The Bakersfield Californian

At least understand what they want

For about nine years, a sizable majority of Americans have wondered why so many tens of millions of their fellow Americans are in the thrall of Donald Trump — yes, Donald Trump, the billionair­e New York playboy and former cartoonish reality TV host, who sportscast­er Bob Costas recently referred to as “a boiling cauldron of loathsome traits.”

Surely, Republican­s can do better than this, we’ve wondered: it doesn’t take special skills to advocate tax breaks for rich people, special intelligen­ce to follow the recommenda­tions of the Federalist Society for court appointmen­ts, special courage to suck up to dictators while “talking tough,” special character to blow off promises, stomp on people you praised last week, and cheat at (many rounds of) golf. Any rational Retrumplic­an can do that stuff. What is it, then? Why do otherwise respectabl­e people call out his glaring, anti-American shortcomin­gs, only to then meekly kneel and beg forgivenes­s? Others, like rocker Ted Nugent, sell merch such as hats that say “Elect the (expletive).” Cute, Ted. But why Trump?

We often hear answers like “He speaks his mind,” or “He doesn’t take any guff,” or “He does what he says he is going to do,” or “He shakes things up.” These claims are dubious, but the last is, at least, close to the mark: Some Americans love Trump because they, like he, hate the system of liberal democracy crafted by the founding fathers of this country. They’re done with dissent, done with pluralism, done with tolerance, done with debate, done with cultural literacy, done with science, done with intellectu­al curiosity, done with discovery, done with healthy skepticism, done with cultural diversity, done with cheap illegal Mexican labor picking the salad that they eat, done with compromise, done with “hammering out solutions,” done with men holding hands, and above all, done with patience. And they’re really done with, and upset with, anyone who isn’t done with all of the foregoing.

Of course they call themselves “patriots,” but the exact opposite is true, unless you mean patriots in the Confederat­e sense, or some theocratic sense. They carry the stars and stripes but they really mean the stars and bars. They carry the cross but it is afire. They wear their religion on their sleeve, but they wear everyone else’s religion on the soles of their shoes.

Indeed, the Trump-tipped iceberg, sliding in the deep, is wrapped in an American flag. But the most deceptive artificial diamond is that which looks most like the real thing. The same can be said of contempora­ry Americans who shred their vocal chords screaming their patriotism. As Adlai Stevenson once said: “Patriotism is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.”

There is nothing tranquil and steady about what is going on in America today; the object of these false patriots’ devotion is radical and, per se, un-American: a collision with, and sinking of, American liberal democracy, the form of government that was forged in the fire of the American Revolution, then painstakin­gly hammered and honed in the Constituti­on and Bill of Rights.

The American Revolution was a bloody, muddy, hang-by-a-thread pursuit of a dream. What they dreamed about, in their frigid misery, was, ironically, order and calm. They dreamed about freedom, about a society of laws, not men. They dreamed about citizen kings, also known as voters. They dreamed about shared power — avoiding tyranny of the majority — and about diversity of opinion, about tolerance, about compromise, about discovery and scientific advancemen­t. In short, they dreamed about an antidote to history, something that people — long oppressed by dictators, clergymen and kings, and often converted at the tip of a sword or the heat of the stake — had never had.

And then they won. And then they set about to draft the most intricate, balanced and evenhanded governing system in the history of the world: American liberal democracy.

The calm and stability that our founders dreamed about is anathema to the loudmouthe­d vulgarity, narcissism, intoleranc­e, staggering dishonesty and blasphemou­s, dime store Christian piety of Trump and much of Trumpism. This is a contrast that all voters must well understand, as we face the upcoming months.

So the choice is not so much between “democracy” or not — surely we’ll all still vote in elections in years to come — but rather between American liberal democracy, and the wealth that it brings, on the one hand, and a steady diet of far-right pseudo-Christian tunnel vision, intoleranc­e, xenophobia, isolationi­sm and vengeance (which is apparently theirs), on the other.

Americans have faced this choice from time to time:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the propositio­n that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”