Two of the world’s most unpredictable leaders are meeting in Singapore, each with an olive branch in one hand, a nuclear missile in the other. Our Narcissist-in-Chief cozies up to autocrats while he alienates our natural allies. The country and the world are tip-toeing along the edge of a treacherous cliff. The United States is bracing for the possibility of a dangerous, even irreversible transformation. Some look forward to it with anticipation. Others of us live in dread.
I hear ominous echoes of words and events from a century ago, almost to the year, in the poem by W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming,” which I’ve reproduced at the end of the post.
We are a country built on a constitution and a system of laws, but they aren’t enough to hold us together. We depend on the gravitational pull of societal customs and norms to keep us from falling prey our worst tribal, anti-democratic instincts. With Trump’s constant stream of lies and half truths, with his condemnation of every branch of government which isn’t under his absolute control, with his willingness to go it alone without guidance from governmental traditions or responsible advisors, he is pulling us ever further from our gravitational center.
If Trump and his enablers continue to spiral out of control, carrying us further from the established norms of the executive branch, they will break free from the force which binds this country, as imperfect and as wrong-headed as it often is, together. Lincoln’s appeal to the better angels of our nature, the great president’s plea that we use the Constitution to help us form a more perfect union, will become so many pretty words piled on the ash heap of discarded ideals.
The center is barely holding. We’re falling apart, with no way of knowing what form the shattered bits and pieces of our country will take when they’re reassembled.
When I write these T.H.R.E.A.T. Watch posts, which I began the week after Trump’s election, I watch the comments section fill with paeans to Trump and his accomplishments and scorn for anyone who thinks differently. The passionate intensity of Trump’s supporters jumps off the page with an untamed energy which makes a response nearly impossible. Most readers who agree with what I write remain silent. A few try arguing with the Trump acolytes, but they find themselves shouted down. They’re left with the choice of swapping insults with the Trumpists or leaving the field.
Democratic leaders oppose nearly everything Trump stands for, yet they seem flummoxed. They don’t know how to respond. Instead of expressing outrage at Trump’s excesses, they issue passionless, hyper-logical statements devoid of the kind of conviction which springs from Trump’s supporters. The only people who scream like their hair is on fire are the Never Trump Republicans, those writers and analysts and ex-campaign managers who remain true to their conservative Republican convictions, which they see being blown to pieces by something that calls itself the Republican Party but has morphed into the Party of Trump. Occasionally an elected Republican joins the unelected Never Trumpers. Our own Jeff Flake is one of them, speaking and writing often about his fear of the direction Trump is taking the country. Most recently he responded to the way Trump trashed Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau and reneged on the G-7 summit agreement, tweeting, “Fellow Republicans, this is not who we are. This cannot be our party.” From his sick bed, John McCain tweeted in kind: “To our allies: . . . Americans stand with you, even if our president doesn’t.” Both are men of conscience, though they might not be willing to speak as forcefully if they planned to run for reelection.
President Reagan spoke of the vision of the United States as a “shining city on a hill.” It’s an overblown image — I prefer Lincoln’s aspirational goals to Reagan’s sense that we have arrived at our glorious destination — but it’s a lofty, uplifting image. A bald eagle soaring overhead would complete the picture. Trump’s imagery has nothing to do with shining cities or better angels or more perfect unions. His chosen image is the swamp. He has turned himself into some kind of rough beast, a creature moving in the shallows, his reptilian body lumbering through the muck, its human head just above the water line, searching for prey.
W. B. Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I, which was called “the war to end all wars,” a phrase that has taken on an ironic meaning which wasn’t intended at the time. Yeats was also living through a struggle for independence in his native Ireland. The world’s future looked dark. In its early form, his poem had specific historical references, but he removed them as he revised, giving the finished product the timeless quality which has made it among the most quoted “modern” poems.
What I’ve written above is a very loose, contemporary paraphrase of Yeat’s words and images, but my translation isn’t really necessary. The message of his century-old poem, below, is all too clear, and all too appropriate to this moment in history.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
This article appears in Jun 7-13, 2018.
