If you mean to foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints, mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is not the way to go.
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| The people left to their own devices. |
In a chilling commentary,
conference planners caution that longstanding certainty about the US Constitution
as “solid and prescient enough to thwart — or at the least contain — the more
authoritarian impulses of citizens and elected officials” has been called into
question by the presidency of Donald Trump.
I could quibble with the rest
of the statement’s woke tone and presuppositions but not with its bottom line
conclusion: “America is as polarized now as it was on the cusp of the Civil War
because of forces which polarize Americans into ideological, hyper-partisan
camps.”
“Democracy, Difference,
and Destabilization” has a catchy ring to it. However, in searching for a way forward,
the program chairs ask a misguided question: “How inclusive and representative
of our country’s diversity are democracy’s institutions and practices?” Pretty diverse,
actually. The US Congress has more women than ever before (131); there are 53
African American House Members and three in the Senate; 51 Latinos in the
House, 20 House Members who are of Asian or Indian origin, plus an unprecedented
four American Indians in the House. The percentage of people of color on the Federal bench is for most jurisdictions in the double digits.
The question political
scientists should be asking is: How can we reimagine representative democracy for
the remainder of the 21t century – along the constitutional lines envisioned by
James Madison.
The Madisonian model of
democracy has no greater nemesis today than President Donald Trump. By dint of
his character, Trump has manipulated the demos, exploited differences,
and spurred destabilization. If you do not believe me dust off Richard
Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics, take a fresh look
at Dye and Zeigler’s The Irony of Democracy, and re-read The Federalist Papers,
particularly No. 10.
The point is if you mean to
foster tolerance and want to protect the rights of people who hold minority viewpoints,
mobilizing the masses, whether based on racial identity or ideology, is
counterindicated. This lesson is something America’s responsible elites need to
relearn – fast.
Trump’s presidency has
played out as foretold. Americans knew about his character before Election Day 2016.
Yet 62,980,160 voters put a pyromaniac in charge of an already combustible
situation. When Americans contrasted Trump’s character with Hillary Rodham
Clinton’s, maybe they saw difference without
distinction. They were sorely mistaken. Clinton’s character may be out of
kilter. Trump’s is putrefied. Or perhaps by voting for Trump, Americans were
saying character does not much matter.
In our dopamine-drenched
social media environment, Trump succeeds by mobilizing his doltish supporters even
as he goads the hordes who oppose him into self-defeating militancy.
Alongside Trump drones
are his more rational enablers who perfunctorily concede that the president’s character
is problematic but argue that his policies
are worth the discomfiture. I suppose they mean trying to pack the Supreme
Court with justices inclined to re-criminalize abortion; or using regulatory
authority to reverse irksome environmental laws, or just plain trying to keep
America as white as possible for as long as possible.
To be fair, some of his policies
on trade, illegal border crossings, and NATO are hardly outlandish at face
value.
Like a broken clock, even
Donald Trump can’t be wrong 24/7.
It would be churlish of
me as an Israeli not to admit what a relief it is to have a denizen in the
White House who does not instinctively challenge every IDF military operation
or decry every Jewish home constructed over the 1949 Armistice Line. It is
fitting that the US Embassy is now in Jerusalem and that President Barak
Obama’s 2013 Iran deal was reversed. Too bad that Trump’s administration seems
no less helpless than its predecessors in preventing the mullahs from lurching
toward an atomic bomb. And I shudder to think where Israelis would be if the
PLO and Hamas had cleverly finessed their response to Trump’s deal of the century instead of rejecting it outright.
I get that Trump’s America
is understandably finished with endless wars in the Middle East. Still, as salesman-in-chief, Trump is delighted
to flog
F-35s and EA-18G Growlers to the UAE, Patriots to Kuwait, an old guided-missile
frigate to Bahrain – and just about anything that goes boom
to the Saudis. A welcome byproduct of this transactional approach to US foreign
policy is that Israel’s zero-sum conflict with the Palestinian Arabs has been
dissociated from its bridgeable differences with the broader Arab world.
Trump’s policies,
for better or worse, tend to be divulged in a slapdash,
circuitous manner that reflects his disordered personality. Staffers are left scrambling to justify his impetuous actions after the fact.
