Category Archives: personal essay

Getting to Albuquerque

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August, 1960: an unbearable day—the temperature well over a hundred degrees on the concrete runway at Dallas Love Field where I am pitching bags off a conveyor belt onto a luggage cart, unloading one of the Vickers Viscount aircraft that Continental Airlines flew in those days. Next to me a mechanic jokes with a coworker as he takes a wad of chewing gum out of his mouth and stuffs it into the guts of a turboprop engine he’d been having trouble with. “That ought to get ‘er to Albuquerque!” he opines.

True story. I have no idea what happened to that airplane, though I certainly hope it got to Albuquerque safely. I should probably have reported that mechanic to somebody, my boss maybe—but I was too frazzled and tired and drenched with sweat (besides being too low in the pecking order) to think that. I’m a bit ashamed that I didn’t report him, though not as ashamed as I ought to be, and I soothe my conscience with the absence from my memory of any stories of plane crashes from around that time.

Thirty years later I published an essay entitled “The Ultimate West.” It has several weaknesses, the chief of which is an excessive literariness, to which I am still prone. I’m not ashamed of it though, and I’m thinking of a particular paragraph I wrote then about childhood trips to Albuquerque from Abilene, Texas: when my mother would put my brother and me in our 1939 De Soto and drive us there in one day. It still seems remarkable to me that she did that. We would usually stop in Clovis for lunch, which consisted of roast beef sandwiches at a restaurant in a small downtown hotel. I remember parking meters and brick streets in Clovis, but another memory, another kind of memory predominates.

Getting to Albuquerque was for me the most powerful of symbols. Texas was plain, New Mexico exotic and cosmopolitan. In Albuquerque I went to school with Mexicans and an occasional Indian, whereas my Texas schools protected my Scotch Irish ethnicity against cultural pollution and forced me to memorize Bible verses, which I still think of as Baptist, at school.

I did a lot of growing up in Abilene. It had been my mother’s family home since 1926, the place where she and my father met, fell in love, and married. We lived in Abilene with my grandparents during the early years of World War II when my father was in the Philippines. We moved there more or less permanently in 1948 after his death had been confirmed. But both my brother and I had been born in Albuquerque, I in 1937 and he in 1940. We both started school there; though I had a longer exposure to school in Albuquerque than he did, from first through fourth grade. The road trips I recalled in my 1990 essay took place between 1943 when we moved back to Albuquerque from Abilene and occupied the house my parents had built on Tulane Place near the university, and January, 1948 when we resettled in Abilene.

My parents’ Albuquerque house as it looked when it was it was new (circa 1939). All photos are “live.” Click images to enlarge.

And of course there were as many road trips to Abilene as to Albuquerque in my childhood—but although I have many cherished memories of visiting and living in Abilene as a small child and continue to love my adopted home town, it is the road trips to Albuquerque that my memory assigns to a special place among my magic things. “I could feel my heart rise in me as we passed the state line at Farwell and it mysteriously got an hour earlier.” Not even the seemingly endless succession of wolf and coyote skins strung on the barbed wire fences along the roadways dampened my enthusiasm. But in spite of the fact that Albuquerque gave me a childhood sense of something like cultural diversity, what I didn’t understand as a child was that both in Northern New Mexico and in West Texas I was living in places where perhaps a hundred fifty years of history had been erased. It is my connections with that history that I continue to ponder and with which I still strive to come to terms.

Historic marker at Millerville (TX) Cemetery.

Last fall, on my way to my annual high school class reunion, I made another road trip, in a rented car, to the Texas ghost towns of Duffau and Millerville, not far from the present day town of Hico, on the edge of the Texas hill country. I made the trip to search for my great grandmother’s grave. She is buried in Millerville Cemetery, according to her death certificate. I didn’t find her grave, but I suspect it may be one of a good many graves in the old cemetery that are marked with field stones bearing no inscriptions, or that it may never have been marked at all. Her name had been Melinda Ava Akers. She was born in 1843 in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, and had moved with her extended family to Bloomington, Illinois, some time before 1870. She was just shy of seventy years old at the time of her death in 1913. Her journey from Pennsylvania to Texas had been long and meandering.