Hey Chicken Little, the sky is not falling. Get a grip man, you are spinning out of control.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
But who the best and worst are, David, is a matter of interpretation. Perhaps the worst are those in both parties who kick truth, relationships, and civility to the curb while passionately pursuing their partisan agendas and political ambitions. The best, those with principles they will not sacrifice in the partisan fray, have deserted the field that the partisans have turned into an obscene mud wrestling match. Its revealing of the position you occupy, in the thick of a partisan camp, that you see things the way you do, believing the best to be members of a sold-out, ineffectual party that long ago relinquished its right to be seen as any better than the opponents whose methods they adopted and whose funders they also began to court, leaving those outside the money/power networks with a choice of vanilla flavored exploitation or rainbow flavored exploitation.
Time, like St. Benedict, to retreat to a cave. Perhaps the ravens will deliver some bread, perhaps not. But at least the cave-dwellers wont end up covered in mud from head to toe like the partisan mud wrestlers of both camps.
You were not disappointed by the Trumpers jumping on your article but thank you anyhow for writing it. I also wonder how we will put this country back together after the tribalist-in-chief is done riving us apart. I also wonder what drives so-called conservatives to be so mean to their fellow Americans in the name of taking their country back? Take the con out of conservative and maybe we will see…
Our “natural allies” like Iran?
If Trump can solve the nuclear situation on the Korean Peninsula, I’ll be the first to congratulate him.
@ ZEEMAN
Geez. “I’d wager Yeats wouldn’t think…” is not a Trumper. And no thanks should go to Safier for mixing Yeats up in his partisan political BS. “Putting the country back together” will be a difficult task indeed, if it is even possible, but the deterioration started long, long before Trump, and the Dems share much of the blame for the current miserable state of things. They jumped on the corporatist bandwagon and left the cause labor utterly undefended. They, more than the Republicans, laid the ground for Trump by creating a situation in which large portions of their previous working class base felt (rightly) that putting another Clinton in office wouldn’t improve their situations. Go talk to all the people who voted for Obama and then Trump.
Pulling the wool over your own eyes, blowing smoke and hiding under the covers won’t help, sold-out Dems. When you look at Trump you are looking at the results of your own betrayal of the working class.
“The best” is not a partisan concept, nor is “the worst.” It is a self-defeating lie to say that all of the current conflict can be reduced to partisan wrangling.
Let’s start with “the worst,” which are clear enough. Racism. Sexism. Misogyny. Xenophobia. Homophobia. Religious insanity. Ignorance. Intolerance. Greed. All of which lead to morally bankrupt violence, and all of which are animating forces of the Republican Party, especially under the rise of Tchump. But they’re also found in some measure in the Democratic Party, and they are long traditions in our nation, as in most of the world, evils against which good hearts and kind souls have always had to fight, and probably always will. Fighting against them now, even in the context of what is undeniably an epidemic of mindless partisan bickering, does not diminish the nobility of the fight or lessen its necessity. It would be a cop-out and an abdication of moral responsibility to sputter “a pox on both houses” and retreat to a cave.
“The best”? That, too, is easy. Tolerance. Inclusion. Generosity. Nonviolence. Equality. Diversity. These concepts make peace, promote harmony, and can underpin solutions to virtually any problem. The Democratic Party platform comes closer to these ideals than the Republican’s, but again, revolutionary social change is not a partisan issue. LGBTQ Republicans fought for gay marriage and other equal rights alongside LGBTQ Democrats, and things changed, because they were fighting for these values and driven by love, rather than “the worst”. The fact that much change still needs to happen does not diminish the gains or the fundamental truth that the values are what matter and the fight is worth the effort.
More rage from Mr Safier. Sort of like Robert DeNiro but no vulgarity.
@ SKINNYMAN
Nope, a weak combination of 60s peace-and love-and-everybodys-cool, man values and identity politics do not underpin solutions to virtually every problem. They do not, for example, underpin the solution to the problems that labor in this country is being exploited, jobs and educational opportunities are being exported / globalized, worker protections like the right to file class action labor suits are being shredded, income inequality and executive compensation are out of control, and too many people are losing their foothold in the middle class.
The scariest groups in this country right now are the people on both sides of the political spectrum who ignore the labor issues while insisting their cultural and moral values are right and lockstep conformity to them can solve every problem. Like the so-called liberals who violently shut down campus dialogues and give political science professors concussions in the process (Middlebury). This is a values-pluralist country. A labor supportive political party might be able to gain some traction if they could maintain focus on the economic policy issues and stop alienating large portions of their potential base with their modern day Puritan-style self-righteousness. Its unfortunately a persistent tradition in this country to believe the equivalent of We are Gods elect! and expelling (Anne Hutchinson) or hanging (Quakers) people with whom you disagree.
