Among my own people I seldom hear purely political discussions. . . . It matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what President holds the reins of office. We are not politicians or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how; but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connection, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any Presidential campaign, that threatens the integrity of our estate” (Josephson).
The essential Carny nature of the American “business tycoon” was captured by William Worthington Fowler in his Inside Life in Wall Street, in which he wrote of Jim Fisk, “All the world to him is literally a stage, and he the best fellow who can shift the scenes the fastest, dance the longest, jump the highest, and rake up the biggest pile . . .. Boldness! boldness! twice, thrice, and four times. Impudence! Cheek! Brass! Unparalleled, unapproachable, sublime!” (quoted in Brands).
What had once been the target of satire by Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken became, over the course of the 20th Century, an object of admiration, then of religious veneration. The carny trickster, the confidence man, the snake-oil peddler, began his rise to respectability with the efforts of Sigmund Freud’s American cousin, Edward Bernays, the first Spin Doctor, who began his career working for the government during World War I. Then: “Most of what Bernays did at the beginning, when he was severing his ties to the Committee on Public Information and setting up his own practice, was aimed at helping American industry accommodate to the economic and social changes wrought by World War I. The pattern had been for firms to alter their product line or pitch to fit changing consumer tastes; Bernays believed that, approached the right way, consumers themselves could be made to do the adjusting” (Tye). The salesman would become the dictator, in other words, because he understood how to manipulate the news media to promote the interests of his clients, whoever they might be. “The formula was simple: Bernays generated events, the events generated news, and the news generated a demand for whatever he happened to be selling” (Tye).
Like his devoted student and imitator Josef Goebbels, Bernays viewed political figures and campaigns as mere sales jobs, further extensions of the arts of practical psychology: “Bernays [in his Hoover v. Roosevelt campaign of 1932] also made clear, as he had in his corporate campaigns, that the best way to win over the public was by appealing to instinct rather than reason. ‘Always keep in mind the tendency of human beings to symbolize their leaders as Achilles’ heel proof,’ his strategy paper advised. ‘Also that the inferiority complex of individuals will respond to feeling superior to a fool. . . . Create issues that appeal to pugnacious instincts of human beings'” (Tye). The 2016 Trump campaign seemed almost created to illustrate these points.
Bernays’ techniques – whether in promoting cigarette consumption or banana republics or presidential candidates – did not go unnoticed. They were adopted by both political parties and by the burgeoning advertising industry. Jules Henry summarized the “philosophy” that had come about in his great book Culture Against Man: “The heart of truth in our traditional philosophies was God or His equivalent, such as an identifiable empirical reality. The heart of truth in pecuniary philosophy is contained in the following three postulates:
Truth is what sells.
Truth is what you want people to believe.
Truth is that which is not legally false.” (Henry)
And the new techniques of money-grubbing, as practiced by the Reagan-Stockman empowered “masters of the universe” on Wall Street, seemed to demonstrate that the values “conservatives” had always trumpeted – thrift, hard, honest work, saving for a rainy day – were things of the past, to be spoken of with reverence and ignored, like grandma’s ashes in a pot on the mantle. As Michael Lewis observed, “For almost ten years, however, the lucky winners of the Reagan years sent a quite different message to the less fortunate: success was money, and money was made with debt, tax games, paper shuffling, and arrogance. The people listened. And an insidious side effect of the chrome-plated Reagan boom may yet to be fully realized; the average American has been left with a whole new notion of how to succeed” (Lewis). This was the “Free Market Capitalism” that well-financed professors and spin doctors endlessly trumpeted as the key to (a vanishing) American prosperity. Marilynne Robinson summed up what, by the end of the century, had become the national religion:
We know that Communism was a theology, a church militant, with sacred texts and with saints and martyrs and prophets, with doctrines about the nature of the world and of humankind, with immutable laws and millennial visions and life-pervading judgments about the nature of good and evil. No doubt it failed finally for the same reason it lasted as long as it did, because it was a theology, gigantic and rigid and intricate, taking authority from its disciplines and its hierarchies even while they rendered it fantastically ill suited to the practical business of understanding and managing an economy. It seems to me that, obedient to the great law which sooner or later makes one the image of one’s enemy, we have theologized our own economic system, transforming it into something likewise rigid and tendentious and therefore always less useful to us. It is an American-style, stripped-down, low-church theology, its clergy largely self-ordained, golf-shirted, the sort one would be not at all surprised and only a little alarmed to find on one’s doorstep. Its teachings are very, very simple: There really are free and natural markets where the optimum value of things is assigned to them; everyone must compete with everyone; the worthy will prosper and the unworthy fail; those who succeed while others fail will be made deeply and justly happy by this experience, having had no other object in life; each of us is poorer for every cent that is used toward the wealth of all of us; governments are instituted among men chiefly to interfere with the working out of these splendid principles.
This is such a radical obliteration of culture and tradition, let us say of Jesus and Jefferson, as to awe any Bolshevik, of course. But then contemporary discourse is innocent as a babe unborn of any awareness of culture and tradition, so the achievement is never remarked. It is nearly sublime, a sort of cerebral whiteout. But my point here is that unsatisfactory economic ideas and practices which have an impressive history of failure, which caused to founder that great nation California, which lie at the root of much of the shame and dread and division and hostility and cynicism with which our society is presently afflicted, are treated as immutable truths, not to be questioned, not to be interfered with, lest they unleash their terrible retribution, recoiling against whomever would lay a hand on the Ark of Market Economics, if that is the name under which this mighty power is currently invoked.
But no amount of direct experience, no number of books, sufficed to alert 60 some million of my fellow citizens to the nature of the enemies of their best interests they chose to put in power. They hadn’t thought about their own experiences of such men as Trump. They hadn’t read the books. They had nothing in their brains to use for purposes of comparison. As Ralph Ellison wrote, “at best Americans give but a limited attention to history. Too much happens too rapidly, and before we can evaluate it, or exhaust its meaning or pleasure, there is something new to concern us. Ours is the tempo of the motion picture, not that of the still camera, and we waste experience as we wasted the forest.”
The idea that we were exempt from any lessons to be learned from the past came over on the Mayflower, and our contempt for history has never wavered. But the utter obliteration of historical experience – an obliteration that makes Winston Smith’s labors at throwing undesirable pieces of the past down the Memory Hole look quaint by comparison – has been implemented by the other force that formed my century: technology. Specifically, by the technologies of “mass communication.”
Acknowledgments:
Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, Straight Arrow Press, 1973
Philip Wylie, Opus 21, Rinehart, 1949
Hank Greenspun, Where I Stand, David McKay, 1966
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons, Harcourt, Brace, 1934
H.W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism 1865-1900, Doubleday, 2010
Larry Tye, The Father of Spin, Crown, 1998
Jules Henry, Culture Against Man, Random House,1963
Michael Lewis, The Money Culture, Norton,1991
Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam, Picador, 2005
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act, Random House, 1964
[from My Checkered Career, ISBN13: 9780984413966]
