Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage (2)

Compared to many other subjects I write about, I don’t write about Donald Trump very often. I don’t follow him on Twitter. I don’t watch Fox News (I cancelled my Shaw Cable TV more than three ago, back in July 2017, writing two months later on Sept. 5, 2017, “Two months post-cable television (and therefore post CNN and Donald Trump) and $150 to the good (me, not Shaw).”

Not being a complete media recluse, however, as there is still the internet, I do know The Donald – a.k.a. President Donald Trump – accepted the Republican Party’s re-nomination for president last night at the party’s national convention, promising to “rekindle new faith in our values” and rebuild the economy once more following the COVID-19 pandemic. He also said, being gathered on the massive South Lawn at the White House, known as the “People’s House,” they cannot help but marvel at the “great American story.” This is a common and recurring theme in American history. Earlier this month, I completed my eleventh Hillsdale College online course, titled “The Great American Story: A Land of Hope,” taught by Wilfred M. McClay, the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma, and co-director of the Center for Reflective Citizenship at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

A little more than four years ago, as President Donald Trump was then running for president as Citizen Donald Trump, a man best known to many Americans in 2016 as the host for the first 14 seasons of The Apprentice, the American reality television program created by British-born American television producer Mark Burnett (of Survivor fame) that judged the business skills of a group of contestants, I wrote my first significant blog post about Trump on July 17, 2016 in a piece headlined, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/07/17/demagoguery-and-demonization-pass-for-discourse-and-civility-vanishes-from-the-public-stage/). The Apprentice, which I didn’t canvass at the time, was produced at Trump Tower in New York City between 2004 and 2015. Episodes ended with Trump eliminating one contestant from the competition, with the words “You’re fired!”

Interestingly, while the headline, “Demagoguery and demonization pass for discourse and civility vanishes from the public stage” may appear to be contemporaneous with Trump and Trumpland today, and certainly could be, it wasn’t written that way exactly:

“Consider the headlines for Sunday, July 17, 2016: CBS News is reporting in a July 16 its headline “W.Va. lawmaker: Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung’ on National Mall.” The story goes onto say, “A member of the West Virginia House of Delegates is causing a stir after tweeting that Hillary Clinton should be ‘hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“‘CBS affiliate WOWK-TV reports that Michael Folk, a Republican legislator who is also a United Airlines pilot, posted a tweet Friday night saying: ‘Hillary Clinton, you should be tried for treason, murder, and crimes against the US Constitution… then hung on the Mall in Washington, DC.

“Meanwhile, Charles P. Pierce has a July 14 piece in Esquire magazine, headlined, “This Isn’t Funny Anymore. American Democracy Is at Stake.” The subhead reads: “Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor to the American idea.” Pierce writes at the top of the story that not “until Wednesday did we hear clearly the echoes of shiny black boots on German cobblestones.”

“Really?

“Is this the best we can do in terms of civics and public discourse in 21^st century America? Call anyone we disagree with a traitor and perhaps for extra outrage allude to Hitlerism and Nazism? Is demagoguery the only currency we traffic in for what passes as ideas?

“We stand at a dangerous international moment in history when an intersection of events conspire to resurrect Fascism on a scale not seen since the 1930s.”

In retrospect, I think both the headline and story have held up well over four years. I also wrote at the time:

“If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end. I may not much like a Trump presidency, but the Supreme Court and Congress will not be dissolved [although Trump will probably make several nominations for upcoming vacancies on the bench that will make me wish the court had been dissolved. But that’s OK; Republican life appointments to the highest court in the United States often prove over time to be stubbornly independent, demonstrating you couldn’t have asked more from a Democratic appointee. It’s kinda complicated.]

“Trump’s also unlikely to push the hot-war nuclear button, should he find himself ensconced in the Oval Office next January.  Want to know what was really dangerous? The dance Democratic President John F. Kennedy, the living Legend of King Arthur and Camelot, had with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. That was the almost the end of the world as you knew it. Right then and there. Not Donald Trump hyperbole.

“There are plenty of examples in recent American history before where the crème de la crème cluck their tongues in displeasure at the electoral wisdom of the hoi polloi [think Brexit for the current British equivalent.] So what? Minnesota didn’t wind up seceding to Northwestern Ontario and amalgamating Duluth with Kenora when pro wrestler Jesse Ventura was elected and served as governor of Minnesota from January 1999 to January 2003.

