Editor’s Note: This is an edited version of a speech I gave to SOAR, the Society of Active Retirees, on April 26, 2021
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And what can we do about it?
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Good afternoon and thank you all for listening to me. I am immensely glad that zoom has been able to keep this series alive over the last horrible year, but I have to confess that I hate it, and I will be glad when we can meet in person again.
So — let me turn to my topic, which is the degree of damage the Trump years have done to our nation.
Let’s flash back first to a day in August forty-seven years ago, a day I would guess most of us remember, the day when for the first and only time in American history, a disgraced President of the United States had been caught in a lie, and resigned.
That was, of course, Richard Nixon. And after he left and the new President, Gerald Ford was sworn in, Ford said:
“My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.” This was a Republican president who was implicitly acknowledging the failing of another Republican.
On that day, August 9, 1974, polls showed that virtually the entire country agreed: Our long national nightmare was over.
Well, it is nearly half a century later. We have gotten rid of another President who lied to us, over and over. This time he didn’t resign; we voted him out.
But this time, the situation is very different. Our long national nightmare is anything but over. And there are evidently millions out there who don’t want this to be a government of laws, but a government by one man: Donald Trump.
And just in case you missed it, a few hundred of them stormed our nation’s capital in January and tried to overturn an election and maybe murder key members of the government.
I want to stop here and say that if you haven’t already guessed, as a lifelong student of history and government I firmly believe that Donald Trump was the worst and most divisive President America has ever had.
Historians should see him as being in a class by himself — actually, as one of them said, a sub-basement by himself. Not for his policies, which were bad enough, but for this reason: Donald Trump knew less than any president in history about the Constitution and the meaning and traditions of the Presidency and American democracy, and he couldn’t care less.
Four years ago, Robert Strauss wrote a book about James Buchanan called Worst. President. Ever. about the ineffectual character who allowed the Civil War to happen.
Well, I think even he has conceded that his book is obsolete. Strauss said recently that Buchanan, who did nothing to stop the southern states from seceding after the election of 1860, was at least a nice guy who gave great parties.
But the real problem is not Donald Trump himself. After all, despite his continual and pitiful lies that he won the election last year “in a landslide,” he was clearly beaten.
Biden won the two-party popular vote by more than seven million, or 52.2 percent to 47.7 percent. That’s better than President Obama did beating Mitt Romney, for example.
So on the surface we should all be a lot more optimistic than we were just a year ago. Trump is gone, and with him all the creatures who populated his administration, from Stephen Miller to the host of incompetents and kooks and probable criminals and science deniers we are all too familiar with.
We have a President now in Joe Biden who is as experienced as anyone in that job has ever been, a man who sincerely cares about people, government and tradition. In his first 100 days he has done his best to commit this country to a host of sensible policies designed, in the words of his campaign slogan, “to build back better.”
Biden has even been honest and forthright enough to propose increasing capital gains and other taxes on those poor souls who earn more than a million dollars a year.
He has even done something presidents for a century have been afraid to do – he has openly recognized that the Turks committed a genocidal massacre against the Armenians in 1915, something that has been beyond doubt for a long time.
Biden has appointed competent and talented people to virtually every position he has filled so far, and has done his best to begin repairing our badly strained relationships with the rest of the world. So far, so good.
And yet, and yet, and yet — there is a virulent poison that is dividing our body politic, of a kind and intensity we haven’t seen at least since the 1850s, and a run-up to the Civil War.
Indeed, it might not be an exaggeration to say that we are now experiencing a sort of cold Civil War in this country, with the majority of people divided into one of two separate tribes who think the other tribe is insane, evil and or crazy.
Millions of Americans and a majority of Republicans actually believe that what was probably the cleanest presidential election in our history was stolen. Many thousands and possibly millions believe the insane QAnon fantasies spouted by someone called Q, who tells them that Democrats and celebrities are raping and killing children and selling child porn out of a pizza parlor in Washington DC.
They have a congresswoman, the infamous Marjorie Taylor Greene, who not only is a follower of QAnon, she has speculated in a clearly anti-Semitic flight of fancy that space lasers controlled by the Rothschilds started the California forest fires.
The problem, again, is not that a few kooks believe this fantastic manure, it is that millions of people do, major broadcast outlets feed their fantasies, and it is proving nearly impossible to get them to accept reality.
There is a polarization between the parties that is, again, clearly the worst it’s been since 1860. Here’s one example. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who used to identify himself as sort of a classic William F. Buckley conservative, reported on Friday that a recent poll asked Americans to choose between two ways in which to view the world.
The first was “This is a big beautiful world, mostly full of good people, and we must find a way to embrace each other and not allow ourselves to become isolated.”
The second was “Our lives are threatened by terrorists, criminals and illegal immigrants, and our priority should be to protect ourselves.”
