The Necessary, Honorable Thing: Defeat the Demagogue
American Samizdat
I first published the following essay on Medium, on March 23, 2016, with the subtitle “Denounce Trump.” I republished the essay in the very first weeks of Homo Vitruvius, in early May 2023, when the Substack had precious few readers. I republished it at the start of this American Samizdat project in early July, with the new subtitle “Defeat Trump.” Now, more fully historically than ever, with only four days remaining to Election Day, it is right to pronounce the call more generically, because the battle is perennial, with the names and faces in the end interchangeable: “Defeat the Demagogue.”
I have to repeat, too, what I wrote in July, that in 2024, to invoke honor as a motivator in rousing greater opposition to Trump feels pointless and a little quaint. Still, opposition to a demagogue begins both in basic human decency and in honor, as patriotic citizens of a democratic nation of laws. I retain the original title to recognize that truth.
Demagoguery is the antithetical evil that opposes free minds reaching to know the truth, that thwarts open spirits yearning to know themselves in relation to others. All I said of Trump eight and a half years ago, all I say of him again here, was borne out to be true. Not a charge, not a characterization, not a word needs to be revised.
The Necessary, Honorable Thing: Denounce Trump
Only a few true moments of conscience present themselves in a lifetime. For relatively safe and comfortable Americans of the post-World War II era — a place and period of human history unparalleled in its general security and complacency — those moments are even fewer. So unfamiliar are these crucibles of conscience in actual experience that even many among the learned are blurred in their vision, dulled to the understanding of what rises before them. Though their fates may be poised before an unalterable destination and a lifetime of nostalgia for the world they lost, they do not act. But they must act. For just such a moment of conscience is now.
Donald Trump, like all demagogues, is a barbarian. Bespoke to pass for civilized in the cultivated appointments of commerce and power, he is a brute in a suit. It is a truism among the unblind that he is a narcissist, an Ego on legs sublimating primal urges to the contest of domination. He has not the least understanding of American history or of the American ideal — both of which he defiles with almost every utterance — but would not value them if he did. For every person who ever confused the exceptional idea of America with some reality of an Exceptional America, Donald Trump is the horrific lie behind the ripped open curtain to which that delusion is put.
As a person, he is an offense to decency who will demean and destroy both the high and the low, the weak and the strong, the guilty and the innocent in order to aggrandize his lust for superiority. Upon the culture and the body politic, he is a blot, a blight, a blob: decent people should refuse his presence for fear of the accreting ooze spreading at their feet. Those analysts among the opining class who confuse and characterize his crude offense and bald bigotry pronounced in a New York accent with candor — said often of a man who can barely articulate a truth not shadowed by a lie, and who rises to glory as the P.T. Barnum of bullshit* — should be locked away from keyboard and microphone for the danger to the republic they amplify.
As a man in pursuit of political power, he is the apotheosis of ignorance over the cheap mammon of notoriety. He knows nothing of the issues he addresses, cares nothing for the people whose passions he exhorts — whom he would cheat by a scheme the moment after professing his love from the podium — and he believes in nothing that he says but the declarations of his own greatness. The foremost authoritarians of the twentieth century themselves actually believed in something — in some perverse conception of the people or the state. Donald Trump is the debasement of even demagoguery itself, for he scorns the very demos in demagogue, which is nothing but a mark to be played.
Short of the snuff film legalized, the return of public executions, or the restoration of the Battle Royal, Donald Trump is the final degradation of exhibitionist, reality-entertainment, gawker American culture. Politically, he is the greatest threat to the Republic since the Civil War. He is an event horizon beyond which, even eventually defeated and overcome, the nation will never be the same again. In some respects, for what Trump has revealed of many, that is true already.
What has Trump revealed?
That the American people, no different from any other people — which the nation’s founders well knew, but their most pious inheritors forgot, in unseemly self-congratulation for an achievement not their own — are subject to the same ugly and shameful passions and animating angers as any other people; and which their better educated but equally foolish observers will excuse as the passionate expression of democracy.
That despite the cant of American patriotism, American political partisanship is superior by far for many than love of country; that there is, for many, no true idea of America separable from a conservative or liberal America.
That the American news media, at their now far too common worst — ever and fatally uncomprehending of the distinction between objectivity and neutrality, and of the inherent mission of journalism to seek and serve the truth, and thus reveal and judge the lie — are stenographers of disaster and ticket takers at a Roman Circus they sponsor.
The advent of Donald Trump on the political scene is a rend in the fabric of American republican history, a maelstrom in the moral climate of the nation’s present. As did many millions of Europeans after the Second World War and Americans after McCarthyism, we will reckon with the roles we played at the time of his rise for generations to come, as well we should. For now, the task is to ensure that the reckoning comes sooner and less seriously than if it comes later.
Every Republican who would be called a patriot should work to ensure that Donald Trump does not become the candidate for President of the Republican Party. If he does, Republicans of conscience must leave the party and form a new party, of conservative principle, of human decency, and of commitment to America’s founding ideals, and run a candidate against Trump.
News media must cease to treat Trump as another candidate, end their acquiescence to, and normalization of, his conduct, and report on him not as a mere variant candidate for president, but as a phenomenon of American political history deserving of historical analysis and judgment.
Too many have waited too long. The time has come. This is the moment.
Defeat the demagogue.
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”
Edward R. Murrow
AJA
Exactly this
I was reading this morning an interview with Wright Thompson, author of the newly published "The Barn," about the Emmett Till murder. He describes his work on that book as a necessary "excavation" that reveals "a direct line from August of 1955 to January the 6th. . . from Ross Barnett and James P. Coleman and Fielding Wright to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance." I've read a number of books about that case; Thompson is the first who, to my knowledge, examines in this context the "lie" of what happened and makes clear that what happened in 1955 is "very present" with us, and that "until everybody can say this is what happened here, there is no future for the Delta." (Thompson grew up only 23 miles from where the crime took place [in The Barn] but not until he began his research did he know that.) That "deafness" you reference in your response to Mary's comment was as true then as now, and intentional, perpetuating "an alternate view of reality, that if everyone agrees that they believe in it, then it becomes true." The "necessary, honorable thing" was not done in the Delta and so, says Thompson, "the history remains unknown." The parallel to today is startling, even overwelming to consider because of its implications for all of us, and I struggle to hope it will be "owned."
For those interested, the interview is online at Electric Literature, Oct, 30, 2024. The interviewer was Dierdre Sugiuchi.