“California survived when Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian-born American professional bodybuilder and movie actor wound up getting himself elected to serve two terms as governor of California from November 2003 until January 2011.

“And speaking of California, an earlier Republican governor, Ronald Reagan, also a movie actor, went on from the statehouse to the White House, elected to two terms as president between January 1981 and January 1988. Each time – when Reagan, Ventura and Schwarzenegger were elected – Henny Penny cried out the sky was going to fall. It didn’t.

“I was living in Somerville, Massachusetts in November 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president.

“I had been working as supervisor for Cambridge Survey Research where I oversaw telephone call center employees for Democratic National Committee (DNC) pollster Pat Caddell’s firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the 1980 Jimmy Carter-Ronald Reagan presidential election campaign.

“We lost the election. Big time. I well remember going to work a few days after, late in the afternoon, riding above ground aboard a subway car on the Red Line “T.” The November sky was a foreboding steel-gray, with leaves all fallen now from the trees. And there it was, as we headed into Harvard Yard, giant spray –painted graffiti on a cenotaph proclaiming “Ray-Gun” had been elected.

“As it turned out, Reagan did have a fondness for his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), nicknamed Star Wars. But the dreamed-for global missile shield didn’t come to fruition. Instead, Reagan, along with Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, managed to end the Cold War with perestroika [restructuring] and glasnost [openness] becoming part of the everyday vocabulary of Americans by the late 1980s, rolling from their tongues as if they had been saying the two Russian words forever.

“Demagoguery, while deeply disappointing as it is being manifested by Trump and his supporters, is neither new nor fatal to American politics. It is also not surprising when people feel that politics is a rigged game they can’t possible win at under the normal rules of the political elites.”

I admit over the last four years, I have reflected many times on the line, “”If Donald Trump wins the presidency in November, the world won’t end,” and wondered if I was being too optimistic because there have been days and nights with Trump when well, Trump, is Trump. And that can indeed be a scary thing.

My friend Bernie Lunzer from back in my Newspaper Guild union days from 1997 to 2001 perhaps put it best yesterday, writing, “Central frustration – we won’t change Trumpists by laughing at them or telling them they’re stupid. I share those feelings but they don’t help. They are motivated by other things. Maybe we can’t change them because their base motivation is racism? So then they are simply enemies? We still need to do something other than acting smarter and sanctimonious. I don’t have answers. But do take this election as serious.”

This reminds me indirectly of an article Thomas Frank penned for The Guardian and published on Nov. 6, 2016 – just two days before the last presidential election (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/06/republicans-and-democrats-fail-blue-collar-america) headlined, “The Republicans and Democrats failed blue-collar America. The left behind are now having their say.” Frank, a political analyst, historian, journalist and columnist, is also the founding editor of The Baffler magazine, and author of the 2004 book, What’s the Matter with Kansas? as well as Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? published in 2016.

Do better.

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‘In Jerusalem and in Athens, lightning struck. Socrates asked the question: “What is the right way for a man to live?”‘

Skyline of the Old City and Temple Mount in Jerusalem, Israel.

“In Jerusalem and in Athens, lightning struck. Socrates asked the question: ‘What is the right way for a man to live? … that lightning has remade the world,” says Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn, a professor of politics and history, in his opening remarks to the first lecture, “Jerusalem, Athens, and the Study of History at Hillsdale College” in the school’s free online version of its freshman core course, History 101: Western Heritage — From the Book of Genesis to John Locke.

This is indeed powerful stuff. It presents the kind of questions I have long wanted to take some time to study and ponder in more depth in ancient and medieval history.

While I have a master’s degree in history, my focus was on 20th century American history (which I studied at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in Canada in the mid-1990s). Queen’s is a fine school and has a wonderful graduate program with some terrific professors. I was blessed to have the privilege to study there.

