Bookends: The Truman to Trump Era
TRUM__:
illegitimately chosen, racist, unqualified mediocrity with a nuclear arsenal at
his command
How
to complete the spelling of the name above? Perhaps I am first to note the
irony in the fact that the post-war American era is now bookended by two
presidents whose names begin with the same four letters. It’s just a strange
co-incidence, but it helps in tying things together for an instructive
comparison.
In
spite of the glowing hagiographies that have been written about Harry Truman,
and the conventional view that he was one of the great presidents, the
description in the header above can be pinned to both Truman and Trump. Aside
from the similarities in the spelling of their names, they both won narrow
victories at a time when many Americans felt that democracy had been hijacked
by big money and party bosses. The similarities extend to other presidents, but
the historical record and the nature of American politics seems to have been
forgotten in this season of hysterical reaction to the electoral victory of
Donald Trump.
Aside
from the similarities, Truman and Trump have very different personalities and
biographies. Truman was regarded as sincere and decent, while Trump has been
diagnosed as a narcissistic and vulgar hedonist. Yet both have been called
racists and failed businessmen, although Trump has the magic touch that enabled
him to grow richer after each bankruptcy. Interestingly, polite society was
very forgiving of Truman’s faults and deeds, while today’s establishment has
tried very hard not to see any redeeming qualities in Trump, in spite
of the evidence that his character and behavior are within the normal range for
Americans of his class (crass, arrogant, fun-loving, gregarious, family man).
He has been fiercely feared and condemned even though he has no record as an
elected official. Why is the American establishment suddenly so intolerant and
unforgiving of this one individual? Is there really that much space between
Truman and Trump, or between Trump and all the other flawed men who were
presidents in the past?
Although
Truman is regarded as one of the great presidents, there are historians who
have taken a harsher view. Peter Kuznick and Oliver Stone, in The Untold
History of the United States, saw his presidency as a tragic turn in world
history. They viewed him as a mediocrity, unprepared to lead America at the end
of WWII and into the post-war era.[1]
The decisions he made led to the Cold War and the nightmarish dread of the
nuclear arms race. Truman went into politics because local party operatives
found him, down on his luck after one of his bankruptcies, to be an ideal
placeholder for a seat in the US Senate. Tom Pendergast, his handler in the
party machinery, boasted that he wanted to prove that they could take any “office
boy” and get him elected to the Senate.
As
a Democratic senator from Missouri, Truman held the typical racial prejudices
and anti-Semitism of southern Democrats of that era. Like Donald Trump this
year, many Democrats at the time refrained from denouncing racist supporters.
In
1944, with war still on, Franklin Delano Roosevelt easily became the Democratic
presidential nominee for the fourth time (there was no two-term limit at that
time), but the real contest came down to the one for the vice presidential
nominee, who was at that time chosen by vote at the convention and not simply
appointed by the presidential nominee.
It
was well known at the time that FDR’s health was not good, so the contest for
VP carried the implicit understanding that the winner would likely become the
president before the next four-year term was finished. In a rigged process led
by party bosses, reminiscent of what happened to Bernie Sanders in 2016, the
obvious popular choice, the current vice president Henry Wallace, was edged out
in favor of the inexperienced cipher Harry Truman. Oliver Stone and Peter
Kuznick wrote in a CNN editorial:
Despite
the opposition of the conservative Democratic Party bosses, Roosevelt had the
moral authority and political muscle to insist upon Wallace remaining on the
ticket as... the majority of Americans desired. The Gallup Poll--a US public
opinion survey--released on July 20, 1944, the first day of the Democratic
Party convention in Chicago, reported that 65 percent of potential Democratic
voters wanted the enormously popular Wallace back on the ticket as vice
president. Two percent wanted Truman. The internal machinations that resulted
in Truman’s selection are a sordid tale with which few Americans are familiar.[2]
Based
on what is known of Wallace’s record, the pacifist policies he favored, and his
knowledge of Roosevelt’s wartime relationship with Stalin and Churchill, Stone
and Kuznick conclude, “Had Wallace become president upon Roosevelt’s death in
April 1945 instead of Truman, there would have been no atomic bombings of Japan
and possibly no Cold War.”
The
right wing of the Democratic party, which got Truman into the White House, was
getting ready to fight the Cold War, and the progressive Wallace, who wanted to
end British imperialism and coexist peacefully with the Soviet Union, was too
much of an obstacle to those who were planning to establish a post-war world of
American supremacy propped up by the revived British and French Empires.
With
an almost total lack of outrage from elite American opinion, Truman committed
the atrocities of dropping two nuclear bombs on a soon-to-be-defeated nation.[3]
He held racist views, and he helped the right wing of the Democratic Party move
away from the achievements of FDR’s presidency. He went along with his cabinet
and advisors as they created the paranoia and existential dread of the Cold
War.