My great grandfather, John H. Long, outlived Melinda by twenty-five years, married again, and died in Los Angeles, California in 1937. I should like to know more about him and my great grandmother and his second wife, one Mary Floyd Marcoux, though I now know a good deal more than I ever did growing up, when I don’t think I ever heard their names. Apparently, my great grandmother’s death certificate mentions only one child, her daughter Marian. But Marian was the youngest of four siblings, two of whom, Florence and Raymond, are buried in New Florence, Missouri, and one of whom, James Olin, was my grandfather. Here is a photo of John Long, for which I am grateful to my cousin, Carol Flanagan. I have no idea where it was taken or when, though the subject looks to be middle aged. I’ve not been able to find a photograph of my great grandmother. John Long was six years younger than Melinda Akers when they were married in 1876. I have no idea how they met or where, though I have traced John Long to his birth in Peoria County, Illinois, not far from Bloomington. He and Melinda show up together with their then two children, Florence and James Olin, in the United States Census of 1880 in Minneapolis. Their southwards migration through towns in Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri (where they lost their two children, Florence and Raymond), would bring them to Beckham County, Oklahoma, some time prior to 1905 when my grandfather, James Olin, and Adda Belle Peterson were married at Guthrie.

Adda Belle Peterson and James Olin Long on their wedding Day.

I knew none of this growing up, perhaps because we lost contact with my father’s family after World War II. For a long time Grandma Long would come to visit every few months, but finally the visits stopped when she moved to Hawaii for a while—she too was a wanderer. The extended family of Longs and Petersons lived in Oklahoma until 1911 but seem to have split up after that, with John and Melinda and their daughter Marian, who had married a man named Orlando Curtis, going to Texas, and my grandparents and Melissa Peterson settling finally in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Here’s a photo of the Las Cruces clan, I think from 1913; Peter Peterson, my maternal great grandfather who had died in Oklahoma in 1910, is absent. My grandmother is holding my Uncle Bill, the baby of the family. My father is the boy in the middle between my grandfather and great grandmother Melissa Peterson who is holding my Aunt Frances’s hand. Next comes my uncle Randolph and finally, a neighbor boy whose hat covers his face. I never knew my grandfather, James Olin, who died in the flu epidemic of 1919, but I spent a number of happy childhood times at the Las Cruces farm—we didn’t call it a homestead, and of course I’m remembering it as it may have been thirty years after this photo was taken. I chiefly remember sleeping on a screened-in porch on cool summer nights and waking every so often as a train hooted by on the tracks close by. My memory is that the porch faced the railroad, though that could be wrong. I also remember the farm as a garden. Grandma Long kept bees and dairy cattle in addition to chickens. She raised vegetables and I don’t know what else. There was a lot of alfalfa grown in that part of the world in those days. I associate the smell of alfalfa with Grandma Long’s farm and find that smell exhilarating still.

And I think that farm was a sustainable enterprise as long as Las Cruces remained rural and as long as climate cycles allowed. Of course, all the farms in that place were irrigated. The irrigation ditch that brought water to them from the Rio Grande was the chief feature of downtown Las Cruces in those days. My mother once told me that my father and a friend wrote a book about what she called ditchwater Spanish, which my father spoke fluently she said. That expression, ditchwater Spanish, suggests to me that my father and other boys, not all of them Anglo, must have played in and around that irrigation ditch much as I and my friends sneaked away and played in the dry creeks of Abilene. I have the address of the Las Cruces farm but think it exists no more. A 1998 photo shows only the railroad right of way. I’ll go to Las Cruces and look for it one of these days. My favorite of the handful of photos I have of the place is one I’ve used before, because it shows my grandmother and her four grown children. I should say too that I am grateful for all my photos of the Long Homestead to my cousin, Lorian Choate, and her husband, Brett Martin. Another I love just for the way it shows the house, is this winter picture.

