Monday, December 12, 2016
Demagogue-in-Chief
Demagogues like Donald Trump,
writes Hedges, "play to the inverted values of a decayed society."
(Cartoon: Mr. Fish / Truthdig)
For
Donald Trump, the presidency will be a vast stage for accommodating his
megalomania and insatiable appetite for money. Those who mock, defy or anger
him will feel the wrath of the state. Those who are not obsequious will be cast
aside. He will invest most of his energy in his brand. Self-promotion is the
only real talent he possesses. Corruption, already rife within the political
system, will explode into a full-blown kleptocracy. Manufactured stories about
Trump’s prowess, brilliance, sexual allure and goodness, as well as how America
is becoming “great again,” will be pumped out by the White House smoke machine.
He will demand encomiums that will become ever more outrageous. All love,
devotion and allegiance will be to Trump.
Trump is
the sick expression of a dysfunctional political system and mass culture that
celebrate the most depraved aspects of human nature—greed, a lust for power, a
thirst for adulation and celebrity, a penchant for the manipulation of others,
dishonesty, a lack of remorse and a frightening pathology in which reality is
ignored. He is the product of our escapist world of constant entertainment. He
embodies the mutation of values in American society that has culminated in an
enormous cult of the self and the abandonment of the common good.
“When a
population becomes distracted by trivia,” wrote Neil Postman,
“when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when
serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a
people becomes an audience and their public business a vaudeville, then a
nation finds itself at risk: cultural-death is a clear possibility.”
Demagogues—insecure
and crippled by an unbridled narcissism and seldom of high intelligence—play to
the inverted values of a decayed society. They attack all who do not kneel
before the idol of “the great leader.” “Saturday Night Live” can continue to go after Trump, but Trump, as
president, will use every tool in his arsenal, no matter how devious, to banish
such public ridicule. He will seek to domesticate the press and critics first
through the awarding of special privileges, flattery, gifts and access. Those
who cannot be bought off will be destroyed. His petulant, childish taunts,
given authority by the machinery of the security and surveillance state, will
be dangerous.
Trump’s
fight with the Fox News host Megyn Kelly illustrates his vindictiveness. Kelly,
who was sexually harassed by Roger Ailes when Ailes was Fox News chief,
questioned Trump on her television program about allegations of rape made by
Trump’s first wife, Ivana. Ivana Trump later recanted the allegations, although
she had provided graphic details of the rape in a signed deposition during
divorce proceedings. Trump was furious with Kelly for raising the matter.
In
an interview by Terry Gross on “Fresh Air”
that was posted last week, Kelly said that for months Trump attempted “to woo
me—not romantically, but just, you know, into favorable coverage.” Trump
demanded that she phone him, Kelly said, and she did so. There was a moment in
that telephone conversation when he realized he had failed to persuade her, she
said. “He became very angry. He told me I was a disgrace, that I ought to be
ashamed of myself, and that’s when he said, ‘I almost unleashed my beautiful
twitter account against you and I still may.’ ”
The
conflict between the two exploded after the first Republican primary debate, in
August of 2015, in which Kelly asked Trump about his derogatory comments about
women.
Kelly was
savagely attacked by Trump for nine months after the debate, including
repeatedly on Trump’s “beautiful twitter account.” The attacks ended when Kelly
went to Trump Tower to film what she called “a softer focus interview” with
Trump but which in journalism slang is called a “puff piece,” one that flatters
the subject of the interview.
Kelly
told Gross that the attacks by Trump “unleashed a chaos in my life unlike any I
have ever experienced.”
“I was
receiving death threats regularly, serious death threat against me, against my
family,” she said. “Strange men showed up at my apartment building demanding to
see me in a threatening manner. People started casing my home. Photographers
were found on my property. I don’t know if they were private investigators or
what they were, but people started digging into my past, bothering my mother,
bothering my closest friends, bothering my high school friends, trying to dig
up dirt on me.”
“The
c-word was in thousands of tweets directed at me,” she said. “Lots of threats
to beat the hell out of me, to rape me, honestly the ugliest things you can
imagine.”
“The
thing I was most worried about—I have a seven, a five and a three-year-old—and
I was worried I would be walking down the street with my kids and somebody
would do something to me in front of them, that they would see me get punched
in the face, or get hurt.”
Kelly
said the “crescendo of anger” sent “my life into lockdown.”
When
Gross asked Kelly about the “alt-right” figures gathered around Trump,
including Steve Bannon, Kelly was unequivocal. “They will come after you,” she
said. “They will target you. And they will be relentless about it.”
Ridicule
especially antagonizes the demagogue. It deflates the pretentious and the
powerful. It reduces to human size those puffed up by their self-importance. It
exposes them for who they are. It affirms the self-respect and dignity of the
oppressed. Demagogues, lacking the capacity for self-transcendence, cannot see the
ludicrousness and absurdity of their pretensions. They cannot distinguish
between their inner fantasies and reality. They can belittle and ridicule
others, as Trump does, with great cruelty, but they see nothing humorous about
similar treatment directed at the self-created edifice of their own glory.
