Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
In Latin
America, they would call him a caudillo.
The term literally means “man on horseback,” and it’s a product of the 19th
century. People in the newly independent countries of central and south America
who were trying to put together democratic governments had to deal with the
threat that some general or other would either sweep out the government and
stage a coup d’état or appeal to
a large number of people, convince them that representative government was
unworkable, and take over in a revolution. The military leaders who took power
that way came to be called caudillos
— since 19th century generals usually did ride into battle on horses
as a symbol of their leadership authority — and the whole system of
dictatorship they embodied became known as caudillismo.
The 20th
century was full of caudillos, and the
plague of dictatorship they represented spread far beyond Latin America into
countries long considered too civilized to succumb to it. Sometimes the caudillos were just thugs (like Saddam Hussein), but sometimes
they identified themselves with particular ideologies. On the Left there were
Lenin in Russia in 1917, Mao in China in 1949, Kim Il Sung in North Korea after
World War II, Fidel Castro in Cuba in 1959 and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in
1999. On the Right there were Mussolini in Italy in 1922, Hitler in Germany in
1933 and Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1973. Some of the caudillos, like Juan Perón in Argentina in 1945 and 1972 and Muammar al-Quaddafi in Libya in 1979,
invented their own ideologies from a smorgasbord of Left and Right ideas.
But wherever the
caudillos ruled, and what excuses they
put forward as justification for their dictatorial rule, they had one thing in
common. They all took power in countries that were heavily divided politically,
in which the established democratic parties had essentially deadlocked and the
government was barely functioning. And whatever their claimed ideology, they
basically presented the same appeal: they would sweep out the established
politicians, take over and be men of action who could get things done. They
also generally offered convenient scapegoats on which they blamed all their
countries’ problems. The Leftist caudillos blamed property owners, corporations (including outside investors) and
rich people in general, while the Rightist ones usually made their scapegoats
racial instead of economic. But all said that their country had ceased to be
one its citizens could be proud of, and they offered themselves as the saviors
who could “Make ________ Great Again.”
Until August 20,
2015 I wasn’t thinking of Donald Trump as a potential American caudillo. I had pretty much bought into the conventional
wisdom that he was a politically inexperienced blowhard who would self-destruct
under the weight of his sheer outrageousness and overweening pride. I was sure
that sooner or later the Republican primary voters who have given Trump such a
strong lead — though still only about 25 percent of a pretty small sliver of
the total American electorate — would come to their senses, decide they’d made
their point and coalesce around someone more “electable” in normal political
terms. Then I watched Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN August 20, and Rachel
Maddow’s on MSNBC just after it, and all they could talk about was the polls
that showed Trump actually broadening his lead after gaffe after gaffe that would have sunk a more ordinary
politician.
Trump zoomed to
the top of the crowded Republican Presidential field when he said that Mexico
was sending murderers and rapists to this country and therefore we had to stop
“illegal” immigration. Trump attacked John McCain’s military record and
snottily said he preferred war heroes who hadn’t got captured — and his poll numbers went up. Trump responded to Fox
News anchor Megyn Kelly’s “gotcha” question on the first Republican
Presidential debate, calling him on his record of making openly sexist and
blatantly sexual slurs about women, with an openly sexist and blatantly sexual
slur about her. Not only did his poll numbers go up again, he had an even greater margin of support among
Republican women than Republican men. What’s more, even the dwindling numbers of
Republican voters who still support someone else as their first choice for the
nomination overwhelmingly name Trump as their second choice — and the actual
number two candidate in the most recent polls is Ben Carson, an
African-American and a former doctor who, like Trump, has never held elective
office and is therefore not considered part of “the system.”
What I gathered
from those polls, and from the enthusiasm that both Trump and his Democratic
opposite number, Bernie Sanders, are stirring up in their followers — Trump and
Sanders have both had to move their rallies to bigger venues because the places
they booked originally haven’t been big enough to contain the crowds — is that
a lot of Americans have given up on “democracy” as they’ve experienced it in
the last quarter-century. They’ve seen their politicians, whatever their party
label, become so dependent on campaign donations from rich people that the only
policies that get seriously considered are ones that make the rich richer and
the rest of us poorer. They’ve seen their home values destroyed by a
devastating recession, their jobs swept away by corporate restructurings and
“outsourcing” to foreign countries, and in the seven years since 2008 the
economy go through a so-called “recovery” whose benefits have gone almost
exclusively to the top 1 percent of Americans while everyone else is either not
working, working well below their potential, or scared shitless every day that
their job will be taken over by a Mexican, a Chinese, or a computer.
