A vicious culture war is all Trump has left
Opinion by
Columnist
July 5, 2020 at 3:32 p.m. CDT
“Dear
Michael,” wrote British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1957 to the head of
his Conservative Party’s research department, “I am always hearing about the
Middle Classes. What is it they really want? Can you put it down on a sheet of
notepaper and I will see whether we can give it to them.”
Macmillan’s
puckish letter to Michael Fraser, the party official, is cited in
Alistair Horne’s fine biography of the moderate Tory leader who figured out an
answer good enough to sweep to victory two years later. Macmillan, in any
event, had something important going for him: In the Britain of the late 1950s,
he could plausibly declare that
“most of our people have never had it so good.”
That is
not a claim President Trump can make in a summer of pandemic and widespread
unemployment. And so Trump has decided that what he can give to white
middle-class voters whose support he desperately needs to win back is — a
culture war.
Trump’s
vile speeches at Mount Rushmore on
Friday and at the White House on the Fourth of July signal
that he sees one and only one possible path to victory: He will tear an already
riven nation to pieces.
He will
use the classic methods of racist politicians to tie a resurgent movement for
racial equality to “a wave of violent crime” and efforts to “destroy” our “very
civilization.” It is all, he says, part of a “left-wing cultural revolution . . . designed to overthrow
the American Revolution.”
The man
who has been selling right-wing nationalism dares to say his opponents advocate
“a new far-left fascism.” The politician who has defended Confederate monuments
scrambles for cover behind Abraham Lincoln and quotations from Martin Luther
King Jr.
If he
can’t deliver good times, Trump will deliver statues in great abundance.
Thus
his executive order on
Friday proposing a “National Garden of American Heroes” where statues will
serve as “silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal.” Trump plainly
likes his teachers to remain silent.
Trump’s
spiteful and hostile moves on a weekend when we celebrate the equal rights of
all to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are alarming. But they are
also a sign of weakness. They suggest his own lack of faith in his predictions
that our economy will take off like “a rocket ship.”
He
rushed out to the White House press room to celebrate Thursday’s report that
the economy had regained
4.8 million jobs and crowed: “Next
year is going to be an incredible year for jobs, for companies, for growth.”
Except
that the unemployment rate is still 11.1 percent, a resurgence of covid-19
infections could wipe out June’s gains, and Trump has effectively given up on
anything remotely like a coherent approach to reining in the virus.
You
might have thought that Trump would at least make a run at economic issues
before going nuclear on “violent mayhem” and “extreme indoctrination.” After
all, a Pew Research Center poll released
last week showing Trump trailing former vice president Joe Biden by
44 percent to 54 percent nonetheless gave the president a three-point
advantage on making “good decisions about economic policy.” It was a residue of
the days before the pandemic when unemployment stood at 3.5 percent.
But
perhaps what we might call Macmillan’s Law — the idea that middle-ground swing
voters look for tangible, concrete benefits from government — still applies.
And
perhaps Trump is even more petrified by Biden than he lets on. At his
less-than-boffo Tulsa rally last month, Trump cast Biden as
a “helpless puppet of the radical left.” Cue in the derisive laughter about an
absurd charge against a 77-year-old political warhorse regularly censured by
the left for getting along too well with Republicans.
As for
deliverables to the electorate, Biden has it all over Trump. The former vice
president’s website is
chockablock with popular and specific proposals on matters ranging from access
to health care and higher education to infrastructure, climate change and
higher wages.
What is
Trump offering? When Fox News’s Sean Hannity recently asked Trump what he
wanted to do in a second term, the president offered 138-words
of rambling emptiness adding up to nothing. Lacking even a few ideas scribbled
on a “sheet of notepaper,” he can only conjure terrorizing national nightmares.
It’s
true that Trump’s Independence weekend escapades mean we face months of being
led by someone so desperate to avoid defeat that he will warp our history,
shatter what little unity we have left, and leave it to others to clear the
wreckage. But there is hope here, too: Trump is acting like a frightened man
who realizes that if his opponents keep their heads and avoid rising to his
bait, his days are numbered.