May, 2020
Washington – The coronavirus has exposed sickness in our system of government. It has been there for some time.
It manifested itself in the 2016 election, which put the showman Donald Trump, well known for his bankruptcies, his philandering, and his lack of any previous position in government, into the presidency. How could this have happened?
• Many voters I talk to say they voted for Trump not expecting him to win; it was more of a protest vote against a Democratic party that they thought had abandoned them. And, unvoiced: they were looking for an opportunity at the first presidential stumble of Hillary Clinton to declaim, with delight, that they didn't vote for her.
• Once Trump took office, these voters said they wanted to give him a chance to be a different kind of president, not bound by usual presidential expectations. They identified with his grievance that he was not being treated fairly. They gravitated toward media sources that offered this viewpoint, happily identifying their own grievances, real or imagined, with his, even to the point of celebrating his shortcomings as merely the kind of presidential norm-breaking they wanted to see.
• This gave Trump political operatives the opportunity to emulate, wittingly or not, the strategies used by Josef Goebbels in Germany in the 1930s in service of an authoritarian state: flying the leader around to huge rallies; dominating broadcast-news with reports extolling the leader; branding all negative information as a product of the Lügenpresse (fake news); repeating outright lies so often that they are confused with truth.
The Goebbels strategies in Germany were remarkably effective in shaping public opinion. Even when it became clear that their country was going to lose World War II, Germans fought on. Goebbels himself committed suicide at the end (after killing his wife and children), firmly in the belief that his work would someday be honored and avenged.
Indeed, his techniques are being replicated now, in America of all places. Make America Goebbels' Avenger, so to speak, or MAGA.
Parallels with the Nazi experience in Germany, even when obvious, are often not noted in our own country because of the belief that, as nobel laureate Sinclair Lewis wrote, "It Can't Happen Here." It has also been too horrible to contemplate, that we Americans could ever be taken in by the techniques that ruined the German nation.
Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, my generation was taught in our schools and churches that all great civilizations come to an end, usually from internal collapse because of corruption and weak moral fiber. The great question of our current era is why Americans would vote for a presidential candidate of demonstrably flawed character without any governmental experience, knowing what it could do to the country. The answer is that much of his support came from voters who did not think he could win; after election he employed strategies perfected by the likes of Goebbels, which so far have proved too powerful for many Americans, unmindful of history, to overcome.
Hence, we have a divided, weakened, and fundamentally sick nation as we approach 2020 elections.
Which is not to say there is no hope. I believe voters of all stripes and persuasions would respond favorably to candidates who reach out to them by showing up in their communities, listening to them, and advancing positive ideas. Most people want to be for something hopeful and will respond accordingly, if given a chance. They want to heal America and deliver us from our governmental ills as well as from our pandemic.