They’ve given up
on their country’s existing government’s ability to protect themselves against
threats from abroad. They can’t help but wonder why, despite the U.S.
maintaining a bigger military than the next 25 countries in the world combined (and spending that much more on it, too), we’re
getting pushed around in the world by Russia — the country we supposedly won
the Cold War from — Iran, China and North Korea. They’re perplexed that after
all the U.S. servicemembers who were killed in Iraq and all the blood and treasure that was spent there, Iraq is now the home
base of the murderous medievalist thugs of Islamic State. And if they think
about it at all, they’re probably wondering why all the pro-corporate “free
trade” agreements pushed through by presidents of both major parties only make
it easier for businesses to shift jobs overseas and shaft American workers.
What the people
who’ve underestimated Trump until now (including me) haven’t realized is just
how far the U.S. is on the path towards the people losing faith in the entire
idea of “democracy” and desperately seeking a caudillo who can rule with an iron hand and make it all
better overnight. When anybody bothers to ask the people who are supporting
Donald Trump why — as Republican pollster Frank Luntz did in a focus-group
meeting in Alexandria, Virginia August 24 — they get quotes from Paddy
Chayevsky’s famous line from the movie Network: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it
anymore!” They get brickbats aimed equally at President Obama — whom they don’t
believe actually likes the U.S. — and the Republican-dominated Congress, which
they call “useless,” “irrelevant,” “lame” and a few other epithets that can’t
be printed in a mainstream U.S. newspaper.
One woman at
Luntz’s focus group on Trump said of mainstream politicians, “It’s been years
and years of feeling like you’ve been lied to. Nothing getting better;
everything, across the board, getting worse.” Another attendee, a middle-aged
man, said, “We grew up in an America that was the leader of the world. Today,
we’re quickly becoming a Third World [country]. … As a power, [Russian
president Vladimir] Putin slaps us around like we’re Tahiti. Nobody respects
the United States as an authority on anything.”
Asked what they
like about Trump, Luntz’s focus-group participants talk about two things: his
success in the private sector and his willingness to say things mainstream
politicians consider too in-your-face or electorally toxic. “There’s something
about Trump,” said one woman in Luntz’s group. “He looks you in the face. He
doesn’t care what you think of him.” Another woman said, “He’s successful in
this country just like we want to be.” She added that she didn’t mind his
boasting because “he’s proud of his success,” which she felt Mitt Romney hadn’t
been. “I like the confidence,” a third woman said. “It makes me feel
confident.”
Luntz came away
from the meeting he’d organized shaken at the depth, scope, power and seeming
unshakability of Trump’s support. “Nothing disqualifies Trump,” he said. Though
Luntz had worked for the 1992 independent Presidential candidate H. Ross Perot,
who like Trump had come out of virtually nowhere, shaken up the race and
ultimately got 19 percent of the vote, better than any third-party Presidential
candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, Luntz said the Trump phenomenon was
“stronger … far more intense” than Perot.
The
Cult of the CEO
In another
country, or maybe even another historical era in the U.S., the broad
dissatisfaction with the way things are going, and in particular with an
economy that serves only the rich and a foreign policy that has left us looking
weak to the rest of the world, might have inspired large numbers of people to
turn Left. But the American Left has done such a good job in the last 50 years
of shrinking both its numbers and its influence to total irrelevance, while the
Right has come back from seemingly crushing defeats to grow its electoral and
ideological hegemony, that it’s not at all surprising that the man millions of
people are turning to as their political savior is presenting himself as a
Right-winger who blames “illegals” for virtually all his nation’s problems in
much the same reflexive fashion Hitler blamed everything wrong with his country
on “the Jews.”
