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.
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