Trump is a Parody of Toughness and Caricature of a Leader

In today’s Akron Beacon Journal we find two commentaries worth reading, and particularly valuable if read together.

The first is a powerful analysis of the importance of understanding why we value free speech and individual liberty.  The second might be the most intelligent analysis of Trumpism I have read this year—and there has been a lot of remarkable analysis written on this topic—focusing on Trumps inability to defend his own positions because he relies on the misleading sound-bite versions of conservative positions—caricatures and parodies—that too often dominate the arguments of the uniformed to frame his own positions.

Taken together, these allow us to see both what it looks like when elites win the struggle over scope and salience to frame our national conversation around utterly trivial formulations of the most important conflicts we face today…and we see both the deeper principles at stake (democracy, legitimacy, freedom) and how seeing these deeper levels we better understand Trumpism, leadership, political communication, and the skills we need to ‘learn to hone our voices in defense of our values.’

The Akron Beacon Journal reprinted this commentary from the LA Times today.

LOS ANGELES: Teaching a freshman seminar on freedom of speech on college campuses has made us aware of the urgent need to educate the current generation of students about the importance of the First Amendment. From the beginning of our course, we were surprised by the often unanimous willingness of our students to support efforts to restrict and punish a wide range of expression.

Not a single student in the class saw any constitutional problem with requiring professors to give so-called trigger warnings before teaching potentially disturbing material.

Surveys across the country confirm that our students are not unique. According to the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale, 72 percent of students support disciplinary action against “any student or faculty member on campus who uses language that is considered racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise offensive.” Too few students grasp that one person’s offense can be another’s expression of truth to power.

Young people’s support for freedom of speech has waned in part because of their admirable desire to create an educational environment where all can thrive. Our students or their friends have experienced the psychological harms of hateful speech or bullying more than they have experienced the social harms of censorship or the punishment of dissent.

Simply telling students to toughen up isn’t persuasive. Moreover, they were born long after the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War protests that gave their elders direct experience with the need for free expression. It is their education that’s lacking.

History demonstrates that when we give officials broad powers to restrict or punish speech considered hateful, offensive or demeaning, that power is inevitably abused. Unpopular speakers are victimized, and legitimate opinion silenced. Over the course of U.S. history, officials censored or punished those whose speech they disliked: abolitionists, labor activists, religious minorities, communists and socialists, cultural critics, gays and lesbians, demonstrators and protesters of all stripes.

The students were surprised to learn that people went to prison for speech criticizing the draft during World War I, or for teaching or espousing communism during the 1920s and 1930s and in the McCarthy era. The effect of the First Amendment’s strong protections for “dangerous” and “offensive” speech allowed oppressed and marginalized groups to challenge indecency laws, segregation, patriarchy and declarations of war.

Another key lesson was that censoring intolerant or offensive speech can be all but impossible to manage without threatening legitimate debate. There are those who will take offense at anti-Zionist speech and at pro-Zionist speech, at the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter and the demands of racial equality, at advocacy for LGBT rights and for religious beliefs that run counter to those rights.

Our students came to realize that there was no way to create a “safe space” on campuses where students could be free from one set of offenses without engaging in massive censorship, and perhaps creating another kind of offense.

Of course, freedom of speech is not absolute. Incitement of illegal activity, defamation, true threats and harassment are not protected by the First Amendment. Learning what kinds of expression can be constitutionally punished gives students a realistic sense of how speech can be regulated on public university campuses.

For speech that students find offensive but that does not fall within these categories, they must also consider one of the most hard-won lessons of free speech law: Often the best remedy for hateful speech is more speech, not enforced silence.

By challenging and contesting offensive speech students learn to hone their voices in defense of their values, an important skill in a diverse democratic society. By contrast, punishing expression often achieves little except to create martyrs.

[NOTE:  The skills and techniques referred to here are the skills of democratic citizenship…the skills we all need to ‘learn to hone our voices in defense of our values.’  This insight is mobilized when we insist on moderate Muslims standing up against extremists in their camp, but we too often fail to hold ourselves to this same standard. 

Today, doing that means we need to stand up to Trump, we need to engage in the conflicts rather than sitting on the sidelines as the all-knowing Monday-morning quarterbacks.  And we need to understand…to enact, using the skills we are learning here…that the only remedy for hateful speech that is consistent with our values ‘is more speech, not enforced silence.’ 

We need to stand up and challenge elites like Trump who want us to think about conflicts in ways that make productive problem solving less likely…and we cannot do this successfully until we master the skills we are learning in this class, skills referred to here and skills reframed as our core democratic values in the First Amendment.]

At the beginning of the semester we took a vote in the class: Who would agree that the University of Oklahoma was right to expel students who had led a racist chant in a bus on the way to a fraternity event? All hands were raised. By semester’s end, many, but not all, had changed their minds, and those who still supported the university did so with a much more sophisticated understanding of the balance of issues.

Rather than mock students or ignore their concerns, we need to make sure they understand the context of the Constitution’s free speech guarantees. At stake is not merely the climate on our campuses, but the longevity of the great social benefits associated with the rise of modern free speech traditions.

Gillman is chancellor and professor of law, political science and history at the University of California at Irvine. Chemerinsky is founding dean and a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law. They wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.

The Akron Beacon Journal reprinted this commentary from the Washington Post today.

WASHINGTON: This campaign season has offered an unexpected form of reality television entertainment: Watching the light of discovery and calculation in Donald Trump’s eyes when he is presented with difficult policy issues, apparently for the very first time.

