Don’t take it personally, my husband says. But it’s hard not to. The spread of unreasoning hatred (Is there another kind? Reasoned hatred?) has frightened me. Mass killings with army-grade weapons, the singling out of Muslims for exclusion from our country, the murder of people because of their gender or sexual preferences.
Take it to the extreme — and Donald Trump has been doing just that. Imagine a country with only walls and no bridges, a bigot’s dream. Phillip Roth imagined something like that in his 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America.” In it, Roth takes a big “what if” and explores its implications, in particular for a Jewish family — one rather like his own — in New Jersey just before the start of World War II. What if, he asks, Charles Lindbergh, the American aviator and hero had won the election for U.S. president in 1940 instead of Franklin Roosevelt? Lindbergh was an isolationist right-winger who sympathized with Hitler. History would have taken a very different turn. In the novel, Roth’s President Lindbergh makes a non-aggression pact with the Nazis and begins a program of “integrating” Jews into American society by resettling them away from their neighborhoods. Deportation, concentration camps, anyone?
The “what ifs” of the Donald Trump phenomenon have resonated — quite personally — in my imagination. What if the United States had not opened its doors to so many of the refugees from Europe during World War II? One answer is that if my family had not been able to come here from Hungary, we would have likely perished in the Holocaust. So I have a reason to take this new isolationist, America-first attitude both seriously and personally.
The world is certainly different now from what it was in 1939 when my family arrived in New York City. In many ways today’s world is more complicated because it’s more interconnected. Global commerce and the advent of the Internet makes all people, if not brothers and sisters, then at least each other’s customers and employees, not to mention potential Facebook “friends” and irritants. Both information and disinformation travel at Twitter speed. The 24-hour news cycle keeps images and rumors of all kinds in our faces. Rational thinking is hard to sustain under this barrage. No wonder a man with simple soundbites is able to garner a following. The Nazis called it the Big Lie: Keep repeating the same thing over and over and people will believe it. Or in Trump’s case, keep ’em guessing with different answers, different lies on different days.
Last week’s paper told me that for a long time Trump used the services of Roy Cohn, the lawyer and right-hand man of Joseph McCarthy, whose style and tactics Trump’s strongly resemble — bluster, repetition, insults, slander. No matter how wrong you are, never apologize, never explain, just keep yelling.
I do not know anyone who is supporting Trump. Maybe that just speaks for the narrowness of my acquaintance. Maybe it says something about the region we live in. But I have read and listened to interviews with people who do support him, and I can hear the anger that spurs them on. Times are tough for many people and it is hard to love our do-nothing politicians (local representatives excepted), and Bernie Sanders is certainly right that our election process is in need of serious reform, along with other public processes and systems. So maybe something good will come of all of this disruption.
My hope is that the anger that has held Trump’s campaign together so far can be redirected, transformed somehow. What if it were?
Marietta Pritchard can be reached at mpritchard@comcast.net.