Adam Gopnik - THE DANGEROUS ACCEPTANCE OF DONALD TRUMP // Noam Chomsky on Donald Trump: 'Almost a death knell for the human species'
The American Republic stands threatened by
the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern
history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no
apparent barriers on his will to power.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump. First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly over into blind, partisan allegiance—he’s going to be the nominee, after all, and so is our boy. Then a weird kind of pity arose, directed not so much at him (he supplies his own self-pity) as at his supporters, on the premise that their existence somehow makes him a champion for the dispossessed, although the evidence indicates that his followers are mostly stirred by familiar racial and cultural resentments, of which Trump has been a single-minded spokesperson.
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.” The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump. First merely endured by those in the Republican Party, with pained grimaces and faint bleats of reluctance, bare toleration passed quickly over into blind, partisan allegiance—he’s going to be the nominee, after all, and so is our boy. Then a weird kind of pity arose, directed not so much at him (he supplies his own self-pity) as at his supporters, on the premise that their existence somehow makes him a champion for the dispossessed, although the evidence indicates that his followers are mostly stirred by familiar racial and cultural resentments, of which Trump has been a single-minded spokesperson.
Now for the embrace.
One by one, people who had not merely resisted him before but called him by his
proper name—who, until a month ago, were determined to oppose a man they
rightly described as a con artist and a pathological liar—are suddenly getting
on board. Columnists and magazines that a month ago were saying #NeverTrump are
now vibrating with the frisson of his audacity, fawning over him or at least
thrilling to his rising poll numbers and telling one another, “We can control
him.’
No, you can’t. One can
argue about whether to call him a fascist or an authoritarian populist or a
grotesque joke made in a nightmare shared between Philip K. Dick and Tom Wolfe,
but under any label Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional
order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and
plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word
and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of
torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants. It is self-evident in the
threats he makes daily to destroy his political enemies, made only worse by the
frivolity and transience of the tone of those threats. He makes his enmity to
American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute
power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning
the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening
to take away F.C.C. licenses.
To say “Well, he would not really have
the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned
authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as
constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined.
They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can. And Trump announces
his enmity in the choice of his companions.... read more:
Noam Chomsky on Donald Trump: 'Almost a death knell for the human species'
What effect would
electing Donald
Trump have? It’s
hard to say because we don’t really know what he thinks. And I’m not sure he
knows what he thinks. He’s perfectly capable of saying contradictory things at
the same time. But there are some pretty stable elements of his ideology, if
you can even grant him that concept. One of them is: “Climate change is not
taking place.” As he puts it: “Forget it.” And that’s almost a death knell for
the species – not tomorrow, but the decisions we take now are going to affect
things in a couple of decades, and in a couple of generations it could be
catastrophic.
If it were between
Trump and Hillary
Clinton, would you vote for Clinton? If I were in a swing state, a state that
matters, and the choice were Clinton or Trump, I would vote against Trump. And
by arithmetic that means hold your nose and vote for Clinton.
You talk about
capitalism, politics and inequality a lot. Do you ever tire of it? Do you ever
wish someone would ask you about something else? Well, from my point of view, there are two
major categories of issues. There are the kind that are humanly important but
intellectually pretty shallow. There are the kind that are intellectually quite
deep and challenging, but don’t have the immediate human significance. If I had
my choice, I’d rather stay on the second, but unfortunately the world won’t go
away.
Do you not feel you’ve had enough
sometimes? It’s like seeing a child in the
street and a truck coming rapidly. Do you say, “Look, I’m too busy thinking
about interesting questions, so I’ll let the truck kill the child”? Or do you
go out into the street and pull the child back?
But if it was
another child, every day, for decades? It doesn’t matter. I remember the philosopher Bertrand
Russell was asked why he spent his time protesting against nuclear war
and getting arrested on demonstrations. Why didn’t he continue to work on the
serious philosophical and logical problems which have major intellectual
significance? And his answer was pretty good. He said: “Look, if I and others
like me only work on those problems, there won’t be anybody around to
appreciate it or be interested.”
What would you like
to see happen, in that case? I would like to see serious and significant steps made to put an end to
the use of fossil fuels, to create sustainable energy systems and to save the
world – as much as we can – from likely environmental catastrophe. I would move
very quickly towards de-escalating military confrontations, which are quite
serious, and move towards fulfilling our legal obligation to rid the world of
nuclear weapons. I would like countries to become democracies, not
plutocracies.
How do you turn a
plutocracy into a democracy? It’s not very hard. In the US, it simply means going back to mainstream
ideas. To quote John Dewey, the leading US social philosopher of the 20th
century, until all institutions – industrial, commercial, media, others – are
under democratic control, or in the hands of what we now call stakeholders,
politics will be the shadow cast by big business over society. That’s
elementary and it can be done.
