Gotham Diary:
Isostasy
16 July 2015
Ray Soleil just this minute sent me a link, with the following note: “What worries me is that Hitler was also thought a “priceless boob” by the elite of Germany, and look what happened….” Ray and I are on the same page about a lot of things, so I wasn’t surprised when the link took me to a piece of Donald Trump propaganda. (At Daily Kos, of course.) I suppose it could be a hoax, but I am sure that Trump will disavow it as such. Somebody goofed. Some bright young intern was tasked with finding an archival image of World War II-era soldiers, and he did what he was told, only the soldiers are Wehrmacht, not GIs. (The actual stock photo that was used suggests to me that there are Wehrmacht re-enactors.) I don’t know where Ray got the “priceless boob” line — it doesn’t crop up on the Daily Kos page, but it certainly fits, and, yes, it worries me, too — although it’s difficult to deny that the Donald has been a member of the American élite since he was a kid.
I’m not worried about another Hitler. There will never be another Hitler — Timur Vermes’s hilarious and almost plausible satire notwithstanding. Every political malefactor in Western history has developed his or her own brand of poison, to which everyone at the time was susceptible. The next “Hitler” won’t look or act anything like our Adolf.
But there will always be élites. What worries me — and I’m not saying this for the first time; it’s pretty much the fundamental anxiety of this writer — is the difficulty that élites have when it comes to understanding everybody else. The élite of the ancien régime in France, of course, failed to see the need to understand anybody else, and that’s why the ancien régime ended at the guillotine. Since then, it has become clear that one of the problems of democracy is that there are still élites. Democracy does not level the field. It is arguable that the citizens of a democracy don’t even want it to — Americans are particularly resistant to “class warfare.” Democracies still require the services of governors and capitalists. Most people, it turns out, aren’t all that interested in public affairs. All they ask is that things be “okay.”
It is very hard, if you live among the élite, to know what “okay” means. The problem is that few members of the élite are willing to try to find out — as if the French ancien régime had not ended as it did.
Benefits and burdens are distributed unequally in our modern democracies. (Totalitarian attempts to even things out have failed dismally.) I believe, however, that it makes sense to assume that they are distributed isostatically. What I mean by this is that everyone gets roughly the same amount of both. Big piles of benefits for the élite, yes; but also big piles of burdens. Now, here is a structural problem with élites: they use their benefits to offload the burdens. (This is what Trump did when he hired some doofus to create a banner.) They pay other people to do the things that they don’t want to do — the burdens. But determining what hoi polloi mean by “okay” is a non-delegable duty. You have to think for yourself. You can’t hire a consultancy that it is in the business of telling you what you want to hear.
The oldest problem with democracy, the one that ruled it out as a viable political form for the thinkers of classical antiquity, is its vulnerability to demagogues. Demagogues — and Donald Trump has always been one — stoke grievances. Anger can be very clarifying when it comes time to take political action. Trump appeals to non-élite white men who play golf, and to women who devote themselves to taking care of and enduring such men. Not to mention the men who would play golf if they could afford it. I can’t explain the link between golf and Trump, but it might have something to do with the elegant simplicity of the game — just a serious of strokes. You do the same thing over and over again, making minor adjustments for circumstances. Very minor adjustments.
Trump does the same thing over and over. Unlike the other Republican Party hopefuls, he does not wallow in policy. He doesn’t have a coherent program, a strategy for “starving the beast” or clearing the American stables of the “takers'” 47%. He says: America used to be great. Let’s be great again. He means: the United States won World War II, but it rewarded its soldiers with a unilateral and highly unpopular expansion of “civil rights.” Let’s undo that.
Trump is not proposing to chop off the heads of businessmen who sent our manufacturing jobs out of the country in order to maximize profits, incidentally keeping the number of golfers low. His intended audience wouldn’t listen. Contrary to everything that the Chicago School of economics insists upon, voters are nowhere near as interested in money as they are in pride. Their toes got stepped on in the Sixties and Seventies, and they’re sore about never having been offered an apology.
The Civil Rights movement is understood by too many progressives as a good thing that was long overdue — period. They don’t ask why it happened when it did. That’s to say that they don’t see it as a campaign in the Cold War. In the postwar world, the United States was richer and mightier than any other land — but this only made the spectacle of Jim Crow more embarrassing. All the other countries, of whatever political stripe, could say, “Yes, America is rich and powerful. But look at the South!” And now that the formerly isolationist United States stood tall in the global eye, it had to confront what it had managed to ignore, the denial of full citizenship (and, worse, of civil decency) to African Americans, former slaves who even now had not attained freedom. There had always been American opposition to Jim Crow, but Dixiecrats in Congress managed to marginalize it. Lyndon Johnson, who ought to have been one of them, upended the Dixiecrats’ hegemony. Johnson fought hard to reduce the influence of bigots in national affairs so that the United States would be as respectable as it was mighty.
Like so many Cold War initiatives, however — like the Cold War initiative that crippled Johnson’s effectiveness as a “Great Society” leader, the misadventure in Vietnam — the Civil Rights reforms were misguided. They shared, as so many Cold War policies did, the totalitarian preference for top-down edicts. They were ultimatums. The virtues of their objectives were occluded by the obnoxiousness of their enforcement. And Richard Nixon, who followed Johnson in the White House, knew just how to exploit the ensuing resentment, without appearing to backtrack on Civil Rights at all!
Am I afraid of Donald Trump in the White House? Not until I find out who his running mate is, if it comes to that. Meanwhile, progressives ought to be asking why Trump is so popular, and answering the question without resorting to variations on the word “stupid.”