More than three-quarters of Biden voters picked the optimistic scenario. But more than two-thirds of Trump voters picked the scary, hostile, fear-ridden one.
We are indeed two nations today.
Not divided by rich and poor, not divided by black and white, but by how we see the world. And what really may be scariest of all is that we aren’t talking to each other.
How did this happen?
In the world in which I grew up, there were differences between the parties, but they didn’t behave as if members of the the other party were evil enemies who had to be destroyed.
It was an era when a young congressman who referred to the other party as the “enemy” was chided by a leader of his party who told him “son, they aren’t the enemy.
“They are the opposition.” In the thrilling and very close election of 1960, Republicans attempted to appeal to labor, Democrats to business both candidates campaigned in all parts of the country, Nixon in every state, and most states were close.
When Nixon lost a cliffhanger, he conceded defeat the next day, though he grumbled about stolen votes in Chicago and Texas, something he may have been right about.
When Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and George Bush were later defeated for reelection, they went quietly and gracefully and helped the men who vanquished them during their transitions.
Now I don’t want to sugarcoat the past — these were not idyllic times. The lives of black Americans and gay Americans and women were much worse than they are today.
This country was deeply and violently divided on issues involving first race, and then the Vietnam War.
But there was a strong belief nearly across the spectrum that we were all Americans, and that you did not go too far in demonizing the opposition. Those who did, like Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, eventually were gotten rid of by the system.
There was also a very real belief that “politics stopped at the water’s edge,” meaning that when it came to the rest of the world, Americans needed to show a united front.
I think in large part, this was a legacy of the shared experience of the Second World War – and of the Cold War that followed and divided the globe until about 1990.
Many, if not most, congressional leaders in the 1960s and 70s in both parties were veterans of that war — think of Bob Dole and Daniel Inouye and Phil Hart all being hospitalized together in Battle Creek.
Now the politics stops at the water’s edge idea was weakened and heavily strained by the disaster that was the Vietnam War. But as long as the Cold War lasted and even beyond, the notion of an American politician, let alone a President doing the bidding of a Russian dictator was too fanciful even for spy fiction.
So how did that world change into the present one, where, just to name two previously unthinkable things, an outgoing President of the United States essentially incited an insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the presidential election he clearly lost.
And hours after that, in the same building where they could have been killed that day, a majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives voted not to certify the results of that presidential election.
How did we get to this nightmare world?
Well, it didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t start with Donald Trump. I want to talk about three people and three events that set us on the path to our present hell.
And the first of these was Ronald Reagan and his successful move in 1987 to repeal the Fairness Doctrine.
Yes, genial, folksy Ronald Reagan created Rush Limbaugh and all the other nasty right-and-left-wing imitators spawned in his wake. Reagan may not have meant to, but he did, and here’s how: he destroyed the Fairness Doctrine, a rule the government had for many years that required all over-the-air broadcasters (meaning radio and television) to devote some time to issues of public interest, and to present both sides of those issues.
How could they legally do that? Simple: Congress and the courts long ago declared that the airwaves are public property, like the national parks. The all-news radio station in Detroit broadcasts at 950 AM — but Audacy, the company that owns the station does not own that frequency.
The federal government does. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) leases the right to broadcast at that frequency to whatever company owns the station, generally for eight years at a time. The stations have to periodically renew their licenses.
Broadcast licenses are often lucrative “licenses to print money,” and the FCC used to expect something in return. The stations had to provide programming in the public interest, which usually meant news.
They also had standards of decency and fairness. That made sense because there are not enough “places on the dial” for every person, even every group, to have their own frequency. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1969 that the Fairness Doctrine was both constitutional and essential to democracy.
Stations that didn’t follow the rules were hit with stiff fines and could lose their licenses, and a few sometimes did. Rush Limbaugh, as we knew him, would not have been tolerated on the air in 1986. But in 1987, Reagan, nearing the end of his second term in office, decided we didn’t need the Fairness Doctrine any longer. Technology had made it possible to create more stations, broadcasters wanted to be free of any obligations, and persuaded Reagan there would be so many stations people would be exposed to an entire spectrum of views — more choices than ever.
Reagan appointed FCC commissioners who agreed.
However, Democrats and Republicans in Congress strongly disagreed. They overwhelmingly passed a bill that made the Fairness Doctrine, which had just been a policy, federal law. But in June 1987 Reagan vetoed it, saying it was “antagonistic to the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment.”
Congress tried to override his veto, they almost did, but fell just short. Less than two months later, the FCC voted to abolish the Fairness Doctrine. That opened the floodgates.
The next year a savvy executive signed a controversial radio host who was working at a small radio station in Sacramento to a nationwide syndication contract.
The disc jockey’s name was Rush Limbaugh.
Others followed. People didn’t expose themselves to a spectrum of views. They tended to settle on one broadcast outlet that matched their ideological comfort zone. It soon became possible to listen to radio or watch TV all day long without ever being exposed to more than one point of view.