But central to the lives of all of us who gathered from time to time at that farmhouse was the fact that we were inheritors of what we now sometimes call Indian removal. We were the first couple of generations of Americans who profited directly from that experiment in ethnic cleansing. But we didn’t think of our lives that way, and part of the reason we didn’t was that history had been cleansed for us as well, in Texas by the banishment of everything native American including the people, and in New Mexico by commodification. Our story, the story of our times and our places in them, was a story of migration into a place that had been empty of human culture before our arrival, or so we thought. Our stories of heroic journeying, cowboying, and the like, neglected to mention the people who had been there before us as human agents engaged in civilized life.

To be continued . . .

interim report

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The great, glaring ways in which my society’s norms have been morally wrong have pretty much always been obvious to me; though my understanding of the subleties and nuances of these wrongs has grown and changed over the years. It has been my privilege to work to change some of those norms and to see them replaced by others that I and many of my fellow citizens hope to be more humane. But there are other, less obvious norms that are the ground of my experience as well. Last week I participated as a spectator in a forum for candidates for mayor of my city. I attended a play at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, known affectionately as the Rep. I attended a St. Louis Symphony concert and a church service. I spent a day judging debates at a St. Louis Urban Debate League tournament.

In these activities I participated in the civic life of my locality. I affirmed my city by living and acting in it through corporate and conventional modes of behavior. I also ate meals at restaurants and with friends, shopped for goods at local stores, drove my automobile on local streets, visited with friends in their homes and enjoyed my own. By these and countless other actions, mailing letters, using electrical appliances, keeping up with the news, watching the Super Bowl, I pursued my social and civic life as I have for almost eight decades in various places in the United States of America. From my early youth until now I have known myself as a social creature, thinking that it was both my right and my duty to participate in my society’s formal civic life but also taking for granted a host of activities and pursuits that form the accidental and complex infrastructure that gives me a physical as well as a social connection to the turning earth, the seasons, the businesses of business and of learning, modes of intentionality that are as much a part of civic life as voting.

I know myself to be a historical actor too, as we all are, living within the stream of our times. It’s tempting sometimes to think that historical milieux can change suddenly and drastically, especially in revolutionary times—but that’s usually an illusion. What looks like sudden change upon inspection turns out to be the product of a gradual evolution. Such a consequence (e.g. the turn towards fascism in the world’s contemporary democracies) appears to have happened suddenly, or relatively suddenly, only because attention was focused elsewhere, engaged with images of an order of things that had long been imperiled. I mean to speak practically, not to propound a theory of history which I am not qualified to do. I also mean to speak from my own lived experience and from no one else’s. Events that might disconfirm my argument abound, the crashing of airplanes into New York’s world trade towers being perhaps the most recent large-scale Viking raid I have witnessed personally (albeit virtually). But the tensions in the middle east in the aftermath of the founding of Israel in 1948 were nothing new in 2001, and our country’s unfortunate involvement in fomenting and increasing those tensions off and on over the years was also old news. We Americans simply thought we were invincible, that our geopolitical situation preserved us from attack.

The political changes in my country have caused me to wonder if my thinking needs to change. I have understood myself as a liberal as long as I have been an adult. But I spent my professional life working in universities except for a period in the 1970s when I worked in the community arts movement, community arts having been an establishment effort not fundamentally different from the founding of land grant universities and community colleges. I am now realizing the extent to which these experiences gave me a situation and an identity in the center of American life, not on the fringes. What I am just fully realizing is that even though I participated in protests and voter drives during the 1960s and have had an albeit sometimes rocky love affair with today’s academic left, I thought of these things as expressions of civic virtue and not as revolutionary acts. Speaking for myself, it is a mistake to identify with claims of opposition to the center. We are capitalists in the United States, as Nancy Pelosi has recently pointed out. But being capitalist is not synonymous with being American. Capitalism is and ought to be subordinate to our evolved social vision. The New Deal got part of that relationship right, but only part. For many Americans, whole social groups indeed, were left out of the New Deal and denied the goods of American life by virtue of ethnicity, gender, or social class. Our public efforts, some of them misguided, to remedy the defects of the New Deal produced systemic stresses that eventually led to the top-heavy, overly bureaucratic infrastructure that the rightist insurgency has now seized and means to exploit for its own nefarious ends. But it is the evolved democratic social vision of the twentieth century that to my understanding remains the central project of American life and that of the evolved social democracies of the rest of the world, though many of them are presently being impacted by rightist insurgencies as well.