And historic Kingston, the Limestone City, is a very pleasant place to live, albeit skewed somewhat demographically to being home to scores of those who spend their days in the hallowed halls of either academia or behind the walls of the goodly number of federal penitentiaries that also call Kingston and surrounding area home (a number that has decreased though by two with the closure since my graduate student days of both Kingston Penitentiary and Prison for Women). At its peak, there were 10 federal prisons, ranging from minimum to maximum security, in Kingston and the countryside adjacent to the city.  Joyceville, Pittsburgh, Collins Bay, Frontenac, Bath and Millhaven remain very much in operation. On the academic side there is the aforementioned Queen’s University and St. Lawrence College, plus numerous specialized military schools, including the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), Canadian Forces School of Military Intelligence, Canadian Forces School of Communications and Electronics, the Peace Support Training Centre, Canadian Forces Military Law Centre and the Canadian Army Command and Staff College at Fort Frontenac. The military educational facilities in Kingston, just by their very names, suggest the sort of specialized education offered by the modern scriptorium. Civilian graduate school is not so very different most places. While there are significant differences between studying for a master’s or doctorate degree in history (the latter requires an original contribution in knowledge to the field and some foreign language proficiency and takes longer), both endeavors are specialized and research focused, although the M.A., which allows for the use of more secondary sources, somewhat less so. My field of 20th century American history is actually not even that broad, truth be told. It narrows down to diplomatic history and foreign relations, more specifically the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989. Nice thesis title though: America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’: Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan.

What I yearn for now that I have the luxury of time to do so is to study the canon of Western Civilization in a more core or foundational way. In other words to be terribly politically incorrect, studying dead white men and their Great Books. Fortuitously for me, I discovered Hillsdale College s few months ago.

Founded as Michigan Central College in Spring Arbor, Michigan in 1844, the school moved nine years later to Hillsdale and assumed its current name. As stated in its Articles of Association, the college undertakes its work “grateful to God for the inestimable blessings resulting from the prevalence of civil and religious liberty and intelligent piety in the land, and believing that the diffusion of sound learning is essential to the perpetuity of these blessings.”

Though established by Freewill Baptists, Hillsdale has been officially non-denominational since its inception. It was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion, or sex, and became an early force for the abolition of slavery. It was also the second college in the United States to grant four-year liberal arts degrees to women.

Hillsdale sent a larger percentage of its students to fight for the Union in the Civil War than any other American college or university except West Point. Of the more than 400 who fought for the Union, four won the Congressional Medal of Honor, three became generals, and many more served as regimental commanders. Two of those Hillsdale veterans helped carry Lincoln’s casket to the slain president’s final resting place in Springfield, Illinois. Sixty gave their lives during the Civic War.

Because of the College’s anti-slavery reputation and its role in founding the new Republican Party among the notable speakers who visited its campus during the Civil War era were Frederick Douglass, the famed African-American social reformer and abolitionist, and Edward Everett, the former senator and secretary of state – and brilliant Massachusetts orator – who, without notes for two hours, preceded president Abraham Lincoln in speaking at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Nov. 19, 1863. While Everett gave a brilliant speech that day, as expected, Lincoln happened to follow with what we now remember as the 273-word “Gettysburg Address,” which lasted less than two minutes:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln’s speech immediately struck a chord and remains the best-known speech in American history more than 150 years after it was given. Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln the day after their speeches, saying, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

The orator I am studying at the moment predates both Lincoln and Everett — by about 3,000 years, give or take a few centuries. Homer, believed to be the author of both the Iliad and the Odyssey, is the first and greatest of the epic poets, and his writing is central to the Western canon, albeit we’re not quite sure when he lived, or for that matter, if he lived at all. There are some, shall we say, historical ambiguities when it comes to Homer.

Nonetheless this is the beginning. This is where we come. Says Hillsdale College pro­fessor of English and dean of  faculty Stephen Smith, in introducing the second lecture for Great Books 101: Ancient to Medieval: “The Iliad is a poem of rage: Rage is the first word of the poem, and Achilles’ rage is a major theme of the story. The Iliad is a poem of desire, especially the characters’ desires that make them who they are, but also lead to their destruction.

“The Iliad is a poem of delusion: The characters are constantly blaming the gods for their troubles instead of their own free will or choices. The Iliad is a poem of deception, perhaps most notably in the case of Achilles’ friend Patroclus, who dies in battle because of Achilles’ lie. The Iliad is a poem of disaster and double-dealing, especially the double-dealing of Achilles that leads to the disastrous death of his friend. The Iliad is a poem of death and outrage: Achilles re-enters the battle against Troy after the death of Patroclus and kills numerous Trojans, including Hector, dragging his body around the walls of Troy. This outrage turns Achilles’ glory from a high into a low point.

“The Iliad is a poem of responsibility and evasion: Achilles has been evading his responsibility, but at the same time he is responsible for the death of his friend. The Iliad ends when Zeus says he will bring the fighting to an end and grant Achilles his glory — a glory that Achilles wins not through battle, but by returning Hector’s body to his father. Achilles’ glory is to be free of his rage, which is the beginning of virtue.”

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