‘The Joke Turns Fearful Earnest’

It is strange to imagine that you know a country. I assumed I knew this one, until 2016. Then we had an election, out of which emerged a victorious Donald J. Trump. Of course he has antecedents in our history, for example P.T. Barnum, the showman who is said to have accounted for his success with the dictum “There’s a sucker born every minute.” He toured fake primordial giants, recumbent figures carved in stone, modeled on a slightly earlier fraudulent giant, and throngs paid to be astonished. A certain susceptibility to flimflam and a corresponding tendency to monetize bogus wonders have been part of our folklore, noted by Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain. Nonsense has its charms, within limits that should be implied and enforced by the grave and beautiful obligation we all share, to sustain a democracy, to reenact it and recreate it as an electorate.

Melville’s Confidence-Man might have given us some insight into this strain in our culture, but we can’t imagine any of those precursor flimflam men wearying law and custom and reason almost to the breaking point. Subversive as they might be to the best we once thought of ourselves, we can hardly imagine any one of them, in a modern incarnation, thinking out loud about possible uses for nuclear weapons. A crowd might believe we could “tax” other countries for trillions without considering that they could also “tax” us, but when the patter turns to threatening cheapskate Europe with Russian invasion, this is the point at which the joke turns fearful earnest, and very real consequences may be dreaded. It had begun to seem as though the apotheosis of the trickster would be the very bitter conclusion to our life as a democracy, and the end of our having any better role in the world than inciting chaos and accelerating decline.

But just as I had begun to fear that this bizarre figure might truly have mesmerized a large enough plurality to have turned us away from democracy, something splendid happened, itself a great vindication of democracy. The awareness of another possibility dawned on an unenchanted plurality, and there arose a comforting and reassuring celebration of aspirations that had begun to seem almost forgotten. I am speaking here of the Democratic National Convention, of course. If it happens that a political event should strike a chord that resonates with our noblest hopes, this must be acknowledged and appreciated, not least because it might have the power to make this plurality an actual majority. America is, in fact, a wonderful civilization. Its best qualities, historically speaking—openness, optimism, mutual respect—enable freedom, and can show us the way to a better future.

Many resist applying grandiloquent language to countries because it sounds like nationalism. But we Americans must not forbid ourselves a true sense of the consequences that will follow for the world and for every future generation if we let our might empower resentment, belligerence, and stupidity. We must not let ourselves be persuaded of the failure and incompetence of our institutions so that we give over our government to intrusive and manipulative technologies. Our voters bear a weighty burden, face a great test. Fear and resentment cloud thinking even when they are justified. When they are played on by a fraud, a trickster, they can bring only disgrace on those drawn in by the malign charade. What a sad end that would be for a great and noble experiment.