{"id":576,"date":"2020-12-01T08:57:38","date_gmt":"2020-12-01T08:57:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=129845"},"modified":"2020-12-01T08:57:38","modified_gmt":"2020-12-01T08:57:38","slug":"a-near-miss-with-despotic-selfishness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/01\/a-near-miss-with-despotic-selfishness\/","title":{"rendered":"A Near Miss with Despotic Selfishness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Donald Trump\u2019s presidential days are numbered and the latest campaign in the culture war for control of the American lifestyle is drawing down to a shaky truce. The campaign waged by the Trump forces was particularly ugly. For the sake of ideologically shaped prejudices, which cut the believer loose from social responsibility, we got the following outcries: (1) \u201cI don\u2019t care if it sickens the community, I ain\u2019t wearing that mask!\u201d (2) \u201cI don\u2019t care if it takes away a woman\u2019s control over her body, abortion has to be outlawed!\u201d (3) \u201cI don\u2019t care if the environment goes to hell in a hand basket, entrepreneurial rights have priority.\u201d And there are a lot more examples of the fractured \u201cethics\u201d that characterized America\u2019s \u201cexceptional\u201d democracy under the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump spent four years glorifying and modeling this selfishness. His worst performance came with the Covid-19 pandemic. At that point, Trump played the role of the despotic Nero fiddling while the United States went down in the flames of a worldwide plague. That display of uncaring inadequacy may be the main reason he lost reelection in the recent 2020 matchup with Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

It followed naturally that Biden ran a campaign that contrasted with Trump\u2019s modeled selfishness. Biden repeatedly said that he would \u201crestore decency,\u201d \u201csave the nation\u2019s soul,\u201d \u201cbuild back better,\u201d and \u201cmake America America Again.\u201d Finally, Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that Trump and his narcissistic ways \u201cis not who we are! We are better than this.\u201d As heart-warming as these sentiments might be, they raise the question whether America has a single, agreed-upon standard for decent behavior. What if Biden\u2019s claim that Trump\u2019s America isn\u2019t the real America is wrong?<\/p>\n

That possibility was set forth on 5 November 2020 by Jenice Armstrong, an opinion writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em>. She lays out a different reality<\/a>: \u201cthe fact that roughly half of Americans voted to reelect President Donald Trump, despite four years of watching his lying and hateful ways, shows just how wrong Biden is\u2026. This is who we are. And, unfortunately, we are not better than this.\u201d<\/p>\n

I think Ms. Armstrong has a strong argument here, and her conclusion is reinforced by the fact that presently, with Joe Biden having won the election, and no evidence of fraud or conspiracy revealed, millions of Americans continue to believe Trump\u2019s claim that the Democrats stole the election from him. Nor do they recognize that Trump\u2019s ploy is actually an attempt to steal the election from Biden. According to a recent poll<\/a> by the respected Monmouth University Polling Institute, \u201c44 percent of Americans think we do not have enough information about the vote count to know who won the election. Nearly one-third believe Mr. Biden won only because of voter fraud.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Near Miss<\/strong><\/p>\n

For many among the slight majority of Americans who were glad <\/em>to see Trump lose, this situation comes as a shock, because to side with Trump and his radicalized Republican Party, to excuse his moral depravity, racism, sexism and disregard for the public good, contradicts the stereotypical image of American exceptionalism\u2014America as the land of good guys, the ones wearing the white hats, spreading democracy, and so forth. As Ms. Armstrong points out, this image of American exceptionalism is historically false. \u201cAmerica has been on this [ethically indefensible] path since this country\u2019s ignoble inception when our forefathers enslaved Blacks, exterminated Native Americans, denied women the right to vote.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet, there have been recent efforts at redemption. In terms of human and civil rights, aspects of recent American history can be seen as an effort to drag the nation out from the gravity well of cultural depravity. One high point of that effort came in the 1960s with Lyndon Johnson\u2019s Great Society programs <\/a>and the desegregation of the public sphere. However, it is probably the case that a significant number of American white citizens feared those reforms and never quite reconciled themselves to their implementation. Much of Trump\u2019s support was fed by surviving underground resentment that goes back to Johnson\u2019s efforts. Then came the present pandemic, which spurred a challenge to extreme personal \u201cfreedom\u201d in the form of mask mandates and lockdowns. Trump became a hero of those who spurned the needs of public health.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s incompetence in the face of Covid-19 undermined his general support, and if indeed it cost him reelection, it can be seen as the basis of the country\u2019s near miss with despotism. Yet consider the following: What would have happened if Trump had not botched the pandemic response? In that case, perhaps the large minority who supported Trump in 2020 would have turned into a sufficient majority to drown Mr. Biden\u2019s \u201cwe are better than this\u201d in a sea of reactionary impulses. The country did indeed dodge a bullet.<\/p>\n

Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jenice Armstrong of the Philadelphia Inquirer<\/em> thinks that the divide that Donald Trump so dramatically brought forward is too wide for Joe Biden, who sees himself as a national healer, to bridge. As with the Palestinian search for accommodation with Israel, Biden has no \u201cpeace partner\u201d among the opposition. Yet, according to Armstrong, the problem goes deeper. She believes the national divide is a permanent condition, \u201crooted in the fabric of America.\u201d This means that Biden\u2019s pledge to be \u201ca president for all Americans\u201d and unite the country may be nearly impossible.<\/p>\n

Yet in the end, a majority of voters did choose Biden. And, in the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson\u2019s success at reform did open up new and positive possibilities. In truth, Trump and his minions do not represent all of us, but just enough of us to frustrate continued progress in the nation\u2019s social condition. And that is the way things will stay as long as the Republican Party is controlled by those allied to Donald Trump\u2019s quasi-fascist worldview\u2014and supported by 74 million voters. Also, Trump does not plan on simply retiring from politics, even though he will now vacate the White House. He sees himself as a once and future president and will spend the next four years planning for his political revival and vindication.<\/p>\n

Presently we are experiencing what Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor and now Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, calls a \u201ccold civil war.\u201d<\/a> He concludes that, \u201cWe may have defeated Trump, but we haven\u2019t defeated Trumpism. We must work to push the Biden administration to tackle the systemic conditions that allowed Trump to seize power in the first place.\u201d Actually, that was what Johnson\u2019s Great Society programs were supposed to do. At this stage, some 60 years later and in the face of our near miss with Trump\u2019s despotic selfishness, we might ask if Reich\u2019s stated goal is achievable. If Jenice Armstrong is correct, American democracy may not be up to the task.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on Radio Free<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair Donald Trump\u2019s presidential days are numbered and the latest campaign in the culture war for control of the American lifestyle is drawing down\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":77,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,266,4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/77"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":577,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions\/577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}