ENEMY WITHIN

Response to Correspondence

Don Watson

The enemy of Enemy Within is not Donald Trump, but the fear and rancour at work in the United States, and the deep fractures that this election campaign has exposed. It’s the “malaise” besetting the country: its roots are too old and deep to say with any confidence that we’re really speaking of decline. I set out with no clear idea, except to avoid the Clintonite liberal orthodoxy of New York or a rust-belt town where anti-Clintonism – or anti-nearly-everybody – prevails. I chose to go to Wisconsin because it had a reputation for progressive politics, and Bernie Sanders’ success in the Democratic primary there seemed to say it was enduring. At the same time, I knew that Wisconsin’s governor was an archetype of the modern Republican who, through re-districting, voter registration and anti-union measures, had transformed a state once famous for its “across the aisle” cohesion. I fancied I might learn more about what was going on in the election from exposure to this polarised opinion.

I found the old Wisconsin overlaid with the new: the new being Scott Walker’s brand of reactionary politics, fuelled by the Koch brothers, talkback radio, the Tea Party, Christian evangelism and a reflexive and venomous hostility to anything that can be called liberal. Wisconsin, as a former state congressman told me – and Gary Werskey in this issue movingly affirms – is not the tolerant, temperate and progressive place it once was. And the change in Wisconsin is very like the change occurring across the country.

It is a massive conceit to write about a country, a state and an election on the strength of a fifteen-day visit. The generous responses to this essay therefore came first as a relief, and second as enlightenment. Naturally, I will not be taking issue with people who have not taken issue with me. Where they have added further evidence or argument in support of my general case, as Patrick McCaughey, David Goodman and Bruce Wolpe have, I can only be grateful. The same goes for their corrections. I think Goodman is right to say that Americans are no more divided on party lines than they have been throughout their history: though it is true that fewer voters now inhabit the unaligned middle, and that it has been the Republicans’ malevolent strategy for more than two decades to reject all compromise and obstruct democratic ambitions, even if it means closing down the government, the Supreme Court or the economy.

I would rather Patrick Lawrence had not embarrassed me with the news that the remark about coffee and killing oneself cannot be attributed to Albert Camus (I feel like I have known all my life that he said it), but I am glad to know better; and gladder still for his gritty discourse on Tocqueville and the “soft despotism” of the neoliberal consensus. I had not made the connection before, but it is a near-perfect designation for the assumptions of the elites, not least the doctrinaire political correctness that Tea Partiers and Trump supporters find oppressive. So-called liberals for whom globalisation has been a liberating and enriching force live in a universe so distant from the millions for whom it has been a disaster, they seem incapable of understanding them, or of extending to them the tolerance that at other times they hold up as their defining value. If tolerance depends in some measure on empathy, the Democrats should have it in abundance: yet they have little apparent capacity to put themselves in the shoes of those who see them as smug, corrupt, self-serving and deeply favoured by the system – and even less capacity, of course, to recognise their own failings. Give the Democrats the equivalent of the Clinton emails and they would be ruthless. Give them the Podesta emails and the tapes that indicate calculated and systemic disruption of Trump rallies and which received about a minute’s media coverage, while Trump’s eleven-year-old “sex tape” dominated the news for a week or more, and their outrage would be deafening. And yet, to listen sometimes, one would think they cast stones only after an internal audit has assured them that they are without sin. 

Dennis Altman, I take it, would have had me write more – and more favourably – about Hillary Clinton; and less – and less favourably – about Bernie Sanders. More as well about why millions of Americans, including black Americans, like her so much. On that score I will excuse myself on the grounds that this support of the candidate is a given, and the essay is more concerned with what’s at issue. However unfair the reasons might be, Hillary Clinton is one of the reasons the election has been so bitter. She’s been part of the problem. That’s why Sanders won Wisconsin and why he did well enough elsewhere to drag Clinton and the Democrats towards his more radical positions. It’s why Trump was still doing so well deep into the campaign. As for my “bromance” with Bernie, like my “desperately” wanting to believe in the United States, I was not aware that my feelings ran so deep. Sometimes it’s like that, I guess. Still, of all the candidates on both sides, Sanders did strike me as the most authentic, the most grounded, the most concrete in his speech and the one trying to make the electorate face up to some of the realities that are corroding the country (and helping Trump succeed), when Clinton was passing over them with “pragmatic progressive” bromides. 

Thomas Jefferson thought a “temperate” mind was essential to democracy: his own (even at home on a plantation worked by slaves – with one of whom Thomas fathered six children) gave glorious expression to the idea that “all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights …” etc. Jefferson was a wonder of a human being and one of mighty contradictions. And so is the United States a wonder and full of contradictions – some of them, as H.L. Mencken insisted, are a consequence of Jeffersonian doctrine. Jefferson conceived of liberty, Mencken said, as freedom from the tyranny of a monarch. What he failed to recognise, but his rival Alexander Hamilton saw clearly, was the other necessary guarantee of democracy, namely freedom from the tyranny of the majority. So savage is this election, it seems possible that the people contesting it believe it will decide which majority can tyrannise the other for the next four years. Perhaps that’s the case with all US elections, but surely the sense of it is more profound this year.

