The Atlantic's Tom Nichols beat me to it. As I was sitting in hell's waiting room at a hospital's radiology department a couple days ago, on my phone I tapped out a few lines for a later post. I wrote:
When the founders, chiefly Washington and Madison, warned of demagogues capturing the mass minds of weak-willed, ill-informed, "unrepublican" voters, thus annihilating the hopeful prospect of America's experimental representative democracy (or republic, if you insist), they could not have imagined the extraordinarily wretched extremes of a Donald Trump. For no politician of that era was as lurid, as ignorant, as aggressively demagogic as the malicious buffoon we suffer today.
That was as far as I got before being summoned to the CT room. I was going to fill out the piece that night and post it, but physically, mentally I was too down. I postponed instead. In hindsight, my delay was probably a good thing, since I was unaware of Nichols having written on the very same topic for The Atlantic's November issue; if I had posted my piece that night, someone likely would have accused me of plagiarism.
Here's the key paragraph from Nichols' "The Moment of Truth: The reelection of Donald Trump would mark the end of George Washington’s vision for the presidency—and the United States."
"Donald Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the 'spirit of revenge' that Washington lamented as the animating force of party politics. Washington feared that, amid constant political warfare, some citizens would come to 'seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,' and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment."
A supremely magnificent yet now largely unread memoir (I'd rank it among my top 10) is The Education of Henry Adams, great-grandson of one president, grandson of another and secretary to Lincoln's ambassador to Great Britain, father Charles Francis Adams. How quaint it now seems when in his autobiographical work Adams despaired of President Grant, for whom he had avid hopes for reforming the squalor of 19th-century politics.
Instantly dashed by what the author saw as a White House roundtable of cronies and hacks, Adams reminisced in 1907, "Grant’s nominations had the singular effect of making the hearer ashamed, not so much of Grant, as of himself. The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant alone was evidence enough to upset Darwin."
(Grant's presidential reputation has been vastly rehabilitated since Adams' time. He fought for black equality, appointed minorities — including vote-less women and Jews — to government positions and urged biracial social, political and economic advances under Reconstruction, doomed by his second term's end by Northern pols weary of equitable sociopolitical reforms and Southern "redeemers" eager to re-enslave their antebellum "property.")
I have detoured to Henry Adams merely to highlight the relative insignificance of his disdain for Grant — a presidential calamity worthy in his opinion of Darwin's invalidation. Contrast even his bottomless disappointment in the 18th chief executive with what he unquestionably would have characterized as an absolute impossibility to ever come about in this country: the abominable demagogic detritus in the petty personage of one Donald J. Trump.
Apart from noting Washington's dread of exploitative hucksters, Nichols also observes his broader unease over "the animating force of party politics," hardening partisanship and the cheap populism that could cultivate and nurture the lowlifes of the first chief executive's fears. I have long shared Washington's sentiments on this, and my past commentaries on the subject most likely bewildered, dismayed or even appalled some readers.
You had probably not yet landed on this site when I used to reflect on my dislike, bordering on abhorrence, of political passions — shorthand for Washington's trio. I'd wager that most readers see them as admirable elements of civic engagement. I do not.
Profound political emotionalism may come in the form of Washington's "spirit of revenge" — MAGA being a sordid object lesson — but also as a manifestation of self-affirming tribalism. What's more, deeply passionate forces of the heart-not-intellect routinely bring devout partisans to grief.
They become so wrapped up in a campaign's exhilarating rhetoric and grandiose promises they take a precipitous plunge into resentments and illogical disappointments when Mario Cuomo's poetry of campaigning becomes the prose of arduous governing — inescapably incapable of fulfilling the full bounty of stump-pledged commitments.
Think, for instance, of Barack Obama and the once-fired-up, passionate progressives who swiftly shape-shifted into ill-tempered, aggrieved partisans who simply refused to acknowledge that he as president was powerless to unilaterally secure a "public option." Or the outrage they displayed when Wall Street firms walked free after perpetrating grossly unethical yet technically legal lending practices which had kneecapped Obama's inherited economy. Why the promise-reality disconnect among those passionate progressives? They were motivated not by Reason but unthinking emotion.
And that's a political actor not to be trusted. On the national stage it's unreasoning, primordial and disruptive of governing compromises. Even more pernicious is that passions denied foster a fractious disaffection with, and a crippling lack of confidence in, representative democracy. Such unbounded emotionalism feeds on its corrosiveness, which then contaminates the wider electorate.
And that's where we are today, cursed by a political environment infested with visceral zealotry — a dark landscape enabling an aggressively demagogic buffoon like Donald Trump to descend as predator on the American political tradition.
Washington, Madison, Adams, the founders to the last man would be aghast at how easily the ingenious constitutional edifice they erected, lasting 237 years to date, could potentially collapse on itself overnight.