I don’t want to
suggest that Trump’s politics are comparable to Hitler’s, but it’s indicative
of how he’s using undocumented immigrants as an undifferentiated scapegoat that
Trump even said the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore over police killings of
African-Americans were the fault of “illegals” and that he’d end such civil
disturbances by deporting their practitioners. “When
you look at Baltimore, when you look at Chicago, and Ferguson, a lot of these
areas, you know, a lot of these gang members are illegal immigrants,” Trump
told a talk-radio host in Mobile, Alabama August 14. “They’re gonna be gone.
We’re gonna get them out so fast, out of this country. So fast.”
If Donald Trump wins the Republican nomination, it won’t be
the first time the GOP has tried to reclaim the White House by putting up a
corporate CEO with no political experience. It happened in 1940, when the
Republicans saw their hopes of ending Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, with its
domestic New Deal and its aggressive challenge to fascism abroad, in
industrialist Wendell Willkie. Had the 22nd Amendment been in effect
in 1940, Willkie could well have won the election, especially if there’d been a
typical fratricidal war for the Democratic nomination between FDR’s
conservative vice-president, John Nance Garner of Texas, and the progressive
FDR actually wanted to be his
successor, agriculture secretary Henry Wallace. But with FDR eligible to run
for a third term and many Americans still associating CEO’s in general with the
business practices that had sunk the American economy a decade earlier,
Roosevelt beat Willkie — not by as much as he’d beat Herbert Hoover in 1932 or
Alf Landon in 1936, but enough to win comfortably.
Since 1940, there has been a sea change not only in the way
Americans view their government and political system, but the way they feel
about businessmen. The original caudillos
were military leaders — indeed, that’s where the term came from — but with the
demise of the draft, which has led most Americans to think of the military as
something “other” people do, military experience has virtually faded completely
from the list of virtues Americans look for in their prospective leaders. The
last U.S. President who was a general was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who left office
in 1961, and the last President who served in the military at all was George H.
W. Bush, who left office in 1993.
Instead, thanks to a highly successful propaganda campaign
waged by corporate America and the politicians and academics they funded, the
cult of the general has given way to the cult of the CEO. The Republican Party
is now totally governed by a libertarian ideology that holds that the people
who run companies succeed because they’re better, more capable humans than
anyone else, and therefore they ought to have the right to run things as they
please and any attempts to tax them to help those below them on the
socioeconomic scale are not only bad policy but downright immoral. This
ideology was expressed in the popular novels of Ayn Rand, whose most important
book, Atlas Shrugged (1957), is
generally named by Republican activists as the second most significant work of
political philosophy ever written (next to the Bible).
At the end of the 19th century, many progressive
reformers — Republicans as well as Democrats and independents — believed that
private ownership of the financial system, the energy industry and basic
utilities like gas, electric, water and public transit was inherently
oppressive. Throughout the country so-called Municipal Ownership Leagues were
formed to buy out the private owners and make the big utilities publicly owned
and therefore more responsive to the people. Even people who stopped short of
calling for public ownership still felt the corporations ought to be regulated,
and anti-trust laws should be enforced to keep companies from getting so big
that they monopolized whole industries and got so rich they used their fortunes
to buy control over the political system and shield themselves from public
accountability. The basic attitude of the progressives of that era was summed
up by activist attorney and, later, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis,
when he said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated
in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
But that view,
along with the government regulations, anti-trust laws and other attempts to
curb corporate power — including protecting the right of workers to form labor
unions — has become, as George W. Bush’s attorney John Woo said about the
Geneva Conventions, “obsolete and quaint.” As the governments in the Soviet
Union, China and the other countries that claimed to be putting the
philosophies of socialism and communism into practice turned into oppressive
tyrannies, the American Right was able to argue that this proved that any controls on corporate power, any government
interference in the economy, would generate similarly tyrannical results. As
memories of the Great Depression faded, corporate CEO’s themselves and their
hired propagandists were able to create the cult of the CEO. Self-glorifying autobiographies
by people like Trump, Lee Iacocca and General Electric CEO Jack Welch (who
became known as “Neutron Jack” because one of his key strategies for building
up his company’s stock value was firing large numbers of workers) became
best-sellers.