71
years later, it is interesting to note that both then and now, in the way
America looks back at this time, Truman’s presidency is not regarded as a
national trauma or crisis of conscience for journalists, historians and
government employees. He is more highly regarded now than he was then, thanks
to hagiographic films and biographies and the preferences of the “greatest
generation.”
In
the 1940s there was dissent at the margins of society over the atrocities
committed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wallace ran as an independent in 1948
and picked up a small percentage of the popular vote, but was damaged by
accusations of having communist sympathies. Intellectuals and artists expressed
great pessimism and fear about the direction of the country, but mainstream
media and liberal opinion did not suffer, as it does now, from vaporous
fainting spells and dread fears that democracy had been hijacked, the president
was capable of dropping nuclear bombs, and the nation was heading down a path
to fascism—all of which was actually the case. This might have been the time
for Americans to start worrying, not 71 years later when the problem has taken
deep root and emerged in more sinister form.
In
the 1940s, few professionals and civil servants wondered whether they should
cooperate with this new, morally reprehensible regime. In contrast, the East
Coast American literati is now in a quandary about whether they should refuse
to collaborate with President Trump when he begins “making America great again”
or whether they should go along to get along in order to prevent the worst from
happening. There were no such qualms about drone warfare and Hillary Clinton’s
record as Secretary of State of destroying Libya and Syria, or about other
items in a long list of entrenched outrageous practices that have been
normalized in recent decades. Civil servants didn’t go on strike when the US
government was establishing and supporting fascist dictatorships throughout the
world, but now elite opinion suggests it is time for the intelligentsia to
search the depths of their souls for the right way to respond to the Trump
presidency.
There
is certainly an unprecedented ugliness in the rise of Trump. He and his
campaign drew out the worst elements of America (that have always been there)
and gave them license to express themselves. Yet Trump was simply traveling the
frontier wild country, picking up votes where Hillary Clinton feared to go. He
wanted votes the way a carnival barker selling snake oil wanted dollar bills,
taking votes with no questions asked and no judgment made on the character of
his customers. If the suckers had ugly motives and false hopes of a cure for
what ails them, that was their problem.
Trump
may be reckless, vulgar, ignorant and unprepared to lead, yet again it is not
as if this is the first time that America has elected a deeply flawed and
mediocre talent as president. Many presidents also exhibited dubious personal
behavior. Yet in the big picture, what does it matter if the man who signs off
on the drone kill list is a good father and husband, or whether he has a
scandalous personal life? The public actually used to expect that naturally
only men with the most alpha male and aggressive traits would rise to power. It
was par for the course. The quick rise of a clean, upright family man such as Barack
Obama was a phenomenon that should have aroused suspicion that the party
machinery had chosen its necessary illusion—a figure meant to be an eloquent
and charming distraction so that business and politics could continue as usual.
One
sample of the fraught new obsession with how to react to Trumpism was written
by Rick Perlstein in the journal In These Times:
Now
comes the test of our institutions: the bulwarks that outlast elections, meant
to stand between strongmen, mobs and their awful instincts. How will they fare?
… And from the evidence of Clinton’s concession speech, those atop the
commanding heights of the Democratic Party clearly lack the will for the heroic
fight ahead to resist the lawless madman who commands the executive branch. Who
will lead the resistance? More fundamentally: Can a nation that cannot
acknowledge genuine trauma even resist?”[4]
The
problem is that such questions are a century late and a few trillion dollars
short. America has never acknowledged the genuine trauma it caused in other
lands or to large segments of the domestic population, so it is no surprise
that the capacity for resistance is lacking now. The obvious answer to
Perlstein’s question is that the bulwarks—the institutions--may be the problem.
There are too many structural constraints on the voting system, to cite just
one example. More radical solutions are necessary, but mainstream
liberals act as if there haven’t been any far left or radical movements crying
in the wilderness for a very long time about the need for drastic reform and
the danger of fascism coming to America. Bill Ayers, veteran of the radical
anti-war movement of the 1960s, said in a recent interview:
Today
what we need more than anything is an ability to step outside the frames that
are given to us for reasonable legitimate debate and say there is something
else. What could be and what should be stand just on the horizon. I refer back
to Emily Dickinson: imagination is what lights the slow fuse of possibility. I
think we have to remember that in a war of fixed positions we always lose. In a
war of the imagination, people from below can win.[5]
Educated
elites should have known that the American system was as vulnerable as any
other great power in history. The universities that produce Washington’s
management class perhaps stopped teaching Thucydides’ History of the
Peloponnesian War, with its fundamental lesson that the tyranny inflicted
abroad eventually comes home to feast on the homeland. Alan Ryan summed up the
modern relevance thus:
The
importance of the Peloponnesian War for our purposes is obvious. First, ...