Jefferson would have loathed Donald Trump, of course. Trump is intemperate. Worse, he is vulgar. No breeding, manners or enlightened reasoning restrain him. There are no contradictions in Trump. He is all id, as some elements of the country are, as we all are now and then. Trump is the unrestrained part of the United States. In worshipping him, the unrestrained – or those who would be – are worshipping themselves, within the cult of freedom and ignorance of which they are honorary members. The rest are merely obsessed with him. In morbid fascination Americans now watch his fall as they did his rise, with barely a thought for the content of his policies. It’s not his critique, but the manner of it that is so … seductive.

His opponents, perhaps mindful of Jefferson, might like to pretend there’s something un-American about Trump, but he’s as apple-pie as any on either side of politics. He’s the unapologetic go-getter; the Yankee bounder; the chancer; the champion of the deal; the great manipulator. He’s the populist; the anti-intellectual, the rugged individualist; the people’s friend; and the enemy of the elites. He’s Barry Goldwater (for his racism) and LBJ (for his vulgarity) in one; he’s Dr Strangelove and General MacArthur; P.T. Barnum, Ed Sullivan and Hugh Hefner. He’s the ringmaster of celebrity, sex and fame. He takes what is his: and his is whatever he can take. In the lost world he promises to restore, this is the code they lived by. What in some places is now called “inappropriate” behaviour was then called doing what comes naturally, and in Trumpland it still is. The intemperate Trump is no less the genuine American article than the temperate Clinton is. 

As Nicole Hemmer amply demonstrates in her comment on the essay, not the least of Trump’s Americanness is his anti-democratic tendency. She quotes the example of the Roosevelts, and of the populists Coughlin and Long, but we might add dozens of congressmen and senators, state governors, mayors, military men, sheriffs and small-town bosses – of varying degrees of corruption (which, if it is ever proved against Trump, will also be nothing new). To these, we could add any number of characters in popular culture. The anti-democratic thread in American life is as old as the democracy itself. And so is the corruption.

Hillary Clinton may lack her husband’s political genius, but she could hardly have done better in this campaign. Her courage may one day become legendary. In those dreadful debates she returned Trump’s brutal attacks on her character with much deadlier attacks on his, and deployed her temperate mind to beckon wavering voters with flawlessly marshalled facts and arguments. Not that the media or those who watch are judging the quality of her arguments, much less the content. In keeping with media practice, that she remains in charge of herself is enough: the products of that mind, such solutions to the country’s problems as she might suggest, the policies she offers, are of no great interest. 

If you think this overstates the case, just tune in to any of the networks (and dare to wonder if this might be the future in Australia). And if you will forgive such a crude conspiracy theory, the failure of the media networks to bring temperate minds to bear on policy and the rise and seeming fall of Donald Trump have the same cause – ratings, or, if you like, commerce. At a Kennedy School forum on 19 October, the NBC pollster Peter Hart was asked, “How do you understand the role of the media in this election cycle?” He replied: 

I think the one thing we can all agree on is, ratings have driven this. I mean, Donald Trump has been a magnet, I mean, in that you can put him on anytime, anywhere and bingo. I love sort of the “Morning Joe” element. You know, they created him, and then essentially, he turned on them, and they turned on him, and you know, you have all of this. 

If Donald Trump is a squalid reminder of the dark side in American life, the country’s media cannot escape the same judgment. If he’s a joke and an embarrassment to the democracy conceived in liberty and defended in blood, ditto. And if the substance of the policy choices has drawn minimal focus on any of the networks, ditto again. But if media ratings reflect public demand, most responsibility has to fall on the audience. 

That was the point Richard Ford was making when he wrote about the malaise. John Updike’s observations twenty years before him, Jimmy Carter’s a decade or so before that, and the fascist United States Philip Roth imagined in 2004 conceived of the malaise in different ways, but all of them plant responsibility at the door of the democracy itself. Blame materialism, greed, cartels, intrigues, indifference, ignorance, xenophobia, fear, religious manias, unlikely sexual pathologies or intemperate minds – the country has flaws and lunacy in abundance: they are always there, waiting for a demagogue to stir them into something dire. It is the remarkable achievement of the United States that the democracy has never succumbed, and continues to be, if only after a fashion, the one revolution that ever worked. So far, that is.

Don Watson

Don Watson is the author of many acclaimed books, including Caledonia Australis, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, American Journeys and The Bush.