Our "Cultural President"

Abbie Hoffman

David Brooks of the New York Times calls Donald Trump our "cultural president" in a recent column, "The Abbie Hoffman of the Right: Donald Trump."

Abbie Hoffman was (alongside Jerry Rubin) Provocateur-in-Chief of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s. As a student at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, I participated as an antiwar protester and also as a reporter for our college radio station, WGTB-FM, in the October 21, 1967, "March on the Pentagon."

The 1967 "March on the Pentagon"

This march was a huge gathering of about 70,000 at the Lincoln Memorial to hear protest songs by Phil Ochs ("I Declare the War Is Over") and antiwar speeches by David Dellinger and Dr. Benjamin Spock. Then Hoffman led 50,000 of us on a hike to the Pentagon, where a second rally took place, hippies tried to "levitate" the Pentagon building, and about 650 protestors were arrested for civil disobedience.

It was, yes, a time of cultural upheaval. Now we are experiencing another such upheaval. Brooks writes that "in 2016, members of the outraged working class elected their own Abbie Hoffman as president" — in the person of Donald Trump. Today, the President of the United States is our new Provocateur-in-Chief.

What happened? Brooks says:

After World War II the Protestant establishment dominated the high ground of American culture and politics. That establishment eventually failed. It tolerated segregation and sexism, led the nation into war in Vietnam and became stultifying.

Then came the ascendancy of Hoffman, Rubin, et al. among much of the youth of America. But we Baby Boomers quickly shed our trappings of hippiedom and became the new leaders of our culture:

The late 1960s were a time of intense cultural conflict, which left a lot of wreckage in its wake. But eventually a new establishment came into being, which we will call the meritocratic establishment.

That was us as we entered our late 20s and early 30s: college-educated meritocrats who were setting out to run things our way. We were the ones who:

... cut [our] moral teeth on the civil rights and feminist movements. [We] embraced economic, social and moral individualism. [We] came to dominate the institutions of American society on both left and right.

And, Brooks notes, Hillary Rodham Clinton was one of us.

Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1969

Hillary Clinton's whole life has been oriented toward success. Her family came from the middle echelons of American society. She moved up and away from that starting point, until she came within an eyelash of being elected our first woman president.

As a good meritocrat, she set aside whatever inclinations she'd had as a younger woman to be a cultural provocateur. She learned how to turn her intelligence and drive into national leadership — until, that is, a large segment of the electorate decided to rebel against her sort of leadership.

For me personally, this new cultural transition is hard to accept. Brooks says,"Trump is shredding the culture and ending the dominance of the meritocratic establishment." Well, I was never much of a meritocratic climber myself, but a great many of my friends and associates were. I'm not at all ready to tear down what my generation — however flawed — has built.

Yet there is nothing so constant as change. We all have to adapt. The kids who are just entering adulthood today are especially on the spot. Brooks:

Because of [Trump], a new culture will have to be built, new values promulgated and a new social fabric will have to be woven, one that brings the different planets back into relation with one another. 

That’s the work of the next 20 years.

Good luck to you, all ye children (and, soon, grandchildren) of the meritocrats!

Taking Knees and Linking Arms

I write this as a fan of the Washington Redskins. Before last weekend's Sunday Night Football contest between the Redskins and the Oakland Raiders, Redskins' owner Dan Snyder linked arms with some of his African American players on the sideline during the singing of the National Anthem:

Dan Snyder links arms with players.

It was a protest against the way President Trump had, a couple of days before, called for NFL owners to fire players who take a knee during the pregame anthem ... the way San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and a few other players had begun doing in 2016 as a protest against police shootings of unarmed black men.

Colin Kaepernick takes a knee.

At other NFL games last weekend, there were similar arm-linkings, knee-takings, and even refusals to leave locker rooms for the anthem. This activity was meant primarily to upbraid Trump. But it was also meant to show solidarity against racial injustice.

In the wake of last weekend's protests, the Washington Post published two op-ed columns, one supportive of the protests and the other against.

The supportive one was by columnist Eugene Robinson, who is black, and was called "If Trump’s not a white supremacist, he does a good impression." The anti-protest column was by columnist Marc A. Thiessen, who is white, and was called "Disrespecting the flag is a disgraceful way to protest Trump."

Robinson's remarks centered on the notion that "We ... have a president who, if he’s not a white supremacist, does a convincing impression of one." He added, "Trump claimed in a Monday tweet that 'the issue of kneeling has nothing to do with race,' but that is a lie. Kaepernick’s method of protest had everything to do with race, as its intent was to focus attention on racial injustice."

Thiessen felt that showing due respect for the American flag is the dominant issue here: "What these players don’t seem to understand is that Americans gave their lives so that they could have the freedom to play a kids’ game for a living. When players disrespect the flag, they disrespect that sacrifice."

I agree with Robinson and disagree with Thiessen. Given that the underlying issue in the protests against Trump's rhetoric is one of racial justice, I'd say it outranks questions of the proper protocol for respecting the U.S. flag. We can't separate the racial justice issues of today from America's "original sin" of slavery. A lot of Old Glory-defending soldiers died in our Civil War, a struggle that was fought to restore the Union and emancipate Southern slaves. Here is one of the flags which the Union forces fought under:

Civil War flag

The Grand Old Flag represents a Constitution that insists on the equal treatment of all citizens, and on the right of all to exercise freedom of speech. And the anthem celebrates "the land of the free and the home of the brave." I'd say that considerations like these settle the question of whether recent pregame protests on NFL sidelines were indeed proper and just.

