Tag Archives: American values

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Wondering What We Have Become

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More than we may want to acknowledge, a large segment of the society is comfortable buying what Donald Trump is selling.

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times Columnist Carlos Lozada wrote that “throughout Trump’s life, he has embodied every national fascination: money and greed in the 1980s, sex scandals in the 1990s, reality television in the 2000s, social media in the 2010s. Why wouldn’t we deserve him now?” Lozada notes that “the tragedy is not that this election has taken us back, but that it shows how there are parts of America’s history that we’ve never fully gotten past.”

G 7 meeting june10 2018 Jesco Densel photographer

The same view is quietly expressed in peer nations. Many believe we live in a culture awash in sensation-seeking and shallow pursuits. Even a sober friend of the U.S., former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, wonders what is going on. She expressed “sorrow” at Trump’s election because of her own experiences in his presence at international meetings. “He was obviously very fascinated by the Russian president,” she wrote in her new memoirs. “I had the impression that politicians with autocratic and dictatorial traits captivated him.“ She also recalls the telling incident when he refused to shake her hand: an early clue to his basic rudeness. His aberrant behavior then was less focused on how the international community might solve common problems and more on the chances to exploit them.

The grifter is a familiar sometimes admired American type. More than we want to acknowledge, the avaricious President-elect is more like us than we might admit.

At its worst, American culture has shrunk from the idea of the common good or acceptance of the values and actions of humane and shared power. Our cultural interests seem to have narrowed to the shorter purview of how politics affects the acquisition of things or experiences. We may be comfortable, but we resent those who have even more. Hence, the price of gasoline matters more than attempts to mitigate the effects of its overuse. And vacationing like a prince can occur in the absence of awareness of basic realities like the monstrous American carbon footprint. According to the World Bank, the U.S. is far ahead of other nations in per capita consumption, doubling the rates of other peer states like France and those of Scandinavia. The idea of sufficiency doesn’t really apply. We have more clearly turned ourselves into exuberant materialists.

In the process of trying to purchase our way to a Mar-a-Lago of comforts, our older children now acquire huge amounts of consumer debt, most Americans drive fat cars, and cities are designed to accommodate them. Black Friday and Cyber Monday seem to have become national holidays for expressing our accumulated abundance. Many have forgotten the collective values once fostered by presidents, including sacrifice for the good of other democracies, or honoring our birthright commitment to accept new arrivals. As Lozada notes, in America there is “a long tradition of xenophobia — against Southern Europeans, against newcomers from Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.”  Under the next President this embedded habit is in danger of becoming a core American principle.

Beyond of love of things, where is the compensating consciousness of the nation’s giants of art and literature? The first Trump White House was mostly a no-go zone for concerts. I suspect the Scottish and Italians have a better collective awareness of titans in their shared past. The Japanese, British and Swedes seem to be ahead of us in protecting their nations’ natural assets. Even the simple pleasures of using nearby public spaces seem overlooked, with many localities barely providing basic amenities like sidewalks or housing for the destitute. In economist Kenneth Galbraith’s words, our mantra seems to be to amass “private wealth” even at the expense of “public squalor.”

Of course broad generalizations are subject to many exceptions. “We” can only be a suggestive pronoun when broadened to represent an entire culture. And the U.S. covers a large part of an entire continent. But 63 million Americans voted for Trump in 2016, and a commanding 76 million this time around. His bluster and fakery does not represent everyone. But many accept his forged identity as an achiever and a builder. As Daniel Boorstin noted long ago, America is the natural home of the “man on the make:” the striver who delivers more bluster than truth about achieving material success. With our now ominous avoidance of serious cultural ideas and ideals, more of us are willing to rely on the thinest of impressions to  to buy what Trump is selling.

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The Divider

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Nothing stands out more in the rhetoric of Donald Trump than his apparent pleasure in pitting Americans against each other. 

Classic studies of the American Presidency always include detailed histories of the office’s rhetorical style. In the most visible office in the world form usually follows function.  Presidents have always been called upon to find common values and beliefs that transcend regional and party differences.  In the words of analyst Mary Stuckey, the nation’s leader is the “interpreter in chief.”  His (and someday her) job includes finding the common threads of the American experience, then celebrating them in statements and appearances.  Others in Congress may function as professional partisans. But the Presidency has usually found its natural buoyancy when a leader tries to speak for the entire nation. Even past Presidents swimming in private resentments usually managed to celebrate the American experience. Most have not strayed from their constitutional oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”  That includes not just honoring the independence of the press and judiciary, but celebrating the transcendent principles of tolerance and inclusion laid out in the expansive amendments to the Constitution.

Or so we thought.

Nothing stands out more in the Trump administration than his seeming delight it pitting Americans against each other.  To be sure, leaders have been intense partisans. We know from the record that this was true of F.D.R., John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson.  Johnson is an interesting case. The former Senate Majority leader from Texas was an old ‘pol’ in the classic sense of the term. He learned about the uses of power from Richard Russell, an unreconstructed southerner. But he also understood how long-standing problems of race and poverty could be acted on in ways that would bring out the best in Americans. His televised address to Congress in 1965 supporting the Voting Rights Act remains an impressive demonstration of political courage.  In his slow drawl he reputed the racism of his mentor, embracing the promises enshrined in the nation’s founding documents.  Here are a few pieces of that address.

"What happened in Selma is part of a larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America.  It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.  Their cause must be or cause too.  Because it’s not just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.    

And we shall overcome."

It was an electric moment. Johnson spoke to our aspirations rather than our fears.  The act that passed eventually opened up local politics, leading to more registered voters and many more African American office holders.

It’s hard to fathom the horrible fact that some news organizations must supply their own security at Trump events.

Trump’s instincts are much more personal and strategic.  He seeks to celebrate himself more than the diverse corners of American life.  He feeds long standing resentments centered on race, vulnerable new arrivals, Muslims and any number of corporations and sports leagues. Most shockingly, he regularly campaigns against a sacred principle of public life: the value of a free and vigorous press.  He attacks the single feature of American political life that has been most admired and duplicated in emerging societies. His  vile and dangerous claim that the press is “the enemy of the people” is stunningly unamerican.  And from a more legalistic perspective, some verbal attacks at rallies approach the definition of felonious “incitement to violence.”  It’s hard to fathom the horrible reality that at Trump events some news organizations use their own security people to protect their journalists.

What motivates a person who publicly loathes so many?  If governing requires dealing with large segments of society that one finds distasteful, what rewards and motivations can exist?

One explanation from a psychiatrist writing in the New York Times doesn’t include a mental disorder, but a simpler habit of mind. He wrote that Trump has “a personality that privileges destructiveness and revels in the destruction of others and their ideals, whether they be refugees seeking asylum or carefully constructed policies that recognize the danger of Russian aggression.”  He notes that the President is not a “broken man,” but one “fully in tact” who simply gains pleasure from wreaking havoc on basic presuppositions grounding both conservatives and liberals raised in certain protocols and traditions of governing. He’s an anomaly in politics, not to mention the hospitality industry.

Trump will someday pass from the scene.  The more troubling problem is the mounting evidence that too many Americans seem to share his desire to destroy the values of liberal democracy.