It is also a mistake to believe that the rightist insurgency in the U. S. is a demand for small government. It may have been that in the early days (though it is hard to think of HUAC and the McCarthyist witch hunts as small government projects), but by 1964 movement conservatism was clearly an ethnic nationalist coalition opposed to emerging social change and resentful of the declining world power of the United States as the Cold War continued. Nor is today’s rightist insurgency the sole projector of neoliberal economics. One of the rifts that could destabilize our emerging rightist government could pit neoliberals, both Democratic and Republican, in the congress against the economic nationalism of the executive régime. But I think it more likely that rightist forces will unify around rolling back regulations that protect citizens from corporations coupled with various repressive social policies: scapegoating immigrants and minorities, feminists, LGBTs, public schools and universities, unions, science and scientists, professionals of all sorts—a longer list could be made. Much of this will be done in the name of religion. While it is tempting to me to identify myself entirely in opposition to the rightist insurgency, I am beginning to understand that I care most as a citizen about preserving the evolved democracy I am coming to see as the main project of my lifetime and the lives of my family and parents and grandparents.

The rightist emergence in the developed democracies of the west seems sudden (if it does) because of its determination to undo history and because of its violence. We democrats (note the small d) are accused of violence when we protest, just as we are accused of having changed the world illegitimately, albeit we represent the slow evolution of western society towards democratic institutions (e.g. universal suffrage, equal access to education, health care, and other public goods for all persons regardless of race, religion, gender, social class, place of origin, etc.) And what may have begun in this country, seems to have begun if I consult my memory and my family’s, as what was billed in my youth as an effort to ‘restore free enterprise’ has now become a movement to destroy every vestige of democratic socialism among us by any means necessary—and the harm, the pain, the social dislocation and disruption this will cause are not accidental but intended as the means of reestablishing governance by what the rightist insurgency believes to be our legitimate ruling class: white, affluent persons who subscribe not only to a radical neoliberal economic ideology but also to a reactionary and paranoid set of social beliefs that for some are reinforced by a retrograde piety that calls itself Christian. Our current Vice President is representative here more nearly than his boss, but the President adds a beefed-up nationalism and overt kleptocracy to the already toxic mix of recommended rightist practice.

One can fault Edmund Burke for many things. He could not have been a feminist. His record with respect to slavery and colonial abuse, the two great issues of his time upon which he spent the most of his energies, is mixed and problematic. He was not a democrat in any sense of the term. His most famous writing is a tract attacking the French revolution; yet he more or less supported the American. To say these things, however, is to say only that he was a man of his time. Perhaps it is more important that he was a practicing politician, spending his career in the British House of Commons, that his writings have more of the character of obiter dicta than of philosophy. The last thing I want is to endorse the uses to which Burke’s ideas have been put by American movement conservatives. Indeed what seems useful to me at the moment is more nearly what Burke has come to represent in the history of ideas than what Burke actually said about politics or history. Burke’s understanding of the French revolution was deeply flawed, his reaction to it naïve and sentimental. But his position as a politician observing and reacting to what he took to be the destruction of the evolved society just across the channel accords very well with my position with respect to my country’s present history. I have claimed now several times that we are an evolved democracy in the United States. Like Edmund Burke, our founders did not approve of democracy; but we have evolved towards democratic institutions, particularly in the last century, just as we have made some efforts to remedy the consequences of slavery, the native American genocide, and our terrible record as a colonial power. Some have said, and used Burke as their justification, that this evolution has made us weak; I believe, on the contrary, it has made us strong. Now, our evolved democracy faces, if not extinction, at least a severe and cruel curtailment. I don’t need to rehearse the horrors of the past few weeks, only to allude to them and to the fact that they are being praised enthusiastically by representatives of the rightist electorate even whilst their leaders’ behavior horrifies most Americans and indeed most of the rest of the world.

