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The Great Unsettling
By Tom Hyland
Americans today would be well-
advised to heed the words of Virginian
James Madison, who two hundred and
twenty-nine years ago warned our then
fledgling nation (in
THE FEDERALIST
No. 10
of November 23, 1787) that “[a]
mong the numerous advantages promised
by a well-constructed Union, none
deserves to be more accurately developed
than its tendency to break and control the
violence of faction. The friend of Popular
Government never finds himself so much
alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their
propensity to this dangerous vice.”
Our current presidential election campaign has been styled
by political journalist and author David Marinass as the “Great
Unsettling.” According to Marinass, and his co-author, Robert
Samuel, in a
Washington Post
March 2016 series of reports, the
proximate, and over-arching, cause of that unsettling is anger :“[s]
pecific anger and undefined anger and even anger about anger.
All of it is leading to this moment of great unsettling, with the
Republican Party unraveling, the Democratic [Party] barely
keeping it together, and both [parties] moving away from each
other by the week, reflecting the splintering not only of the body
politic but of the national ideal.”
Maraniss and Samuels recount how they traveled the country
as a means of determining, “the causes and connections of the
anger: Did all the noise of the campaign match the reality of how
people were living their daily lives?”
What they did learn, among other things, was that “[f]or every
disgruntled person out there who felt undone by the system and
threatened by the way the country was changing, caught in the
bind of stagnant wages or longing for an America of the past. . . .
[they] found someone who had endured decades of discrimination
and hardship and yet felt still optimistic about the future and
had no desire to go back. On a larger level, there were as many
communities enjoying a sense of revival as there were fighting
against deterioration and despair.”
With respect to the “unraveling” of the Republican Party, it
should be noted that the party is, arguably, currently made up of
more numerous groups of widely-differing political, social, and
economic beliefs than even the Democratic Party. Given that
wide divergence of constituencies, it should not be surprising that
the party would be having difficulty holding together in times
of severe political, social and economic stress. Add to that mix,
the polarizing language of the leading Republican presidential
candidates and you have a toxic brew ripe for a political, social,
and economic revolution not seen in this nation since the “Great
Depression” of 1929, which led to the election in 1932 of Franklin
D. Roosevelt, the first Democratic Party president since Woodrow
Wilson.
Describing the scene at a Republican candidate rally, Maraniss
and Samuels stated that “[a]t the center of it all, amid the
kaleidoscope of candidates and issues, stood Donald Trump, the
New York provocateur who had seized the Republican Party from
its bewildered establishment. What raging current in the American
public could explain the rise of this say-anything man of wealth
which was breaking every rule of modern politics? The answer was
in the question, to a certain extent. Many people were done with
convention, sick of political correctness, and tired of waiting for
the GOP to keep its unmet promises. Fear of
the other
was also a
motivating factor, evident in individual discussions and behavior
of crowds at a Trump rally. But we also found an aspirational strain
among his supporters. The evangelism of wealth—a respect for
his authoritative vocabulary and monetary success, and a desire to
follow him into a future of riches.”
Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, chroniclers of modern
day federal politics, co-authored in 2012, a book entitled
It’s Even
Worse than It Looks
, describing the then current state of gridlocked
and dysfunctional politics at the federal level, particularly the
congress. This year they have come out with a second and updated
edition of that book with the new title of
It’s Even Worse Than
It Was
.
Dan Balz, a political columnist for the Washington Post,
commented in a column of March 27, 2016, that what has previously
”. . . played out in the congressional wing [of the Republican Party]
has come to consume the presidential nominating contest … [with]
Trump and Cruz [having] brought to the surface the economic and
cultural anger among those in the party’s base as well as the distrust
of the party’s leadership— the same motivating forces behind the
Freedom Caucus rebels in the House Republican conference.”
In responding to Balz’s question about “…whether this
presidential election ultimately will produce a true course change
for the [Republican] party or merely end up intensifying the forces
that have brought it to this moment,” Ornstein responded ‘This
really is an existential crisis for the Republican Party. Will it be
a Ryan-style conservative, problem-solving party, or will it be a
Trump-style, authoritarian, nativist and protectionist party, or a
Cruz-style radical anti-government party content with blowing
things up as they now stand? Or, just as possible, will the party
break apart, with no clue as to what will replace it or how the
pieces will fit into the broader political system?’
The
Washington Post
, in an editorial on March 22, 2016,
carried an account of its’ editorial board’s meeting with Donald
Trump on the previous day and described his response to questions
regarding “the seemliness of [the Republicans] trading insults and
[Trump’s] threatening critics,” as well as his highly- negative and
often questionable or false accusations against immigrants and
Muslims. Trump’s response, as recorded, was “… I mean, actually
I think it is presidential because it is winning [votes].”
In response to the March 21, 2016 terrorist attacks in Brussels,
Belgium, Republican presidential candidate [and U. S. Senator]
Ted Cruz declared at a recent political rally that “[w]e need to
empower law enforcement [in the United States] to patrol and
secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized,” a
proposal of questionable constitutionality. That comment had been
preceded several days before by statements also from Senator Cruz
about the need for surveillance of Muslim mosques in the U.S.
and an unsupported allegation of terrorist infiltration of the U. S.
through the Mexican-U.S. border.
Peter Wehner, a former advisor to President George W. Bush,
in a
New York Times
column of March 20, 2016, criticized Donald
Trump’s current political campaign for the Republican Party
presidential nomination for its linkage of violence, passion, [and]
anger [with] love of country. Mr. Wehner commented further
(paraphrasing Madison’s warning in
THE FEDERALIST No. 10
)
that, ”[t]he founders knowing history and human nature took great
care to devise a system that would prevent demagogues and those
with authoritarian tendencies from rising up in America. That
system has been extraordinarily successful. We have never before
faced the prospect of a political strongman becoming president.
Until now
.”
Tom Hyland is a retired local, state and federal lobbyist residing
in Centreville, Virginia.
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