Tag Archives: jon meacham

The Very Big Difference Between Nixon and Trump.

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In the wake of the decades-overdue indictment of Donald J. Trump there’s been a lot of talk about my previous favorite Republican criminal president, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. The obvious comparison being that A: Both at one point were looking at possible jail time for their behavior, and B: Cases were/are being made that indictment and jailing would be a bad, banana republic look for the USA.

A month after Nixon resigned Gerald Ford, the epitome of your dull, institutional D.C., no-wake team player, pardoned Nixon to put an end to “our long national nightmare”. Never mind that vengeance-crazed twerps like myself and 70-80 million others were popping corn in anticipation of Dick’s televised trial. (Ford’s approval rating dropped 25% in one day as a result.)

There’s a line of thought that Nixon and Trump are comparable on the scale of malfeasance, criminality and their rot-from-within threat to democracy, and should be treated similarly. I don’t see it that way.

Without diminishing the illegal and barbaric bombing campaign Nixon ordered to deliver a “victory” in Vietnam — long, long past the point when it was obvious the North Vietnamese weren’t going to submit to anything we did — Nixon’s Watergate fiasco was very small beer compared to what Trump has engaged in. And by that I’ll let it go at, A: kowtowing to a homicidal dictator like Vladimir Putin in general, B: withholding duly-appropriated weapons to Ukraine in a mob-style shakedown to force them to invent a scandal around his election opponent and … oh yeah … C: inciting a riot to overthrow the government based on a lie about an election he plainly lost.

For all his deeply ingrained psychological failings and insecurities, Nixon was a familiar enough institutional actor. We’d seen his type before, going back to the likes of Warren G. Harding and other flagrant abusers of legal niceties. Additionally, Nixon, who was intelligent and disciplined enough to carry out the basics of the job did interact with Congress well enough to produce and handful of commendable legislation.

Not so with Trump … ever. As we’ve seen in shockingly explicit relief during his now eight year rampage through our consciousness, Trump has neither the interest or the ability to focus on legislation or anything that doesn’t primarily benefit him. Unlike Nixon and every other corrupt politician who achieved the grand stage, Trump was and is solely … a personality. A creation of pop culture, with no footing at all in serious “public service”, however you take that to mean.

As many have long said, Trump is a manifestation of a deeply anti-intellectual strain in American culture, something that has always existed, but never before at this scale or volume, thanks to the virulence of our media/social media entertainment culture. (The irony for me always being that where most think of entertainment as providing pleasure via laughter, escapist adventure or titillation, the entertainment culture that has produced Trump and the Trumpists infecting Congress, delivers instead regular, reliable doses of outrage and greivance. Good times! Bon appetit!)

The salient point here is that where it was possible to agree with Gerald Ford that enough was enough and it was time to move on, because Nixon was, well, just a standard-size politician who got a bit out over his skis, Trump is something more sinister and worrisome.

Unlike Nixon, Trump inspires a clearly violent cult of irrational partisans. Unlike Nixon, Trump still enjoys a near lockstep (public) support of fellow Republicans. (Never mind 90% are privately wishing he’d die and be gone tomorrow.) And unlike Nixon, Trump’s career-long strategy is to never concede defeat, while ignoring and disrespecting every process that tries to contain his criminality. And — this is important — unlike Nixon, Trump has already demonstrated the willingness and ability to summon mob violence to “defend” him.

Historian Jon Meacham was on TV again this morning making the point that part of any nation’s maturing process is recognizing when history doesn’t apply. That is to say recognizing unprecedented threat and responding in unprecedented ways.

The response to presidential criminality 50 years ago probably doesn’t meet the broader, louder, more violent demands of today’s conflict. So right now, that means dropping every appropriate legal hammer on a character who has shamelessly, unrepentantly abused the values of this country, no matter how much howling and mayhem he sets off.

No doubt something bad will happen … somewhere. But the country/culture will be far better off for facing up and defending its values, as opposed to begging off in the vain hope of ending this latest long, long national nightmare.

That Enlightenment Thing? It’s a Still a Work in Progrsss.

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I won’t say that perspective and proportion are the first casualties of a crisis. But those two virtues of rational thinking have a way of quickly becoming endangered species.

While we don’t yet know the origin of COVID-19, (U.S. intelligence says it picked up no alarmed chatter among Chinese officials indicating an accidental outbreak in one of their bio-chemical labs), we do have a vividly clear picture of how thoroughly, totally and unequivocally the Trump administration has bungled — through fundamental incompetence, self-interest and naked mendacity — the preparation for and response to the pandemic. It’s all there already in the official record. Facts have been established.

But we don’t live, and — perspective alert — no human has ever lived in a world where facts alone control how critical decisions are made. As many have noticed, this is a partisan pandemic. Just as climate change instantly became a partisan battleground. Just as Galileo announcing that Copernicus was right that the Earth revolves around the Sun got him branded a heretic by the Catholic church and thrown into house arrest for the rest of his life.

It doesn’t help much, nor will it do anything to prevent Team Trump from continuing to blunder, ignore science and miscalculate the best available data. But there is a perspective on this calamity — the worst exercise of executive authority in American history (and that, I’ll debate anyone, is fully proportionate) — that I find somewhat reassuring.

A disclaimer here is that I’ve come to see validity in the brain science research that says some if not most of our tribal/partisan divide is a factor of evolutionary biology. As creatures who only a dozen or more centuries ago first figured out how to grow crops, we smugly think we’ve come along way in terms of making quality decisions based on what can be proven with the science we have. But just as with bonobos, hyenas and snail darters some are quicker on the draw than others. As with all evolution in all species, there’s a range in cognitive abilities, usually for good societal reasons.

This sort of thing — quite possibly a textbook example of a little information being a dangerous thing — is always in my mind as I watch, usually aghast, as Trump or one of his media enablers prattles on in wave after unapolgetic wave of misinformation.

So I perked up the other day when author/historian Jon Meacham suggested almost in passing that what we see today with this partisan pandemic is really just the latest battle of The Enlightment. Six hundred years later, we are still locked in the unfinished business of bringing the entire human species out of the dark ages of religious superstition, witchcraft, intellectual serfdom and blind loyalty to whoever holds power over our physical well-being.

I suspect Meacham’s been thinking about this because of the many fascinating ways that The Black Death of the middle ages set the stage for the Renaissance and Enlightenment. But the key point is The Enlightment was merely a tipping point. By no means did every member of the race suddenly reject superstition and embrace rationality. Evolutionary steps are never uniform across a species. IThe Enlightenment was merely when enough people of reason were able to network among themselves to establish a formidable, rational, scientific rebuttal to the superstitions that had failed to protect the 75-200 million who died of the plague.

But “enough” is far different than “all.” Which helps to explain the so often astonishing number of 21st century Americans, (not some lost tribe of the Amazon), who still believe in the fantastical. Like the 55% who say they believe in angels. Or the 39% who don’t “accept” the theory of evolution. Or the disparity of Americans who believe Jesus was born of a virgin, (73%), compared to those who believe humans have something to do with climate change, (61%).

As I say, I don’t know that applying this perspective helps all that much when the 21st century equivalent of necromancers, alchemists, pharisees and court jesters are making a forseeable pandemic several factors of magnitude worse than it should have been. But it may serve to fortify you and those around you for the fight to come, post-pandemic. The fight to step up the next rung on ladder of Enlightenment and prevent this kind of catastrophic failure from ever happening again.

The fight where fools, philistines and misanthropes are quarantined from power.