WAS: What Adults are Saying about Churchill, Hillary and American choices
They warned--we ignored
If you were a student of 20th century history and concluded that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was not in the top five as person of that century, then you might have been a poor student. A privileged child, Churchill was arguably the most important leader in WWII who leveraged balls, booze, cigar smoke and wit so that today we speak English not German.
He was a leader, statesman, raconteur and cheerleader all rolled into one. He was also a “quote machine” who was peerless—with the possible exception of Yogi Berra. His musings were grand, poignant and bitingly accurate. At least that was so when about military foot-dragging he famously said “ Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all other possibilities.”
Hillary Rodham is an early boomer born into a comfortable suburban home. She was raised a Country Club Republican who distinguished between a mink and “respectable Republican cloth coat” like the one Nixon considered to once save his ass. In a political irony she campaigned, without voting privileges, for Barry Goldwater in 1964.
She easily was one of the most highly qualified and educated candidates to ever seek the Presidency. On brain power alone one would have to go back to Carter or the forgettable Hoover for a parallel or distant third places to either the crusty Wilson or even her long-time husband. At her commencement she addressed the Yale law class not long before time as a hot-shot lawyer and young mother that was followed by an impressive career. She did all of this amid a publicly squalid marriage— grappling for decades with the issues faced by all women married to men of power—while ultimately doing what she once criticized, in “standing by her man.”
Like Churchill she was also a quote machine as you can see. When facing the unconventional Donald Trump for the Presidency in 2016 she lamented being undercut by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” She described half of her opponent’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” who among others things were xenophobic, racist, sexist and homophobic.
Fast forward to today and now gauge the veracity of what these past and present leaders had to say. Nine years after the famous escalator ride, a felonious Trump again seeks the Oval Office after being unimpressive there once before. In that time he has intensified his McCarthyism political-style to such grotesque levels of bluster and complaint that he frequently redefines “political sewage.” That’s hard to do.
He has been enabled by a feckless GOP that alternates between being on-the-take and avoiding culpability for who knows what subterranean shit that went down during Trump’s term. Meanwhile Wall Street leans his way because as Trumpian chaos dominates the top of the marquee, it is free to plunder the countryside with who knows what practices to separate a fool from his money. But hey, what do you expect? It’s Wall Street.
Then there exists Trump’s so-called “base.” Wrongly characterized as “half the country”, the 37% or so of American voters who actually support Trump (that’s only five-points higher than Nixon’s level the day he resigned) is a unique mish-mash of folks whose social contours have been deeply revealed. As a group they are known to be more rural, lowly educated, older, White, underemployed, male and monolithic in the variety of news media consumed than American norms. Like the GOP itself they affirm few things that speak to governing the world’s most unique (and perhaps), complex country excepting the following: erase abortion, widely acquire firearms, Christianity and cleanse from our land the scourge of “immigrants”—which of course is virtually all of us. Was Hillary onto something?
Maybe. Embracing these views doesn’t in itself make a deplorable. But it does place one in the next section over while clamoring for a seat upgrade. Within the base there are segments where this is clear. For instance, the anarchists who thought doing a D.C. stair workout on January 6th is one such sub-group and it has abundant sympathizers. But more than deplorable, those folks are also law breakers.
For an effort that was equal parts danger, comedy and stupidity (you are gonna over run the Capitol with a spear and Viking helmet? WTF), many of those hard-hewn “patriots” are now serving Federal prison sentences. Ironically few realize that if we truly had the type of government they desired most of their sentences would have been delivered with a rope—not food and a TV room or time to practice the harmonica. So for this, Hillary is due a tip of the chapeau. So is Churchill because what is quite possibly, the last weeks of Trump’s political depravity on the main stage we may be seeing the natural, final iteration of the first wrong decision made long ago—the embrace of one Ronald Reagan.
Reagan’s politics was little more than a reheating of Goldwater extremism which had suffered a humiliating defeat in ‘64. But true to his professional pedigree, the Ol’ Gipper simply changed sets for those worn ideas while adding two concepts not widely practiced within the Oval Office: government is the problem and us vs. them.
Now it takes some cajones to say to a country that was born on “we the people” that “they”, the people, those who govern is the problem and then, ask for their vote. But he did and in record numbers American complied while carefully avoiding mirrors so they wouldn’t confront the troubling irony of killing their own agency. In this proxy transfer of power it was also convenient to learn too many “other” Americans compounded difficulties and the race baiting “welfare queen” concept was born. It provided the first in a long-list of demeaning tropes about our fellow citizens that we continue to use to this day so that we may always distinguish the “us” from the “them.” How convenient. This also seriously shifted the arc of modern Republicanism that even then, but certainly now, seems terribly outdated for a modern power.
Thankfully, like time, Reagan passed. But first he begat old man Bush who called for a “kinder, gentler” GOP and then received a prompt party dismissal amid an aberrant 1992 election. That begat Newt Gingrich who did his best to illustrate the Reagan promise by, from a legislative view, making government the problem and as dysfunctional as possible. That begat Dubya who (at family picnics never polled higher than 3rd) with help from The Supreme Court was awarded the highest office. He promptly job-shared with “president” Cheney so that the fortunes of Haliburton and Texans planning a Confederacy could be supported as we searched for destructive weapons that never were.
All of that, yes all of it and much more, begat Trump—the man who soaked it in and doused it with the parables of Joe McCarthy’s bulldog (and his mentor), Roy Cohn. From a place on the spectrum neither he or we have bothered to define, his street cred was knowing that a sitting President was born a foreigner—and even worse—Black. That unleashed the deplorables about which we were warned with astonishing unpredictability and willingness to debase humanity.
The contours of his collective behavior knew few bounds. You could take Shakespeare, Freud, Hunter S. Thompson and Robin Williams, lock them in the presidential suite for a month, supply them with as much cocaine desired and still not get to the place where Trump has taken us. We are long past the point of being surprised, angered, shocked, disgusted or anything else. We just sit in astonishment that his enablers and supporters could somehow push him back into the White House. Maybe.
But to the degree that Hillary was at least partially right and that we wrestle uncomfortably with Churchill’s insight, it may be true that all the other options have been tried. The 40 year evolution of GOP madness has brought us to a possible paradigm-shifting point seldom seen in American politics. The New Deal, The Great Society and perhaps Reagan himself are such examples but these are few and far between. On top of that America is more diverse than ever and little about our 21st century challenges seem solvable with the zeitgeist of Ronnie’s Hollywood, those who celebrate their own ignorance (the purest of all deplorables) or Trumpism as Jim Crow on steroids. It looks like some 60 years posthumous Churchill is again going to be right.