Editorials

My earliest political memory is watching the 1952 Republican convention on the little round ten-inch screen of my family’s almost-brand-new television set on one of those hot humid St. Louis summer nights. That’s right, I’m so old I can remember both pre-TV and pre-AC—though not that well any more.

My recollection is that the hot issue on that hot night was Taft v. Eisenhower. I recall that my grandfather, a one-time finance guy who never got another job after “The Crash”, was for Taft, and everyone else was cheering for Eisenhower. My mother would later claim that she’d never been anything but a Democrat, but I don’t remember a word about Adlai Stevenson being uttered then.

My father, however, was a Republican of sorts, an Eisenhower Republican to be sure, who welcomed the opening that Ike provided in the closed world of the Taft types who dominated his party until then. That identity was consistent with his class interests as an up-and-coming middle manager in a big corporation, in the 50s bubble where all was right with the world for people like him.

When his employers moved us all to California in 1953, he voted cheerfully for the kind of moderate California Republicans epitomized by Governor Earl Warren and Senator Thomas Kuchel. But as the party turned meaner under the influence of people like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, he took up voting for Democrats in almost every election. My mother, however, insisted that he maintain his party registration through the 60s and 70s so she could fire off outraged telegrams over his signature as “Lifelong Republican”.

Neither of their long lives was long enough to require them to watch what passed this week for a Republican convention, for which I’m grateful. As I watched it on my desktop computer screen not much bigger than our 1952 TV, I felt like a space traveler who’d unexpectedly landed on Mars.

My husband’s grandfather, born in 1869, was one of the really real Republicans, an early inheritor of the party formerly known as the party of Lincoln, son of an Ohio Quaker woman whose obituary described her as “a lady abolitionist and classical scholar”. The racist Nixon/Goldwater “Southern Strategy” disgusted him and people like him and like my father, but the Republicans (formerly known as the Grand Old Party) managed to maintain a façade of quasi-civility since then, even (I can’t believe I’m saying this) during the regimes of Bush I and Bush II.

No more.

The Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle, corporate inheritor of what used to be the Republican house organ, the old Examiner, used this jump headline for their convention story: “Clinton Crudely Reviled”. Exactly.

Whatever happened to the respectable Republicans of my childhood? Who are these aliens?  

(And of course I use the word “alien” in the sci-fi sense, not in Trumpish derogation of foreigners.) 

Even more than like a space traveler, I feel like a time traveler as I watch the Republican convention faithful in their vulgar display of rancor against the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.  

“Vulgar”—now there’s an old-fashioned word, one much used by my grandmother but seldom invoked these days. It comes from the Latin “vulgus”, meaning the common people, though in its current usage it’s an unfair slur on the common folk. 

But as I watch the scene from Quicken Loans Arena (now there’s a crude name!) I think of another arena, the Roman Colosseum, where the populace enjoyed watching Christians being fed to lions and gladiators killing each other. It’s no coincidence that Lying Donald is a pro wrestling fan.  

Or for another historic snapshot, how about an auto-da-fé, a popular entertainment where the public cheered as heretics were burned at the stake? Or public hangings in medieval England? Or lynchings in the American South, right up through the 20^th century?  

Events like these have always had their fans. But what’s happened, I think, is that modern technology, starting with television, and extending now through the whole breathtaking range of anti-social media, has brought ugly spectacles like these back into the forefront of public life.  

(This week there was a bit of a flap about someone banned from Twitter because he orchestrated a Twitted attack on an African-American actress. Here’s a little tip: the First Amendment covers government regulation of speech, not decisions by private media that some expressions of opinion are too gross to facilitate. That’s why not all emails to the Planet are automatically posted.) 

I’m not a watcher of reality TV—in fact I don’t even own a TV anymore. But I gather much of television has devolved into a competition to see who can behave the worst. This year disgusting reality shows seem to have been transmogrified into the electoral process, including the debates which fueled the Republican primaries. Many regular Republicans, even those like John Kasich and Ted Cruz with whom I might disagree on almost everything, seem finally to have figured it out and distanced themselves from the results, though too late.  

But here’s the thing: what the convention’s shrieking delegates reflect is genuinely profound unhappiness with the status quo—and what with the widening gap between rich and poor, they have a point. It’s just that wearing funny hats and screaming insults won’t fix things. 

This is not new. A Roman satirist proposed a cure for an unhappy populace: Instead of changing things to serve the people better, distract them with bread and circuses. And that’s precisely what the Notorious DJT has always excelled at: circuses, with perhaps a little bread on the side. More precisely, he’s offering a side of what we’re now calling “red meat,” in the form of hysterical attacks on his opponent from the podium accompanied by antiphonal chanting of threats (“lock her up”!) by the audience.  

Will his strategy work? Well, it worked a while for Mussolini, for Hitler, for Stalin, for Franco, for Peron, for Marcos…the list of those who tried it in the last century is long, and many succeeded, at least at first.  

Most of the examples I can think of in the modern world eventually went down in flames, but there were some hard times before that happened. Will it work again? This is not reality TV, this is just plain old reality and our season’s almost up—we’ll find out in November.