When the Din Subsides

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Donald Trump may be history’s greatest noise maker. The noise he makes is not so much the opposite of “quiet” as the opposite of “signal.”

Never in human history has a leader subjected so many to so much distraction, irrelevancy, inconsistency, indecision and emotion-provoking nonsense. And never in human history have mass media, including social media, so repeatedly amplified the nonsense. For five years, our media have served as a gigantic echo chamber for one man’s diseased mind.

As a result, our people are like political prisoners being softened up for interrogation. They’ve been kept sleepless for years by loud, discordant music.

But all bad things must come to an end. Trump’s presidency will end in less than two months.

Once that happens, 330.6 million Americans will awaken to a sobering reality. A single man has grabbed their attention to the exclusion of almost all productive thought. Global warming, energy conversion, saving our industrial base and good jobs, economic equality, racial justice, international alliances, the pandemic, simple majority rule—all have succumbed to inattention and neglect.

It was his words, his taunts and cartoonish grimaces, his Tweets, his attacks, his insults, his lies, his bigotry, his “alternative” reality that commanded our attention.

Trump’s campaigns and his presidency were a vast exercise in clickbait. And we fell for it, all of us. Not just his Trumpets and loyalists, not just our social media, not just our cable news, not just innumerable craven Republican lackeys, but all of us. Our “mainstream” media, our politicians, our “opinion leaders,” and “we, the people” fell under Trump’s spell.

Whether in support or in opposition, almost everything we said or did was on his terms. As a nation, we couldn’t speak, think, feel or act without somehow recalling his name.

After January 20, we’ll be like political prisoners released without warning. The din will end, and we’ll stumble out into the fresh air and sunlight of quiet and reason. We’ll be free to think and plan once more. What we think, say and do then, and how we recover, will fix the fate of our nation and maybe our entire species.

Make no mistake about it. This has never happened before. Sure, we humans had Caesar, Hitler, Stalin and Mao. But they ruled by brute force. Caesar had his personal army, Hitler his Gestapo and Brown Shirts, Stalin his gulags, and Mao his “re-education” camps. Their physical coercion was an age-old component of tyranny.

Trump was different. As far as I know, he has killed or imprisoned no one. Innocent alien refugee children were detained separately from their parents, and a few hundred deprived of family. A few dozen protesters were jailed recently, but almost all of them already have been released.

Trump has no secret police, no concentration camps. The military—especially our top brass—hates him for his indiscipline and his refusal to heed expert advice, let alone his calling our heroes “losers” and “suckers.” The Proud Boys may be his Brown Shirts in waiting. He has threatened prison and harm to others, and he has incited others to do harm. But so far only his own have actually gone to prison, although he has pardoned some of them.

Maybe Trump would if he could, but he has not yet governed or sought to govern by force. His words alone cast their spell. He has beguiled and destroyed us almost entirely with his mouth and his Tweets.

Trump has extraordinary emotional intelligence. After all the wrong he has done, all the hardship and suffering he has caused, all the rules and norms he has broken, all the lies he has told, all the hate he has spawned and the bigotry he has fostered, he still got nearly 74 million votes. The fact that he ultimately lost does not detract from his status as the most successful demagogue in human history.

And it all happened here, in our “exceptional” America, on our watch, in our time. We have no one to blame but ourselves, all of us, collectively.

Those facts alone should give us a sobering dose of humility. After things went this wrong, we all ought to think long and hard about how and why. We must seek solutions, not just point fingers.

That’s what our Founders would have done. They were unabashed social engineers. They would recognize and acknowledge when the machine of government they had engineered stopped working so suddenly and so dramatically. They would find out exactly where the checks and balances failed and fix them. If we are to survive as a nation, let alone win the coming competition with China, we must do the same.

Solutions, I think, lie three areas. The first is our uncritical reverence for “free speech”—a subject on which I’ve written before. When unlimited reverence for speech causes what we’ve seen during the last five years, it becomes a religion, not a science. Left unbounded, it has magnified and glorified lies.

We need to channel and contain its excesses, especially in the Internet age. Our Founders’ faith that truth would emerge from the cacophony of competing voices makes little sense today. Now “truth” is different in different information bubbles, and nearly half our voters opted for attractive lies. Perhaps we need something like our old “fairness doctrine” for political attacks, or at least a beefed-up law of defamation adequate to the Internet Age and its automated trolls.

