Editor’s Note: We welcome back Radio Free New Hampshire. Michael Davidow took a few months off from his column to finish his latest novel “Interdiction” about a veteran cop in a small New Hampshire town who shoots and kills a college student in a traffic stop gone awry. The ensuing investigation presents a tale of drug dealing, gunplay, and justifiable homicide. The lawyers are in control. The police are waiting and watching. The sole civilian witness to this killing is under indictment herself and silent regarding what she saw. The state’s most powerful politicians line up behind their officer. Only one thing stands between him and exoneration: another cop from another small town who begins to question what happened that night. His past has called him to his own separate truth.” It is awesome and available on Amazon.
By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Richard Hofstadter taught history at Columbia University in the years before that campus lost its soul. In 1964, he published an essay called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” discussing a paradox in left wing thought: progressives praise wealthy people for voting against their personal economic gain but they criticize poor people for doing the same thing, calling them deluded or worse. Hofstadter explained that different people value different things. The Democratic Party has had sixty years to figure that out, and so far it has failed.
Events keep coming fast and furious, on both the national and international scenes. Writing every two weeks, your columnist can’t keep up. But in searching for underlying themes, it is hard to avoid applying that same brand of analysis to the entertainment style in American politics, which Donald Trump embodies to an extreme.
Before this last election I tuned into Fox News one afternoon to watch one of Trump’s televised rallies. I don’t remember the specifics, where or when it occurred. But I remember he spoke in his usual offhanded way. Various guests paraded themselves. He eyed the women with open admiration and they soaked it up. It was easy to be offended if you wanted to be; it was also easy to laugh. He reminded me of Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack.
The Democrats despised this, of course. The showmanship, the lack of seriousness. Yet these high-minded critics were also in the process of nominating Joe Biden for office, who was transparently a figurehead; a vote for Biden was a vote for Biden’s circle, for Jill Biden as main counselor, Anthony Blinken as Secretary of State, and Biden himself as master of ceremonies. Then when that collapsed and they hand-picked Kamala Harris instead, they presented her with messaging like “brat summer” and the “politics of joy.” They put her on Saturday Night Live.
And why not. There’s a long history of politicians playing that game. Bill Clinton brought his saxophone to a late night talk show. Ronald Reagan was a movie star to begin with. Richard Nixon appeared on the comedy show “Laugh In” to say “sock it to me.” John Kennedy laughed with Vaughan Meader, who played him on tee vee. Their conscious forebears were Roosevelt’s fireside chats and Laguardia reading the comics on the radio; their more distant ancestors were the torchlit parades of the 19th century, the stemwinding speeches of southern senators at memorial events, the barrels of rum and whiskey that George Washington and his peers gave their retainers.
America has always expected entertainment from its leaders. That came early and it cemented itself in place because it served a purpose: it kept our government grounded and it weeded out the ideologues and prudes. It’s astonishing to look back in the record, in film, in photography, in journalism, in history, and see the genuine warmth in men as distant from each other as Harry Truman and Abraham Lincoln. Our best politicians have never followed scripted lines. Rather they have shown true pleasure in the company of their fellow citizens and in that pleasure our country’s public life was both reflected and lifted.
This tradition of non-seriousness has often led us astray too, raising up demagogues like Huey Long and Joe McCarthy, cynics who caused harm by conflating popularity with policy. Trump does that too, betraying his background in business while he’s at it. He is a bunkum-seller at heart and he has more in common with the Duke and the Dauphin who tormented Huck and Jim on the Mississippi than with any previous president – and Mark Twain ended that story with those frauds being tarred and feathered, run out of town on a rail.
The harm lies not in Trump’s entertainment value, though, which can’t be separated from the push and pull of our democratic processes. And the Democrats not only know as much; they are as guilty as their opponents when it comes to blurring the lines. Returning to the stage of Columbia University, for instance, there are few things more non-serious than the argument that Hamas is a freedom-fighting organization and Israel is a settler-colonialist state; few ideas less congruent with history and less liable to promote real understanding; few movements more enthralled to self-dealing emotion, bluster, theater, and audience reaction. Yet that exercise in entertainment masquerading as argument serves an entire wing of the Democratic Party in lieu of a foreign policy.
Once again, then, Donald Trump benefits from the strength of distant tides and forces beyond his control. It seems to be asking too much for our opposition candidates to actually enjoy speaking to people, much less to speak with sense when they do.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.