Thucydides’ account of it exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of democracy
in ways that every succeeding age has seized on. On the one side, the
resourcefulness, patriotism, energy, and determination of Athens were
astonishing; on the other, the fickleness, cruelty, and proneness to dissension
were equally astonishing. ...Second, it reveals one major reason for the
ultimate failure of the Greek states to survive the rise of the Macedonian and
Roman empires. Greek city-states were conscious both of being Greek and of
their own narrower ethnicity: Athenian, Theban, Spartan.[6]
Another
example of the recent concern with ethical behavior in journalism and public
service appeared in an essay by Masha Gessen in The New York Review of
Books shortly after Trump won the election:
It
is not impossible that if the Times and the political establishment follow
Friedman’s advice and shower Trump with praise whenever he is so much as civil,
he will respond positively... Perhaps, if hundreds of federal employees stand
firm and do their jobs exactly as they should be done in the face of breaking
norms—and assuming they don’t get fired—Trumpism will fail. Or perhaps it will
fail if they refuse to do their jobs. We cannot know.
Similarly,
we cannot know whether Western sanctions have kept Vladimir Putin from invading
more neighboring countries or shedding more blood in Ukraine—or, on the
contrary, have caused him to be more stubbornly brutal and militaristic than he
would otherwise have been. In other words, we cannot know whether economic
punishment of the Russian government has been, in the realist sense of the
word, “effective.” What we do know is that sanctions were the correct response
from a moral standpoint—even if it is a response we have applied inconsistently
elsewhere—simply because it is right to refuse to do business with a dictator
and his cronies.[7]
Such
liberal class soul-searching was never done when Truman dropped the atom bomb,
nor during the long list of atrocities carried out or enabled by US military
and economic interventions since then. There is also something hyperbolic in
the Gessen’s comparison of the present era to Jews who cooperated with the
Nazis in the hope of forestalling and minimizing suffering. Why not discuss the
Indonesian genocide of the 1960s instead? What sort of moral dilemmas did
people face then when the American-backed coup sub-contracted the killing to a
nation-wide militia of street gangs?
The
evoking of Nazism in a discussion of what may come from a Trump presidency
overlooks the fact that the authoritarian nightmare that Trump might bring on
would probably come with many original features that couldn’t get very far in
the present American demographic, and others that would be accepted merely as
incremental changes in what already exists. Furthermore, it’s doubtful that
Donald Trump, a man who has operated for decades in multi-cultural New York
City, with a predilection for revelry and luxury, has any interest bringing
about such atrocities—which is not to say his recklessness won’t cause
unintended disasters.
As
some commentators have astutely noted, Trump’s opponents take him literally but
not seriously; while his supporters take him seriously but not literally. Yet
elite opinion likes to tells us there is a class of deplorables which
supposedly lacks the mental sophistication to perceive the nuances of the
situation.
The
sad fact is that with the NSA spying on everyone and a long list of eroded
civil rights, America may have already installed its optimal form of fascism,
adapted to its modern circumstances. Terror and repression happen away from the
view of a populace that is kept entertained, distracted and financially
insecure. The elites were just not interested in taking note of the problem
until a bogeyman arrived to make it look frightening. As comedian Lee Camp
remarks about this time of late-stage capitalism:
“A
cruel and morally bankrupt elite, backed by the organs of state security and
law enforcement, will… bankrupt the citizenry through state-sponsored theft,
war, austerity and debt peonage…” That sounds really scary, but relax. They’ve
pretty much done most of it.[8]
If
there were anything convincing in Gessen’s argument, the insertion of an
irrelevant and erroneous comparison to Vladimir Putin gives away the game. For
some, Putin has become what Vietnam was for Walter in The Big Lebowski.
Whatever anyone was talking about it had to have something to do with his time
in “Nam.”
Any
small effort to learn about what has happened in Ukraine in recent years would
reveal that the overthrow of the government in 2014 was aided and abetted by US
interference and false promises of prosperity if Ukraine joined the EU and NATO—two
hopes yet to be realized, ironically, at a time when the “populist” revolt
threatens to dissolve the EU like an echo of the Warsaw Bloc collapse a quarter
century ago.[9]
President
Yanukovich was overthrown without the constitutionally required impeachment, so
the new regime is technically illegitimate, but that doesn’t seem to bother any
Western mainstream journalists.[10]
Once in power, the new regime began to threaten ethnic minorities, which
provoked the predictable Russian response to protect them. What a moral
dilemma! Should Russian minorities have cooperated and held out hope that these
threats were idle passing expressions of extremism, or should they have chosen
to pursue support from Russia? “We cannot know,” to quote Gessen, but Putin and
the Russian minorities within Ukraine made their choice. Russia supplied
weaponry to the eastern provinces, and mercenaries from Russia came to assist,
but there was no invasion. If there had been, the conflict would have ended
quickly. Likewise, there was no invasion in Crimea where 25,000 Russian troops
were already in place because of a pre-existing treaty.