The Roots of Trump-Style Politics

David Brooks

My favorite op-ed columnist David Brooks writes in "The Coming War on Business" that everything Donald Trump stands for was presaged some decades back by an essayist/cultural critic named Sam Francis. Brooks knew Francis when the two of them worked at the Washington Times in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Francis opined that:

• Globalization was screwing Middle America.
• The Republican and conservative establishment did not understand what was happening.
• Politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts — religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite — were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.

Pat Buchanan

Pat Buchanan shared these views when he ran unsuccessfully for president in the 1996 Republican primaries. But this version of populism and nationalism wasn't yet ready for prime time. By 2016, it was ready. Donald Trump now sits in the White House as our president.

Brooks quotes Francis:

Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts — economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing; culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.

Globalization, in this view, is what was killing American farms and blue-collar manufacturing jobs. That's why the remedy needed to be nationalism. Francis: "A nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes the better."

So, what does our future look like now? Brooks posits two alternatives, the first bad and the second good:

1. That "Trump may not be the culmination, but merely a way station toward an even purer populism." That is, Trump's nominal pro-business stance will fall away, and "the next populism will ... take his ethnic nationalism and add an anti-corporate, anti-tech layer. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple stand for everything Francis hated — economically, culturally, demographically and nationalistically."
2. Or, that a "cancer [will] destroy Trumpism" — the particular cancer called racism. Francis was a racist who wrote, "The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."

I vote for option #2. If this country is to be saved from the Trumpian politics of nationalism and an outlook based on the principle of us-versus-them aggression, it seems to me it can only be because our willingness to set aside the original sin of America — slavery, with its aftermath of ongoing racial disharmony — ironically provides the ultimate salvific impetus.

This is why the removal of Confederate memorials and statues is such a marvelous sign ...

The Triumph of Tribalism?

Michael Gerson

Op-ed contributor Michael Gerson's column in today's Washington Post is a must-read. The headline says "Tribalism triumphs in America." The thrust is that in our country today, politically and culturally, we are ever at daggers drawn. We divide into two tribes (or "phyles"), "reds" and "blues," and each phyle makes perpetual war on the other.

Andrew Sullivan

Gerson's comments extend those of essayist Andrew Sullivan in a recent New York magazine. In "America Wasn’t Built for Humans," Sullivan asks how our democracy can survive the tribalism that has infected us during the last couple of decades. (Actually, I think tribalism of the sort Sullivan describes has been our bête noire since at least the late 1960s, when the country was nearly torn apart by race riots and by civil unrest incited by anti-Vietnam War protesters.)

Never have I read such insightful commentary. I agree with just about everything Gerson and Sullivan say.

My own focus on such matters is not quite as broad, presently, as that of these two gentlemen — who, frankly, are capable of greater intellectual breadth and depth than am I these days. I'm more about race than I am about all the other matters that the "reds" and the "blues" are at daggers drawn about. I don't think we can patch up our differences about all these other matters if we can't get back to patching up our differences about race in America.

The Tides of Racial Reconciliation

Charles M. Blow

New York Times op-ed columnist Charles M. Blow recently wrote: "Sometimes you simply have to call a thing a thing, and the thing here is that Trump’s inner racist is being revealed, and America’s not-so-silent racists are rising in applause."

Heather Heyer

He was referring, first and foremost, to "Trump’s growing intolerance and his growing adoption and internalizing of white nationalist ideology," as revealed by his reactions to the recent tragedy at Charlottesville in which a counter-protester named Heather Heyer was killed by a vehicle driven by one of the white supremacists protesting the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue.

I've been trying to figure out how best to respond, myself, to Charlottesville.

On the one hand, Blow is right to rue the president's constantly appealing to Americans' worst hatreds, whether racial or ethnic or otherwise. He is right to worry that all the hatred, whether it is of African Americans or Latinos or Muslims or any other group defined by skin color or religion or sexuality or gender, is pulling us in the wrong direction entirely.

Yet it seems clear to me that the tides of history are moving in the direction of reconciliation, not hatred. The most important of these tides is the one that is moving us toward a healing of the scars of African slavery in America.

We have, after all, just lived during the time of the first African American presidency, that of Barack Obama. Fifty years ago, no one would have thought that possible.

Catherine Pugh

I live in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland, a city whose mayor, Catherine Pugh, is African American. Citing questions of her city's safety and security, she wisely orchestrated the removal of the city's Confederate monuments in the wake of Charlottesville. For Baltimore to have an African American mayor — the third black mayor in a row since 2007, and the fifth since 1987 — is something that would have seemed possible in 1967.

But the other side of that same coin is a negative one. Baltimore can have had a succession of black mayors in large part because of the white flight to the suburbs that took place during the 1950s and 1960s.

So the overall direction of the tide during the 70 years of my life has indeed been a positive one, in the direction of racial reconciliation. Yet I have to acknowledge that backlash has never ceased to rear its ugly head. The best metaphor I can come up with for that recurrent backlash is that of undertow. And as Charles M. Blow indicates in his column, undertow can be very, very dangerous.