“Coughlin was a priest tending a shrine to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux who found that he had a syrupy radio voice. McCarthy was a ferret who fancied himself the Grand Inquisitor from the Dostoevsky novel he was not literate enough to read. Wallace was a strutting little fellow dwarfed by the doorway he stood in to keep blacks out. Trump looks like an overripe former matinee idol, a male Norma Desmond insisting that he is still wonderful (make Hollywood great again). These are not people of great charm.”
“Some suspect that the demagogues must have twisted or damaged psyches; but probing such muddied puddles does not get us far. Leaders are made by followers. The real question should be: what did the followers want that they could supply?”
“Demagogues can touch exposed nerves, but some perceived crisis has to expose the nerves in the first place. Each of these men (only men) rode a turgid wave of turmoil caused by some menacing development. The Depression was the crisis Coughlin claimed to meet, by blaming it on the Jews. The cold war created the Commie scare that gave McCarthy his hunting license. The civil rights movement made Wallace a grubby improbable knight of the Old South. What is the crisis that created that parasite on the Republican Party called Trump?”
“What do his followers want to be saved from, even by a not-very-palatable savior? Two crises have, with some justification, been listed. First there is the shock some whites feel at having a black man in the Oval Office treated as superior to them. A second crisis is the growing income inequality, letting whatever money is still being made float inevitably up to those who are already rich.”
“These anxieties do, undoubtedly, gnaw at Trump’s followers. But I think a deeper crisis underlies them both, not shouldering them aside but pitching in to make them both more pervasive and more intense.
This is the shuddering distrust of every kind of authority—a contempt for the whole political system, its “establishment,” the Congress, its institutions (like the Fed), its “mainstream” media, the international arrangements it has made (not only the trade deals but the treaty obligations under NATO and other defense agreements).”
“This is a staggering injection of bile into the public discourse. It does not answer, or even address, the question: what kind of order can be maintained in a society that does not recognize the legitimacy of any offices?”
“Geoffrey Wheatcroft says of Blair’s dishonesty and incompetence: “It is not fanciful to see the Brexit vote, the disruption of the Labour Party, and the rise of Donald Trump…[as] part of the revulsion across the Western world against elites and establishments that were so discredited by Iraq.””
“Torture occurs in all wars; but Bush is the first president (he may not be the last) who adopted an official rationale and defense for torture. This alone, apart from all his other war measures, would make him our worst president ever. To gauge our descent into distrust, we should measure it against the giddy assent we gave to the war at its start.”
“To his followers, Trump seems to “tell it like it is” because he voices their dissatisfactions.”
“His insults show he does not follow the polite evasions of “political correctness.” He will not be bound by any of the practices that seem to have brought about the loss of status of people not rewarded by the economy. He will not have to submit any spending to a gridlocked Congress. He will end Obamacare and do something else—anything will be better. Abroad, he will just “bomb the shit” out of enemies, not acting under the restraint of alliances. He will go it alone. As he said at the convention, “I alone can fix it.” His followers think that they are acting alone through him. That makes them regain what they imagine were their powers under some earlier era. He will wage wars without allies. He will end terrorism by means far more drastic than waterboarding. He will kill the terrorists’ children. He will make America vilely great again.”