Adam Gopnik: The Music Donald Trump Can't Hear

[MBS]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-music-donald-trump-cant-hear

. . . Of course, it’s no secret—it is one of the strangest aspects of this strangest of all American stories—that the divide between Trump’s manners and those of his most feverish supporters has always been unusually large: a rich man who lives with his third wife among gold-plated fixtures in a New York tower becoming the tribune for the evangelicals in the South and the dispossessed in the Rust Belt. But the space, we sense now, is still larger. Many liberal opponents of Trump want to insist that he is the natural heir to the past twenty years of increasing ideological insularity within the Republican Party, and in the sense that that insularity helped produce the radicalism and polarization that made Trump possible, this may be true. But, at a deeper level, this is a libel on the countless Republicans and conservatives who, however much one may disagree with them on gun control or women’s reproductive freedom or the rest, seemed still to be—indeed undoubtedly were—every bit as devoted to the principles of constitutional republicanism, so beautifully articulated by President Obama the other night in Chicago, as any American liberal. American conservatism has as many clear, resolute devotees of constitutional democracy as any other stream of ideology—or it once seemed to.. . . Republican legislators who, a year ago, would have been aghast at any politician who praised the brutal dictator Vladimir Putin now have little trouble swallowing their tongues when Trump insists that Putin’s good opinion, however earned, is “an asset.” Those who made a fuss about pursuing any possible conflict of interest among Obama’s appointees now meekly allow the most conflict-ridden and least “vetted” of candidates for high office to walk through largely unmolested. And the insistence of the leader that he has no obligation to release any record of his financial entanglements, with the bold repeated lie that an “audit”—whose existence can’t be confirmed and wouldn’t matter anyway—prevents him from doing so, is simply and mutely accepted. The collapse—motivated for some by opportunism, for others by the intimidation of the mob—is complete.

No, the collapse is total. And at that terrifying first press conference of Trump’s, on Wednesday, we saw the looming face of pure authoritarianism. Rewards are promised to the obedient: those good states that voted the right way, the “responsible” press. Punishments are threatened to the bad: “They’re going to suffer the consequences!” Intimidation is the greeting to any critic. And look! There’s a claque alongside to cheer the big boss and deride his doubters. This is what was once called Bonapartism: I won and I can now do anything I choose. Victory, however narrow, is license for all. Autocracy, after all, has always been compatible with plebiscitary endorsement. The point of constitutional government is to make even the victors subject to the rules.

Trump is so unusual and scary a figure that he lends himself to over-, or overly narrow, interpretation. As John F. Kennedy was said to represent the ascent of the movie star and Reagan of the TV host, Trump, we’re told, represents the triumph of the reality-television star. There’s truth in that, no doubt. But the trouble with this kind of analysis is that the same country and the same culture that produced Trump as President also twice, very recently, produced Barack Obama, his diametric opposite in tone, style, and persona. It is Trump who is the improbable outlier, not our democracy. (And Hillary Clinton, who, it cannot be said too often, won more votes, was not of that new kind either.) In any case, there is nothing in the least “postmodern” about Trump. The machinery of demagogic authoritarianism may shift from decade to decade and century to century, taking us from the scroll to the newsreel to the tweet, but its content is always the same. Nero gave dictates; Idi Amin was mercurial. Instruments of communication may change; demagogic instincts don’t.

What is to be done? In such a moment of continued emergency, the most important task may be to distinguish as rigorously as possible between new policies and programs that, however awful, are a reflection of the normal oscillation of power, natural in a mature democracy, and those that are not. To borrow from Woody Allen’s distinction between the miserable (something we all are) and the horrible (fortunately suffered by only a few), we must now distinguish resolutely between the sickening and the terrifying. . . .Assaults on free speech; the imprisoning of critics and dissidents; attempts, on the Russian model, likely to begin soon, to intimidate critics of the regime with fake charges and conjured-up allegations; the intimidation and intolerance of even mild dissidence (that “Apologize!” tweet directed at members of the “Hamilton” cast who dared to politely petition Mike Pence); not to mention mass deportations or attempts at discrimination by religion—all things that the Trump and his cohorts have openly contemplated or even promised—are not part of the normal oscillations of power and policy. They are unprecedented and, history tells us, likely to be almost impossible to reverse.