Today the idea
that “the private sector” is inherently more “efficient” than the public sector
is so widespread in the U.S. that it is taken as an article of faith. Given the
opportunity to vote on whether public services should be offered to the private
sector, most American electorates overwhelmingly endorse the idea — even though
the only ways a private company can deliver a service more cheaply than the
government, and turn a profit doing so, is either to cut the wages of the workers or lower the quality of
the service, and in real-world privatizations they usually do both. The cult of
“the private sector” has reached such dimensions that even the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting, the government agency charged with administering public
radio and TV in the U.S., calls itself “a private corporation funded by the
American people.”
So with the
adulation of CEO’s having reached cult-like status, and with the myth of the
super-CEO utterly embraced even by many Americans who have personally suffered
from it in lost jobs, lost homes, work-related injuries, environmental
devastation and higher taxes, it’s almost inevitable that in a time of public
disgust at the way the U.S. is being governed, many Americans are willing to
put the presidency in the hands of a CEO and say, “Here. Clean house. Do what
you have to do.” They were almost ready to do that in 1992, when H. Ross Perot
ran and came a lot closer to being elected President than most people realize.
If it hadn’t been for his spectacular psychological meltdown in public, which
led him first to withdraw from the race (after he’d spent millions just to get
on the ballot in all 50 states) and then to re-enter it, Perot might well have
carried enough states to squeeze out an electoral victory in a close three-way
race.
And it’s looking
more and more like large numbers of Americans are disgusted enough with their
so-called “democracy” that they’re willing to see their salvation in Donald
Trump. His support so far cuts across all the so-called divisions within the
Republican party. Though he hasn’t really talked much about the “social issues”
that motivate evangelical Christians and the religious Right in general, and,
as Frank Bruni pointed out in an August 25 New York Times column, Trump’s own life hardly makes him the poster
child for religious-Right values (“If I want the
admiration and blessings of the most flamboyant, judgmental Christians in
America,” Bruni wrote, “I should marry three times, do a queasy-making amount
of sexual boasting, verbally degrade women, talk trash about pretty much everyone
else while I’m at it, encourage gamblers to hemorrhage their savings in casinos
bearing my name and crow incessantly about how much money I’ve amassed? Seems
to work for Donald Trump”), he’s leading among Republican evangelicals just as
much as he is among the rest of the party.
What’s more, Trump’s appeal extends beyond the Republican
Party. Some of the participants in Frank Luntz’s focus group of Trump
supporters had voted for Barack Obama. And while the Democratic insurgent,
Bernie Sanders, could hardly be more different from Trump on the surface — a
self-proclaimed “socialist” instead of a capitalist, a community organizer who
eked out a victory in a close race for the mayoralty of Burlington, Vermont in
1981 and has held public office ever since, and someone who’s not only not rich
himself but who proudly boasts that the average donation to his campaign is $35
— he’s making a similar appeal to voters disgusted with business as usual in
Washington, D.C. and who want an alternative. Frankly, many voters attracted to
Sanders in the Democratic primaries will have a hard time accepting Hillary
Clinton, Joe Biden or some other old-line pro-corporate politician as the
ultimate nominee, and despite Trump’s business background and frankly racist
platform on immigration, may vote for Trump just because they think this
country needs a shake-up and they’ll see him as the man who can deliver it.
It could be that there may be something out there that will prick the Trump balloon, just as the
bizarre scandal about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server for
State Department business has metastasized and stripped her of the aura of
“inevitable Democratic nominee” she once possessed. But more and more, it’s
beginning to look like the normal rules of politics don’t apply to Donald Trump
— just as the normal rules of business success haven’t applied to him in the
career that got him the riches, name recognition and don’t-fuck-with-me
reputation that are his principal assets as a politician. It may seem ironic that
a country full of people on tenterhooks about how much longer their jobs will
last would elect as President a man whose main public presence has been on a
“reality” TV show in which he humiliates people and tells them, “You’re …
FIRED!,” but when a country’s people feel that their so-called “democracy” has
failed them, they’re fair game for a caudillo, a man who can ride in on horseback (or, in Trump’s case,
on a state-of-the-art helicopter emblazoned with his name): a Lenin, a Hitler,
a Mao … or a Trump.