A second possible solution involves the qualifications for high office. When our forebears ratified our Constitution, public education through high school lay nearly a century in the future. The average life span was a generation shorter than it is today. So it seemed natural for them to allow any natural-born citizen of age 35 or more, resident in our country for 14 or more years, to become president.

But today our Founders would instantly recognize the Trump’s chief failing: his failure to bring any direct experience to the highest of all elective offices. That failure precluded working knowledge of our scheme of government, its checks and balances, its cautious, incremental culture, and its rule of law.

To correct that flaw, we might require some experience—perhaps at least a decade—in lower elective office. That would insure at least some experience with and “buy-in” to our political system as it now works. We could do so by amending the Constitution, adopting a federal statute, or having our political parties adopt appropriate internal rules for candidates.

A third possible solution our Founders never would have anticipated because they antedated the scientific age. (Only two of our Founders, Franklin and Jefferson, had any acquaintance with science, and only Franklin actually practiced it.) We might apply the sciences of psychology and psychiatry to test and screen out extremely unfit candidates: the psychopaths, sociopaths, clinical narcissists and pathological liars. (Trump may fall into all four categories.) We could avoid after-the-fact disputes by testing and screening them before allowing them to run for office.

We do this sort of thing with psychological fitness tests for airplane pilots and the people who man our Doomsday nuclear missile silos. So why not our president, who can order Doomsday?

More generally, your beautician, barber, real-estate agent, insurance agent, lawyer, doctor, civil engineer, and stockbroker all have mandatory professional qualifications, enforced by testing. Why not your president?

In developing solutions, we should think “outside the box.” In particular, we should not consider our Constitution an insurmountable roadblock. True, some things in it seem immune to solution without amendment—a difficult, time-consuming and (given our national division) unlikely process. The worst example is the appalling minority rule in our Senate; our Constitution mandates it for all time, absent every state’s consent. (Yet even that rule might succumb, for example, to targeted economic boycotts of recalcitrant smaller states by the industrial powerhouses that they now rule.)

But outside of our Senate, workarounds are possible. A valid interstate compact to cast Electoral College votes in accordance with the national popular vote is well on its way to fixing the Electoral College, and economic boycotts might push it over the top. Federal statutes or political-party rules requiring specific levels of experience, education or testing for candidates might supplement our lower and mostly outmoded constitutional qualifications.

After all, it was our political parties that abandoned candidate selection by wise elders in favor of popular primaries that demagogues can control. Our parties might reverse that decision, which in retrospect seems hasty and unwise. Just think, for example, where the Dems and our nation might be today, had not their wise elder Jim Clyburn saved Biden’s candidacy from oblivion.

The Chinese had a demagogue much like Donald Trump. His fervent nationalism and clever manipulation of popular emotions was gaining traction in his home region in China’s South. But this demagogue, Bo Xilai, is now safely in jail.

This is not to say that we need to follow China’s model. It’s just to say that there are practical problems that affect the very survival of governments and systems. They need prompt solutions if a nation and its system of government are to survive.

The rise of Trump the Demagogue is surely one of those problems. As his din subsides and we recover our collective sanity, we may have only a short time to stop his return, or (worse yet) the rise of someone smarter and more disciplined to claim his mantle. If ever there were an existential threat to our constitutional government, this is it. This threat is even more immediate than global warming.

Endnote on kinds of intelligence: Trump is our nation’s best proof (so far) of what I modestly call “Dratler’s law.” The worst leaders, it holds, are those like Trump with high emotional and low analytical intelligence. They are brilliant at manipulating people to do stupid and counterproductive things, even against their own economic and practical interests.

Trump’s analytical intelligence was so low that he took extraordinary steps to conceal his college grades and test scores. He also failed to understand that importers and consumers, not foreign exporters, pay tariffs in the form of increased final prices. And he speculated on using bleach and sunlight, internally, as cures for Covid-19. Yet his emotional intelligence was high enough to nearly win a second election after most of his promises had turned to dust and he had nearly destroyed our pandemic response, our economy, our internal cohesion and our democracy. Somehow, we have to protect ourselves from him or his like ever reaching high office again. That is job one for the Biden Administration; our survival as a democracy may depend on it, as soon as four years from now.

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