Many of today’s problems lie at the feet of tolerance because in many cases one must lower or eliminate any moral standards to be fully tolerant. A perfect example is a immigration policy which rather than being enforced has allowed tolerance to creep in. That opened the flood gates and more tolerance will only make the problem worse.
Too many past President’s tolerated the Kim regimes. Somebody has finally said ENOUGH! Knock it off or you will pay a price for your actions.
I almost wish the Safier’s increasingly unhinged, apocalyptic ramblings were an accurate description of the country, rather than just sad evidence of the author’s descent into madness. It would be nice if we were “on a cliff” with the very future of the country at stake. Let’s be honest, we are not a common people anymore. We just happen to shop at the same stores and watch the same television shows. The time has long passed for a break-up of this country. Let’s hope it’s peaceful.
Lots of genuinely thoughtful comments here — actual dialogue. My pick for the most cogent and accurate statement is skinnyman’s. I refuse to except the false equivalence embodied in the “Pox on all your houses” approach. And I sure as hell don’t accept the notion that Trump and his acolytes are making this country a better place.
Yeah, who needs jobs, border security and a robust economy when you can have thousands of illegals running around all over the place?
Since when have we been “a common people”? Would that be during the Colonial era, when Puritan dissenters settled in Massachusetts and English Catholics in Mary-land, while Jews and a whole variety of religious “others” were tolerated by the Dutch-Reform colonists in New Amsterdam, in part because there were investors in the Dutch colonial join-stock company who were of the tolerated religious persuasions?
There’s no getting away from TOLERANCE and cool-headed, diplomatic, reasonable COOPERATION being the central virtues that have always been needed in this country to resolve disputes from the colonial era forward, if we’re not to descend into the chaos of religious persecution and sectarian violence many of our original settlers were fleeing. It can absolutely work. All it requires is for people to acknowledge that their right to believe and worship (or not) as they choose depends on their willingness to grant the same right to other groups, and that the ONLY path to domestic tranquility in this nation involves sitting down at the table with people of other persuasions and hammering out compromises that don’t take from any group more than they can bear to part with. Cf. Alan Bickel, The Morality of Consent.
I did not vote for Trump, but I and many others who are not Trump supporters experience the constant drum-beat of Trump-hatred and the ridiculous apocalyptic pronouncements of propagandists like Safier as forms of hysteria and self-righteousness that are destructive of democratic virtues and norms. Like him or not, Trump was elected by the rules on the books, which temper-tantruming Clinton Dems cannot object to any more than Sanders supporters could object to the Superdelegates and primaries in which independents could not vote that blocked their candidate’s path to the nomination and set up, in their opinion, the situation in which Trump could be elected.
Heads up, sold-out Dems: this is not THE APOCALYPSE. It is, plain and simple, the result of the Democrats’ bankrupt platform and public policy. If the party would like to end up in a different place in 2020, its partisans should stop the ludicrous “THREAT watches” and start dealing with the real issues. Go talk to people whose jobs were outsourced, or to students overburdened with crushing amounts of undismissable loan debt, or to people who lost their homes or businesses in 2008 and then watched the “Hope and Change” administration bail malfeasant banks out with taxpayer funds, letting the executives who created the crisis off scott free and / or allowing them to award themselves bonuses with taxpayer-sourced bailout funds. Wounds like that are not healed by identity politics and unbelievably lame concoctions like the already forgotten embarrassment of the Pelosi-Schumer “Better (?!) Deal.”
Back to the drawing board, Dems. Neither your hysteria nor your obscenely weak and compromised policy are anything resembling what is needed in this country.
But, but, but, what about Russia? Should they keep crying Russia in place of having any real issues that affect American citizens? Or should they import more victims from the south to represent? Trump is making progress. They are making noise.
The usual way that a Dictator overtakes a country is after a major depression the way that Hitler did in Germany and Stalin did in Russia. The Great Depression in the United States was influenced by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff causing the worst economic decline ever recorded. Trump is trying to reproduce the same situation with his tariffs so that another Great Depression is created and he can establish a Dictatorship in the United States. Every action Trump takes indicates his objective, courting Dictators, alienating Democratic allies, congratulating Xi Jiping for becoming “president” for life, and pushing tariffs to cause a global economic catastrophe. Republicans are more than happy to go along with his nefarious scheme because they will be a part of the new Gestapo.