By Edward M. Cook
Special to the Reporter
The vision for this occasional column was to profile a nearly invisible corner of Dorchester bordered by Geneva Avenue and Bowdoin Street. So why talk about national issues? My reasons include the US citizens on Longfellow Street who were born in Puerto Rico, Dominica, Jamaica, Panama, Viet Nam, Trinidad, British Virgin Islands, Guatemala, Dominican Republic, Kenya, Honduras, Cape Verde, Guam and a few OFD. My reasons include a Dorchester girl named Ayanna Pressley.
I urge people to stop laughing at Donald Trump. I am speaking to the Trump opposition and supporters alike.
From the Left, I constantly hear that Trump is “unfit to be president.” Stop saying that. No one ever made the case that he should be elected because of his fitness for office. He never said that he is fit to be president and neither have his supporters. He is fit to be a boss, like he was in his business and reality TV show, a leader who is free to act out his own will, as he has always done. He is fit to be a totalitarian.
Totalitarian government is a modern phenomenon. It involvers a leader who has no regard for the rule of law because he is the law. In business, this is assumed to be the best practice. But it is not transferable to government. A totalitarian has no use for democratic institutions, precedents or legislatures because he is without oversight. Courts do not matter because he cannot be judged by anyone but himself. A totalitarian government is a form of national rule that depends absolutely on the leader. Hannah Arendt, in her seminal work “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” limits her list of true totalitarian leaders to Hitler and Stalin. In more recent times we could add Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Il, and Saddam Hussein.
These are the models for Trump.
Another warning sign: The undermining of truth. Arendt again: “The chief qualification of a mass leader (is) unending infallibility; he can never admit an error … The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” A corollary is that for evil to succeed, all that is necessary is for good people to do nothing. Evil thrives on apathy until the individual is totally subsumed.
On the other hand, the masses have to be won by propaganda. Hitler provided a radio in every home so that everyone could be required to hear his almost daily speeches. Trump has Twitter.
Arendt writes that “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses reached the point where they would believe everything and nothing: everything was possible and nothing was true. … were ready to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because they believed every statement to be a lie anyhow. Under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if (on) the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism. Instead of deserting the leader who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
The Left owns two failures that must be reversed to confront this danger: First, the assumption that the majority of people are politically active and paying attention to the details; and second, they missed that millions of people were cut off from their government and there was no one to whom they could present grievances; there was rule by nobody, tyranny without a tyrant.
The Left was taken aback by the rage that Trump has brought out in so many people. Rage is not an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such. No one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Trump promised that conditions could be changed, that change was not happening, that people were right to be furious, and he would be the agent of change. Result: rage.
The Right has some serious responsibilities for this threat to democracy. They are the enablers. Very often they dissemble, saying that they find Trump vulgar and distasteful but that they support his brutality to get some of their issues passed. Or they are laughing up their sleeves at the discomfiture of the Left. Or are sick of political correctness. Worse, they are simply silent and sitting back. I pose to them that silence equals understanding, equals agreement. And agreement means accepting blame, and, in this case, agreement will cost us our democracy and bring on an increase in evil behavior.
We all have a role to play. We all have our work cut out for us. Speak up wherever you can. Fight for democracy or we could lose it.