His policies and
character are intrinsically linked – as they have been for all previous presidents.
September 12 marks the 16th anniversary of the death of the scholar who literally wrote the book on presidents and character, James David Barber. What better time than to revisit The Presidential Character – Predicting Performance in the White House, first published in 1972.
Barber, who was the
chairman of the political science department at Duke University until 1995, was
renowned for blending psychology and political science. He hopefully figured
that people would factor a candidate’s character in deciding how to vote. “If
there is such a thing as extraordinary sanity, it is needed nowhere so much as
in the White House,” he wrote decades before Americans sent a self-described “very stable genius” there.
In 2016, voters seemingly
ignored
Barber’s advice to look for patterns of behavior before casting their ballots. They
didn’t have to know that Donald Trump grew up in a home with a mother who was
cold and withdrawn, and a father who withheld his love as punishment for
perceived failure. A family where cheating and bullying were endorsed, and
introspection, soul-searching, and apologizing were inexcusable signs of
weakness to intuit that Trump’s personality was psychologically stunted.
Naturally, a person’s character
is not determinative; it is not destiny. Humans have the capacity for growth. Or,
as Barber put it, “starts, do not define finishes.” Still, he hypothesized that
a president’s early life would be an essential element among a confluence of
factors affecting presidential style, specifically: rhetoric, interpersonal
relations, and homework. “Character is the way the president orients himself
toward life not for the moment, but enduringly,” wrote Barber.
Psychologist Daniel
Goleman added in Emotional Intelligence that “The bedrock of character
is self-discipline; the virtuous life, as philosophers since Aristotle have
observed, is based on self-control” to be able to set aside self-centeredness,
to do real listening and to allow yourself to be empathetic. For Barber, character
is what emerges when who we are comes up against what we must deal with in
daily life. Personality and temperament matter because citizens look to the
president for reassurance in times of crisis. The president ought to be able to
personify the better angels of our nature.
Barber categorized
presidents roughly speaking from Theodore Roosevelt to Jimmy Carter (in a
revised edition). His classifications were anchored in two criteria: whether these
individuals were active performers and whether they took pleasure from their
job.
As presidential types
went, Barber judged Thomas Jefferson as active-positive, John Adams as active-negative,
James Madison as passive positive, and George Washington passive-negative.
Trump, who denigrates
opponents as “low energy,” spends chunks of his days in frenzied TV watching
and tweet storming clearly derives little pleasure from the presidency. Given
his apparent low self-esteem and grandiose schemes, most
observers
identify him as active-negative.
Barber had found that
active-negative presidents do not try to sway those who disagree with them. Their
rigidity impels them to double-down on failing policies. They sometimes work
themselves to exhaustion, become isolated and paranoid. Anger is a constant. “As
the process of rigidification moves along, the President finds among his
enemies an individual who, to him, personifies the threat. That person becomes
the focus for the President’s aggression,” according to Barber.
Active-negatives do
little or no presidential homework. They have no use for anyone who offers an adverse
opinion; total loyalty is demanded. The glass always looks half-empty. So as
not to hurt them emotionally – since they are fragile and desperate for
adoration – bullied advisers tell them only what they want to hear. Tormented,
they cannot relish victory. They find it hard to show compassion. These
individuals assume complex problems can be solved by backslapping, flattery,
and personal appeals.
Barber published before
Donald Trump entered politics, but he analyzed him uncannily: “His natural
medium was the world of the deal, the world where a man at the right place and
time could patch together a bundle of power, doing some good for himself and
some for others at the same time.”
What active-negatives
have in common is “strong deprivations of self-esteem” in childhood as a result
of “parents who denigrated or abandoned them.” Elect an active-negative
character, and you run the risk turning one person’s tragedy into a massive national
and social catastrophe, warned Barber.
He might also have added
that you could be unleashing a pedagogical catastrophe. Besides the immense power
Donald Trump has as president, he also sets an example for children. Remember Vladimir
Lenin’s mantra: “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have
sown will never be uprooted.”
Think about what Trump
could do with four more years.
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I am open to running your criticism if it is not ad hominem. I prefer praise, though.