I think protests have to continue, and I will participate as I am able. Beyond protest, I think we all have to organize better than we have ever done before in order to start winning again at the polls, to fight attempts to suppress our votes in the courts and where we fail, to mount massive voter drives to obtain credentials for the disfranchised. We need to participate in local politics. We need to support our local cultural and eleemosynary institutions as well as regional and national advocacy organizations that are doing the work of democratic resistance. We in the American democratic majority have presently lost the ability to command. Some of Burke’s thoughts about France might give us pause as to why that happened; but now, we stand to lose much more. For me, at least, the realization of what I have to lose, may have lost already, is what I have to defend. It is what I think Burke saw, beyond the specifics and with all his flaws and limitations, in the idea of a developed society. Our local institutions will hold for the time being, but we have lost the ethical center of our civilization. This makes conservatives of all of us who are lifelong liberals, and it means partly that liberalism and conservatism were never a binary opposition.

But it is the specifics that count the most. It isn’t enough just to be opposed to the rightist régime because it is duplicitous, authoritarian, bigoted, and violent. That’s one of the mistakes we made in last year’s election. We have to know what things we value in our civic life, and we now more than ever need to tell their stories—the stories of all those things we had come to take for granted as permanent in our lives and in the world. Why is it that I think the rightist insurgency threatens these things? My symphony orchestra is at least half female and includes a goodly proportion of players whose ethnicity is non-white. My church officially supports the ambitions of LGBT persons. Most of the candidates for the office of mayor in my city are African American. The St. Louis Urban Debate League serves St. Louis City Public Schools, most of whose students are African American. A recent play at the Rep involved a conflict between a gay man and the mother of his dead lover. My front window now features a poster welcoming refugees. The International Center just around the corner from my house is a haven for immigrants, as is my church, which also counts a number of same sex couples among its members. I am a supporter of Planned Parenthood, NARAL, the ACLU, the Sierra Club, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and public media as well as my local art museum, botanical garden and zoo. I am a member of the League of Women Voters. From my perspective these facts are signs of the times and of my participation in the normal social life of my locality. From the perspective of the rightist insurgency, however, I am living in the middle of a politically correct community that needs to be brought into conformity with traditional values.

A Face In the Crowd

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As I think about the chaos that has surrounded us in the United States since the inauguration of Donald Trump as our president, I keep finding myself in a condition T. S. Eliot describes in “East Coker,” having only learned to get the better of words for things I no longer wish to say. I have nothing more to say at this point about Donald Trump and his cabal or the Republican Party, or about my country.

Trump is being treated by his supporters and his detractors as a shiny new bauble on the tree of our public life, the new cynosure of our popular culture when we ought to be saying something like ‘surely not that again!’ For he is the worst of clichés. I don’t care whether he is smart or stupid or whether Steve Bannon is running him or not or whether the congress is using him or whether or when he will be impeached, though I don’t think impeachment is likely any time soon.

Nor do I care whether the chaos around him is accidental or part of a design to destabilize the country. Trump’s entire program is destabilizing as is the potential program of the Republican government in waiting. At this point events are in charge. I fear that neither he nor his supporters nor any of the rest of us will be able to undo the harm Trump is prepared to do—it appears he is ambitious to destabilize the world.

But we have seen his sort before again and again, the cowboy con artist with a shiv in his boot: Oliver North, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, George W. Bush, Rick Perry. Last year there was a fashion for comparing Trump to Lonesome Rhodes, the celebrity anti-hero of Elia Kazan’s 1957 film, A Face In The Crowd, made from a story by Budd Schulberg. Turner Classic Movies aired the film on Trump’s inauguration day. Rhodes is a bad ‘un with a smarmy smile that only an actor like Andy Griffith could have embodied, but he gets his comeuppance.

