The Weekly Screed (#939)

Happy Election Year

By David Benjamin

“I'm a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too.”

— Steve Bannon

MADISON, Wis.  — The byzantine, bumbling Ukraine extortion plot engineered among a motley coterie of Trumpniks, including Gordy Sondland, Mike Duffey, Mick Mulvaney, Rudy Giuliani and, of course, the Orange Don — triggering a long overdue impeachment by the House of Representatives — is serious stuff. But it’s really just the tip of the Trumpberg.

By any impartial analysis, Donald Trump’s pyroclastic flow of travesties, tantrums, indecencies and atrocities (yes, concentration camps for little brown children) would have sent any prior president up the river before the Sharpie ink was dry on his first show-and-tell “executive order.” The list of outrages, which I won’t repeat here, is well-documented and ubiquitous — so overwhelming that we are inured and numbed, which is exactly the strategy of Trump, his minions and most important, his circle of manipulators.

Trump embodies, but does not actually understand, a persistent anti-government strain in American populism. Trump’s expression of this anarchic faith is visceral, but it was also ingrained by his first manipulator. His father, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a tax criminal and slumlord, a man of singular amorality, taught his favorite son from infancy a practical contempt for legitimate regulation. Eager to please and even more eager for the old man’s money, Donald absorbed Fred Trump’s cynical hostility toward the edifice that Steve Bannon calls “the administrative state.”

Trump directed his energies (and $400-odd million of his dad’s ill-gotten booty) into a host of schemes whose prevailing ethos is evasion of the law, disdain for norms and coziness with organized crime, from Manhattan real estate to insolvent casinos, for-profit universities, phony charities, bank fraud and Russian money laundering. He has spent his life nurturing a belief that he is — by virtue of his tabloid fame and alleged wealth — immune from the law. Convinced that no state or government exists beyond himself, Trump parodies Orwell with the conviction that “no animals are more equal than me.”

Some form of anti-statism has been an American theme since 1776. The Declaration of Independence, even before the famous “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” passage, posits the occasional necessity “for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” This statement, defying George III’s control over his subject colonists, foreshadows Bannon’s mission, through the agency of a stooge in the White House, to “destroy the state.”

But there’s a significant difference — well, there are hundreds — between the aspirations of the Thomas Jefferson and the pipe dreams of Bannon, Stephen Miller, William Barr and the current crop of mock-Machiavellis cosseting the incontinent cannon in the Oval Office.

Above all, the American Revolution was openly announced and executed with chutzpah. Its earliest acts were classic examples of civil disobedience. The Boston Tea Party was guerrilla theater. The Boston Massacre was the tragic result of a forbidden public assembly. 

The Founding Fathers, the French Jacobins, the Bolsheviks and Zapatistas, the suffragettes, the Wobblies, Yippies and Black Panthers, the African National Congress, even the Tea Party, all acted honorably insofar as they protested openly, declared themselves enemies of the established order, called for insurrection and waged their asymmetric wars in the streets, universities, assembly halls, legislatures and prisons of their native polity. 

They did not lie about their intentions, join the hated government, infiltrate its highest office and boast constantly about what a swell job they were doing running it, all the while contriving to wreck it. 

Having welcomed our destroying angel, we live under an administration committed, in the words of its exiled but still potent philosopher, Steve Bannon, to “dismantling the administrative state” from within. In a word, suicide. The lumpen-followers of this fatal faith don’t share or articulate any such complicated creed. Enamored of his “attitude,” however, they rally fiercely to the bumptious nihilism of Bannon’s handpicked messiah. Trump is little more than a receptacle for their inchoate “mad as hell” grievances. But this is enough: he says he hates what they think they hate.

Trump is buoyed by the reluctance of both his opponents and the media to defend the “administrative state,” although it’s one of the great inventions in the history of civilization. Seemingly, it’s directed by a handful of democratically chosen political officials. But its day-to-day, year-to-year sustenance relies on a vast populace of public servants who are generally scrupulous about not applying political motives to their jobs. This is easy because most of their jobs have nothing to do with politics. Most earn less money than their skills and training could command outside of government. Together, and humbly, they carry out the nuts-and-bolts functions of the state — from CIA covert ops to providing the least costly mail service in the world — with professional efficiency. 

Of course, while singling out no particular civil servant, everybody bitches about how badly the government is doing its job. This discontent contains no element of rebellion. It is, rather, the whining of the great comfortable. Ironically, it signifies the success of the administrative state. Everyone wants it to do better. All our kvetching about the government is the manifestation of a shared hope, a belief that it can do better. No one, really, wants to incinerate government and stand, free at last, in a landscape of scorched earth and gunslingers. 

The administrative state knows it can do better. We’ve just launched an election year during which we will hear from — and cheer for — a legion of politicians pontificating about just how the state can do better. Because it invites criticism and tolerates dissent, American democracy has a habit of regularly examining and (although not always readily or swiftly) admitting its imperfections.

Humility is the saving grace of America’s unique republic. Since 1787, by law, custom and political pressure, the state has eventually gotten around to correcting its errors, purging its scoundrels and improving an immense array of services to a constantly and rightfully importunate electorate. 

Here’s the difference.

We keep hearing from Donald Trump that some lie he has told, some vulgarity he has spewed, some snafu he has fomented, was “perfect.” 

Perfect? Really? This is a word that jars on the patriot’s ear. The first line of our Constitution links a tacit concession of the nation’s imperfection to a vow to do better: “to form a more perfect union.” We’re a nation whose first utterance of common purpose was an act of humility. At our best, we’re not comfortable with strutting gasbags who refuse to admit error, never ask forgiveness and cannot bring themselves to admit they can do better. 

Donald Trump is one of our many national blunders. In the past, we’ve confessed these screw-ups and atoned, largely through the patient, contentious but ultimately effective collaboration of elected representatives and anonymous civil servants. As the year begins, we have a national consensus about Trump’s unfitness. We the people have all the powers necessary to fix this awful mistake. All we need do is to tone down the bellyaching, remember what our grandmothers told us about how to behave, and muster the intestinal fortitude to lance the latest boil on Uncle Sam’s scarred and leathery ass.