Now, it is important to remember two things: The Fairness Doctrine never applied to print — magazines or newspapers.
That’s because they are produced with entirely private resources. Then, too, there’s no limit on how many newspapers there can be – theoretically, everyone could publish one. Nor did the Fairness Doctrine apply to cable TV, because it is not broadcast over the public airwaves, but via privately owned coaxial cables.
Liberals sometimes say that if the Fairness Doctrine hadn’t been abolished, right-wing outlets like the Fox Network could not exist, but that is wrong. They could, and probably would.
But we would not have had Rush Limbaugh calling a feminist law student a “slut” and a whore for saying contraceptives should be included in health care coverage.
Could the Fairness Doctine, now dead for three decades, ever be reinstated? Theoretically, yes. But there seems to be almost no support for doing so. Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) introduced a bill to do so in 2019, but it went nowhere. U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) came out in favor of reinstating it in 2009, but President Obama wasn’t interested.
The world has changed a lot, and the Fairness Doctrine is probably dead. But if Ronald Reagan or anyone else really thought back in 1987 that its repeal would be good for democracy, the evidence seems clear that they were very wrong.
And this gave rise to “news media” that didn’t even attempt to be fair.
The next two people and events that helped turn the United States into our present Disunited States of America were very different, though they existed about the same time.
The first is a man who is entirely innocent of wrongdoing; a British researcher in a laboratory in Switzerland who in 1989 and 1990 created something that changed forever life as we know it.
His name was Tim Berners-Lee, and what he invented was the World Wide Web, the application that makes the internet usable for all the rest of us. What he created later would lead to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all the rest of social media as well.
The other man who changed America about that time was much more political and malevolent. His name was Newt Gingrich, and he would transform the Republican Party. It had been an essentially conservative party with a range of views and leaders who were willing and interested to compromise and get things done.
Gingrich, who was the architect of the Republicans winning control of the House in 1994 for the first time in 42 years, turned the GOP into something very different; an ideological militant force that was both hard right and more interested in destroying the opposition than in negotiating with it. Gingrich didn’t last long as Speaker; only four years; his own arrogance and personal failings brought him down.
But his work lived on after him. The process of recreating the Republican Party in his image continued. Ironically, the election of Barack Obama was the next step in creating the divided nation we have now.
Obama was a classy man and a good president. He got a majority of the popular vote both times he ran, something Bill Clinton never did. But his election stirred up the strong currents of racism in this country. In past years, leaders of both parties denounced and mostly did not tolerate overt racism.
In the days of the Fairness Doctrine, virtually no tolerance for racism and zenophobia and hate was ever reflected on the airwaves. But with the election of Obama, that all changed. The Tea Party was formed, ostensibly as an anti-tax group, but in reality, a movement powered by thinly disguised racism, which sometimes wasn’t disguised at all.
There was also the closely allied “birther movement,” that claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya,
This was, of course, fueled by a feeling that a black man couldn’t possibly be a legitimate President of the United States.
Many Republicans danced with the Tea Party movement, seeking to use it to their own political advantage, but one strongly took up the birther movement. He also used both conventional and social media to whip up racial and ethnic fears, resentment and hatred.
He was, of course, Donald Trump.
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Trump essentially completed the process of transforming the Republican Party to one that has married the interests of the worst of corporate America, the section interested only in tax cuts and as few restraints as possible on what they do, with the inherent racism and xenophobia of the less educated and less well off. That may the most frightening long-term consequence of what Trump has wrought. He told people that they need feel inhibited no longer about expressing their worst impulses.
I do not think he will run again or ever be elected again, but that may not matter. Not only did he leave behind a Republican party he transformed in his image, he put three justices on the Supreme Court, who will likely be there for decades.
We are now in something of a Cold civil war.
So what can we do about this? Well, it isn’t going to be easy, but we have to try. We have to do everything we can to reject the evil and lies that are being spewed about the reality of life in America.
We need to make sure our schools and our community centers teach classes in media literacy. We need to fight racism and anti-science rhetoric and actions whenever we see them.
We need to demand decency and of our leaders, and reject anyone motivated primarily by hate. With a very few exceptions, the Republican Party seems to have been infected by a virus far worse than COVID, and I don’t know if it can be cured.
What I do know is that we can’t afford to let it destroy us, or the country. Next year’s midterm elections may be as crucial as any in the history of this country. Democrats have a paper-thin majority in both the House and the Senate. The party that controls the White House normally loses seats in midterm elections.
That could be disastrous this time. But if President Biden continues to do a good job and beats the virus, and enough Americans are willing to put aside hatred and fear, we may, just may get through this, and eventually reach a day when we look back at the Trump Republican Party as we do the Know-Nothings of the 1850s.
I do not know. But as President Kennedy said, “One person can make a difference, and everyone should try.”
Thank you.