Abortion is the current case in point. In the late 1990s, Trump supported the legality of partial-birth abortion. For a few hours on Wednesday, he endorsed criminal sanctions against women who have abortions.

On this issue, Trump has been to the left of Harry Reid (who voted for a partial-birth abortion ban) and to the right of Mike Huckabee (who has consistently rejected punishment for women who have had abortions). And Trump is utterly incapable of defending either position. He shows no capacity for ethical reasoning — balancing claims about the moral and legal value of nascent life against claims about autonomy and choice.

If that seems harsh, let’s go to the transcript of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews trying to corner Trump on criminalization. Asked if this is the logical consequence of pro-life views (it isn’t), Trump doesn’t advance an argument about religion, morality and the role of law (other than to call attention to Matthews’ Catholicism).

At the outset, Trump observes that “people in certain parts of the Republican Party and conservative Republicans would say, ‘Yes, they should be punished.’ ” Trump eventually embraces what he thinks a social conservative would say.

In fact, this is not the pro-life position. It is the left’s stereotype of the pro-life position.

[NOTE:  This is a form of dissipating public energies by redirecting our attentions toward more trivial conflicts, in this case by focusing us on more trivial ways of framing important conflicts…framed to make reasoned problem solving even harder.]

“No pro-lifer would ever want to punish a woman who has chosen abortion,” responded Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life. “This is against the very nature of what we are about. We invite a woman who has gone down this route to consider paths to healing, not punishment.”

Trump ended up hurting the pro-life cause by reviving a stereotype of harshness. And it is part of a pattern.

[NOTE:  Trump’s move here (and on other illustrations below) increases citizen confusion about this conflict, which hurts those on the side of the conflict Trump says he wants to help AND contributes to weakening overall legitimacy of our governing system by increasing citizen confusing and frustration.]

In the immigration debate, the restrictionist side makes some serious arguments for prioritizing control of the border and for an immigration system that puts greater emphasis on skills. I generally don’t find such arguments compelling, but they are worth debating.

Trump has not, however, made this case in any serious or systematic way. Instead, he has embraced an anti-immigrant caricature. Illegal immigrants, he says, are disproportionately “criminals” and “rapists.” The Mexican government is purposely sending criminals across the border.

When two Trump supporters beat up a homeless Hispanic man in Boston, Trump called them “passionate.” He retweeted that Jeb Bush “has to like the Mexican illegals because of his wife.”

When Trump eventually loses — as he certainly will in the primaries, at the convention or the general election — the movement to restrict immigration will be left as a stereotype of exclusion and bigotry.

Trump has had a similar, malignant influence on debates concerning the war against terrorism. There is no doubt that America and Europe face a heightened threat from returning Islamic State fighters, and from homegrown terrorists inspired by the Islamic State. Additional measures will be required — in the Middle East and at home — to pre-empt these threats.

But Trump has chosen to inhabit a cruel and counterproductive parody of toughness. He calls for banning all Muslim immigrants. He would conduct the war against terrorism with war crimes, such as killing the families of terrorists. He calls Syrian refugees fleeing violence the “ultimate Trojan horse.” He entertains the possibility of using nuclear weapons against the Islamic State — which would, of course, also kill everyone the Islamic State oppresses.

This stereotype of strength actively undermines the war against terrorism by alienating Muslim allies and cultivating mistrust in Muslim communities.

[NOTE:  By framing immigration conflicts around the type of caricature we hear in bar room arguments and terrorism conflicts around a parody of toughness, Trump fails as a leader to frame these questions in ways that maximize our capacity as citizens to understand and weigh in. 

Instead, he frames each in a way that reduces one side (the side he says he wants to help) to a caricature of bigotry and leadership to a parody of toughness…in both cases making it harder to find common ground on how to productively address either immigration or terrorism…and, at the same time, damaging our understand of, and faith in, the importance of individual liberty, freedom of speech, leadership, and democratic deliberation.] 

For many of Trump’s supporters, this extreme and unpredictable use of language is part of the appeal. He doesn’t employ the careful words of a politician. He is so appealingly unprepared. So refreshingly ignorant. So disarmingly half-baked.

[NOTE: We all love to criticize politicians when they quibble about what the meaning of ‘is’ is, (and our frustration is not unfounded) but at the same time the solution is not to completely abandon any effort to speak carefully, thoughtfully, seriously.]

But the durability of Trump’s appeal creates a conundrum for many Republicans. For decades, some of us have argued that the liberal stereotype of Republicans as extreme, dim and intolerant is inaccurate and unfair. But here is a candidate for president who fully embodies the liberal stereotype of Republicans — who thinks this is the way a conservative should sound —- and has found support from a committed plurality of the party.

[NOTE: Trumpism creates a ‘conundrum’ for all Americans, certainly more immediately for Republican Americans.  Trump is not the way traditional conservative American leaders sound, but some conservatives have for too long exploited (with an assist from Fox News) precisely this approach to framing conflicts, leadership and politics…so, we need to insist on the moderates with that party, with the support of moderates across the spectrum, to stand up to this caricature and parody of American democracy, to both model the skills they have ‘learned to hone their voices in defense of their values’ and to do so as the best remedy for Trumpism.]

If the worst enemies of conservatism were to construct a Frankenstein figure that represents the worst elements of right-wing politics, Donald Trump would be it. But it is Republicans who are giving him life. And the damage is already deep.

Gerson is a Washington Post Writers Group columnist. He can be reached atmichaelgerson@washpost.com.

If you find this type of analysis valuable, you might want to read JS Mill’s On Liberty, since that text is the most famous and powerful defense of freedom in terms directly relevant to this conversation.