If
Gessen wanted to express concern about Nazism and the “correct response from a
moral standpoint,” there is a long list of American crimes to choose from. If
we should be so concerned about the possible rise of another fascist regime
targeting Jews, we could look not to Trump but to the historical revisionism
now approved by the illegal regime in Ukraine. Since the new government came to
power in 2014, history textbooks have been rewritten honoring as national
heroes the Nazi collaborators who exterminated Ukrainian Jews.[11]
It is inconvenient when the enemy of your enemy is your enemy, but the silence
of the global Jewish community on this issue is extremely curious.
The
author Charles Hugh Smith observes that the new, hyperventilating theme
expressed by American mainstream journalists is a reflection of their
unmanageable contradictions and their losing control of the narrative that
supports the status quo:
...
the mainstream media that was once the defender of the free press is now merely
an extension of elitist propaganda… Democracy has the implicit responsibility
of the citizenry to be able to sort out who benefits from the narrative that’s
being pushed… The narrative that is being pushed to support the status quo does
not benefit the bottom 95%, and the people are awakening to this...[12]
So
what are journalists and the intelligentsia, or “management” class, to do at
this juncture in American history? Before they become overly obsessed with the
profound moral dilemmas of cooperating with their new overlord, they could
repent for their obedience to the previous ones and consider what forms of
protest would really be necessary to turn things around. Ted Rall is on the
right track when he summed up in his essay Ameri-Splaining:
The
United States has always been corrupt, savage and brutal. It has always been
wildly dysfunctional and hypocritical. But now, thanks to a president-elect who
is loudly ignorant and utterly devoid of impulse control, the mask is off. The
horrible truth about the United States can no longer be denied. Trump epitomizes
truth in advertising.[13]
As
of this writing there is an obscure plot afoot, arising out of an apparent
alliance among the Washington political, bureaucratic, military and
intelligence establishment. The media is playing a willing role in the psy-op
that alleges that Russia poisoned the minds of Americans through hundreds of “fake
news” sites and hacked the election in Trump’s favor. It should come as no
surprise that the Russian government favored the candidate who didn’t want a
war with Russia, and it is not news that governments are involved in cyber
espionage, but is ludicrous to state that a foreign nation’s interests in its
foreign relations could amount to a noticeable influence over America’s
elections. Countries do exert pressure on each other’s’ domestic policy. How
could that not be the case in a globalized economy? However, this media
campaign is promoting the absurd notion that Russians succeeded in running
Trump as their Manchurian candidate and also succeeded in parasitizing the
minds of millions of voters, as if they could be zombified and body-snatched by
Vladimir Putin himself. The Washington propaganda effort seems headed toward a
coup via an electoral college rejection of the president elect, or at the very
least it will serve to teach Trump that the Pentagon budget and foreign policy
are off limits, even for a president. Liberals and progressives are going along
for the ride, deluded that cooperation with a CIA plot is the brave protest
that is going to save the Republic. And without a trace of irony they say it is
Trump supporters who are dupes.
Notes
[1] Oliver Stone and Peter
Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (Simon and
Schuster, 2012), in Chapter 4: The Bomb: The Tragedy of a Small Man.
[2] Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, “Without
Pearl Harbor, a different world?“ CNN. December 9, 2016.
[3] Paul Jay, “Gar
Alperovitz: Nuclear Attack on Japan Was Opposed by American Military Leadership,” Truthout,
January 24, 2014.
[4] Rick Perlstein, “The
Rush to Normalize Trump,” In These Times, December 1,
2016.
[5] Chris Hedges, On
Contact: Restrained Resistance with Bill Ayers, November 7,
2016.
[6] Alan Ryan, On Politics: A
History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), in
Chapter 1: Why Herodotus?
[8] Lee Camp, Redacted
Tonight, Episode 126, 08:40~ . Lee Camp was quoting an essay by
Chris Hedges.
[9] Steve Weissman, “Meet
the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in Kiev,” Reader
Supported News, March 25, 2014.
[10] “Hawai’i
and the Crimean Crisis – Obama is not a Legitimate President,” Hawaiian
Kingdom Blog, March 9, 2014.
[11] Josh Cohen, “The
Historian Whitewashing Ukraine’s Past,” Foreign Policy,
May 2, 2016.
[12] Keiser Report Episode 1000,
11:00~ . Interview with Charles Hugh Smith. See also www.oftwominds.com
[13] Ted Rall, “Ameri-Splaining,” Counterpunch,
December 8, 2016.
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