Towards the end of A Face In The Crowd a survivor among Rhodes’s entourage comments ruefully to a friend, about Rhodes and others like him:

You were taken in, just as we were all taken in. But we get wise to ’em. That’s our strength. We get wise to ’em.

We can hope Trump’s charisma will fail him—it’s the arc of the action he is playing out—nobody can strut and fret forever. But he has powerful allies in the alternative fact industry whose job it is to manufacture conspiracy theories and cram them in the black hole of the rightist media.

Most Americans are already wise to Trump, have been all along. But the joke’s on us. All the while we thought we were liberals, progressives, agents of change. Now it’s a rightist minority who are driving change, people who want to pull up the last hundred years or so of international history and burn it to ashes—they are not conservatives, no matter how they describe themselves. I am a conservative. I am now, at least in some sense, a Burkean. And I don’t have words for that condition yet.

God did it . . .

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In a recent op ed in The Washington Post Hungarian scholar, Miklos Haraszti, has suggested that our United States Constitution, because it is hard to change, might provide a check against the rise of an authoritarian regime in this country. But Haraszti isn’t seriously hopeful. He rather means, I think, to warn Americans about what is at stake in the rise of the cult of Trump.

The world is looking at the United States now in a way that we never thought would be possible: fretting that the “deals” of its new president will make the world’s first democracy more similar to that of the others. I wish we onlookers could help the Americans in making the most out of their hard-to-change Constitution. We still are thankful for what they gave to the world, and we will be a bit envious if they can stop the fast-spreading plague of national populism.

But what if Trump is able simply to shrug off constitutional restraint as he seems to be doing now with the emoluments clause? Who will hold him accountable? His election and the associated takeover of much of the machinery of governance in this country by a newly authoritarian Republican party (and I speak here of state legislatures and governorships as well as the national congress, much of our system of courts, and perhaps the Supreme Court) threatens not only our multicultural democracy as I have argued elsewhere, but also threatens systematically to undermine our federal system. We should have seen this when Republicans repeatedly shut our government down. We should have seen it when they refused to fund necessary infrastructure spending, as our highways, bridges, waterways, and systems of land-management deteriorated, perhaps beyond repair. We should have seen it when Republicans refused to support our armed services and veterans, indeed privatized much of our military, all the while proclaiming their patriotism. We should have seen it when they refused to confirm President Obama’s nominees to key federal posts and when they refused even to consider the president’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court.

But if we didn’t see the threat to federalism in these things, we should certainly have seen it in the Republican destruction of New Orleans and much of the State of Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. Naomi Klein provides an instructive window into that destruction in the opening section of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, as she describes the talk at a Red Cross shelter in Baton Rouge in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

The news racing around the shelter that day was that Richard Baker, a prominent Republican congressman from this city, had told a group of lobbyists, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” Joseph Canizaro, one of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers, had just expressed a similar sentiment: “I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities.” All that week the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge had been crawling with corporate lobbyists helping to lock in those big opportunities: lower taxes, fewer regulations, cheaper workers and a “smaller, safer city” which in practice meant plans to level the public housing projects and replace them with condos. Hearing all the talk of “fresh starts” and “clean sheets,” you could almost forget the toxic stew of rubble, chemical outflows and human remains just a few miles down the highway.

Destruction of Louisiana was continued by Governor Bobby Jindal, who was ultimately defeated, but much of it remains. At the center of it was the economic gospel of Milton Friedman, whose devastation of both nature and culture Klein documents around the world. According to Friedman disaster provides economic opportunity, as in New Orleans whose school privatization Friedman praised at the end of his career. And sometimes, if God doesn’t clear the slate for Friedman-style entrepreneurship, it may be permissible or even necessary for humans to undertake the task. Autocracy will be a condition of necessary economic reform, since people will hardly vote to destroy their livelihoods in a democratic socialist state. Friedman’s complicity in the excesses of the Pinochet regime in Chile are among many things that have tarnished his reputation as a humanitarian.

We might have seen a threat to federalism in the Kansas Legislature’s attempt to destroy a state supreme court that thwarted its design to defund the state’s public schools. Ultimately the people of Kansas restrained Governor Brownback and the Legislature, whose attempt to subvert the law was made clear by public interest groups. But Kansas remains a state in which Republican rule seeks the destruction of the public sector and establishment of autocracy. So, with North Carolina, whose recently elected Democratic governor’s powers have been usurped by a Republican General Assembly, meeting in special session called before the former Republican governor left office. North Carolina’s voter suppression law was struck down in federal court and the decision was upheld by the Supreme Court. The State’s extreme gerrymandering was also struck down in federal court, but a recent Supreme Court order has suspended the special elections ordered by the lower court’s decision, pending appeal.

We might have seen a threat to federalism in the multiplication of voter suppression laws around the country designed to perpetuate Republican rule and support authoritarian regimes throughout the Midwest, and in the Supreme Court’s casuistic gutting of voting rights and campaign finance legislation. As I write this Republicans are designing total repeal of the Affordable Care Act which President Elect Trump, in defiance of fact, the medical profession, the majority of American voters, and even the insurance industry, claims to have been a disaster for too long. What is trending here is a state of affairs in which the governed are deprived of the constitutional means to withdraw consent from their governors. Some millions of citizens may be deprived of health insurance as well if the ACA is repealed, and that’s only the beginning if Republicans act on the intentions of some to destroy Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In some cases the Republicans’ determination to commit destruction and throttle dissent proceeds with desperate glee and an unabashed mean-spiritedness that borders on joy. An Iowa legislator terms an attempt to deprive college students of benefits he thinks are excessive the “suck it up buttercup” bill. A Missouri legislator gleefully introduces legislation to deprive university faculties of tenure claiming the practice is un-American, no matter its venerability. A former student tweets, “Liberal tears bring me so much joy.”

What seems to be driving the trend is a combination of toxic belief in certain fundamentalisms: the prosperity gospel, the economics of Hayek and Friedman, white supremacy, economic nationalism (which in some ways conflicts with Hayek and Friedman), the social pathologies we saw on display at the Trump rallies, hatred of liberalism and its institutions including schools and universities, nostalgia for a small-town or rural past with its ethnic inequities and tensions erased, etc., but the political dissolution of the modern liberal state is an international phenomenon that is only partly understood. I think Tony Judt made a good beginning in Ill Fares The Land, but he didn’t live to complete the work. Be that as it may, we Americans have legitimately elected a strongman. We may also have given him the means to perpetuate himself in office if he desires to do so. He isn’t Hitler, who was never elected, but he already exhibits many of the inclinations of other authoritarians who have become well-nigh unimpeachable dictators. I’ve mentioned Pinochet. The Italian, Berlusconi, comes to mind as well. Berlusconi was finally unsuccessful as a politician, and he wasn’t the mass murderer Pinochet was. But he did a good deal of damage, and he is often mentioned as a parallel to Trump, particularly with respect to his corruption, his fights with media, and his flamboyant style. The constitution cannot protect us if Trump decides to shrug it off and the congress does not intervene. Given Both Trump and the present congress’s thuggish predilections, it seems far more likely to me that Trump will shrug off the constitution than that congress will act to restrain him.

I conclude at the end of these thoughts that regardless of the strength our constitution has exhibited over the past 227 years we may be facing a crisis that puts our system at peril as it has never before been imperiled. In the final analysis that system rests as much upon good will as it does upon law and tradition. By good will I don’t mean what political fashion sometimes terms Kumbaya-ism. I mean rather the ability to determine the right thing on the basis of established norms and practices—and then to do it. I mean the ability to discern and preserve the good of the whole community. These are things we stand to lose, may already have lost, in the age of Trump.