“There
are people who tell jokes,” goes a joke illustrating the morbid humor prevalent
among the populace in East Germany during the communist rule. “There are people
who collect jokes and tell jokes. And there are people who collect people who
tell jokes.”
I have
covered numerous demagogues as a foreign correspondent, including the Chilean
dictator Augusto Pinochet, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, the Iraqi
dictator Saddam Hussein, the Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and the Syrian
dictator Hafez Assad of Syria, as well as Erich Honecker of the former East
Germany, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia. They
had different idiosyncrasies and styles. Gadhafi and Ceausescu loved the
spectacle and pomp that come with power. Milosevic and Assad spent long periods
out of the spotlight. But all had patterns of behavior exhibited by Trump.
Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of
Arturo Ui” provides the blueprint for how demagogues work. It is the story of a
Chicago mobster cornering the cauliflower market in 1930s Chicago through
threats, blackmail and coercion. It is also a thinly disguised allegory for the
rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. The Barker, who opens the play, lays it out
in the prologue:
Ladies
and gentlemen, we present today,
The great historical gangster-play!
Learn all bout blackmail and framing! Further:
How to succeed in big business through murder.
The great historical gangster-play!
Learn all bout blackmail and framing! Further:
How to succeed in big business through murder.
Demagogues
expend great energy marginalizing, censoring and silencing all critics,
something the corporate state has already done to dissidents such as Noam
Chomsky and Ralph Nader. They use the media, especially the airwaves, as a vast
public relations department to amplify their lies and promote their personality
cults. They destroy cultural and education institutions, replacing them with
rote vocational training, nationalist kitsch and tawdry entertainment. They
elevate members of their family, sect, tribe or clan to the inner circles of
power. (Trump’s tribe, of course, is the billionaire class.) They put generals
in key positions. Those in the military appeal to demagogues because they are
not trained to think but to be obedient. The military also does not shrink from
violence. The demagogue and the inner circle grow fabulously rich by pillaging
the state. They live in private inner sanctums of opulence and depravity that
resemble Versailles or the Forbidden City. They banish anyone in the
court who tells them unpleasant truths. They read into the most benign acts
wild conspiracies. They often sexually assault girls and women. Hussein and Gadhafi
were notorious rapists. Trump’s misogyny is well documented.
Demagogues
foolishly see the elaborately staged public events held for them as proof that
a populace loves and respects them. And in the final, decrepit stages of their
rule they became grotesque parodies of themselves. The sycophants around them,
profiting from the orgy of corruption, feed their gargantuan self-delusion. The
demagogues, believing they are divinely inspired geniuses and omnipotent, make
decisions based on hallucinations. When a demagogue reaches that stage, society
can be obliterated.
Demagogues
usually seek to immortalize their grandeur in huge building projects that are
monuments to their immortality. Saddam Hussein sought to rebuild the ancient
city of Babylon. He constructed a replica of the palace of Nebuchadnezzar II on
the ruins of the original, embossing his name, like Nebuchadnezzar II, on
many of the bricks. Gadhafi built the largest irrigation system in existence,
calling it “the eighth wonder of the world.” Ceausescu, whose birthday was a
national holiday, constructed a massive palace, The People’s House, at a cost
of $1.75 billion in Bucharest. He conscripted as many as 100,000 workers for
the project. There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, who died from accidents
during the construction. The palace, which is the second largest building in
the world, after the Pentagon, has 3,500 tons of crystal and 1 million cubic
meters of marble. It was two-thirds finished in December 1989 when the regime
was overthrown. In a visit to the national museum that winter, I found it
filled with idealized portraits and busts of Ceausescu. Rooms were devoted to
hagiographic accounts of his mythical life story. Building projects and image
creation of this kind make Trump—who has decorated his residence in Trump Tower as if he were
Louis XIV, the Sun King—salivate.
Demagogues
foster the psychosis of permanent war, which often leads to actual war. The
psychosis of permanent war becomes a tool to abolish civil liberties and
condemn dissent as treason. Huge expenditures go into the military, which
demagogues see as an extension of their personal power, while the rest of the
country decays. There is nothing a demagogue loves more than a big military
parade.
The story
of demagogues is as old as civilization. They have risen and fallen like the
tides, always leaving in their wake misery, destruction and death. They exploit
the frustrations and anger generated by a decayed society. They make fantastic
promises they never keep. They demonize the vulnerable as scapegoats. They
preach hatred and violence. They demand godlike worship. They consume those
they rule.
© 2016
TruthDig
Chris Hedges writes
a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard
Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The
New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War,
and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on
America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph
of Spectacle.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment