Trump,
A Symptom Of What?
A Radical
Message From a Half-Century Ago
By Ira Chernus
April 17,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Tom
Dispatch"-
You could
hear the deep sadness in the preacher’s voice as
he named “the greatest purveyor of violence in
the world today -- my own government." With
those words, the Reverend Martin Luther King,
Jr., launched a
scathing indictment
of America’s war in
Vietnam. It was April 4, 1967.
That first antiwar sermon of his seemed to
signal a new high tide of opposition to a brutal
set of American policies in Southeast Asia. Just
11 days later, unexpectedly large crowds would
come out in
New York and
San Francisco
for the first truly
massive antiwar rallies. Back then, a protest of
at least a quarter of a million seemed yuge.
King
signaled another turning point when he concluded
his speech by bringing up “something even more
disturbing” -- something that would deeply
disturb the developing antiwar movement as well.
“The war in Vietnam,” he said, “is but a symptom
of a far deeper malady within the American
spirit.”
Many of
those who gathered at antiwar rallies days later
were already beginning to suspect the same
thing. Even if they could actually force their
government to end its war in Vietnam, they would
be healing only a symptom of a far more profound
illness. With that realization came a shift in
consciousness, the clearest sign of which could
be found in the sizeable contingent of
countercultural hippies who began joining those
protests. While antiwar radicals were
challenging the unjust political and military
policies of their government, the
counterculturists were focused on something
bigger: trying to revolutionize the whole fabric
of American society.
Why
recall this history exactly 50 years later, in
the age of Donald Trump? Curiously enough, King
offered at least a partial answer to that
question in his 1967 warning about the deeper
malady. “If we ignore this sobering reality,” he
said, “we will find ourselves... marching... and
attending rallies without end.” The
alternative? “We as a nation must undergo a
radical revolution of values.”
Like
many of my generation, I feel as if, in lieu of
that radical revolution, I have indeed been
marching and attending rallies for the last
half-century, even if there were also long
fallow periods of inactivity. (In those quiet
times, of course, there was always organizing
and activism going on behind the scenes,
preparing for the next wave of marches and
demonstrations in response to the next set of
obvious outrages.)
If the arc of history bends toward justice, as
King claimed,
it’s been a strange journey, a bizarre twisting
and turning as if we were all on some crazed
roller-coaster ride.
The
Trump era already seems like the most bizarre
twist of all, leaving us little choice but to
march and rally at a quickening pace for years
to come. A radical revolution in values?
Unless you’re thinking of Trump’s plutocrats and
environment wreckers, not so much. If anything,
the nation once again finds itself facing an
exaggerated symptom of a far deeper malady.
Perhaps one day, like the antiwar protestors of
1967, anti-Trump protestors will say: If the
American system we live under can create this
atrocity, there must be something wrong with the
whole thing.
But
that’s the future. At present, the resistance
movement, though as unexpectedly large as the
movement of 1967, is still focused mainly on
symptoms, the expanding list of inhumane 1%
policies the Republicans (themselves in chaos)
are preparing to foist on the nation. Yet to
come up are the crucial questions: What’s wrong
with our system? How could it produce a
President Trump, a Republican hegemony, and the
society-wrecking policies that go with them
both? What would a radically new direction mean
and how would we head there?
In
1967, antiwar activists were groping their way
toward answers to similar questions. At least we
have one advantage. We can look back at their
answers and use them to help make sense of our
own situation. As it happens, theirs are still
depressingly relevant because the systemic
malady that produced the Vietnam War is a close
cousin to the one that has now given us
President Trump.
Diagnosing
Our Deep Sickness
The Sixties spawned many analyses of the ills of
the American system. The ones that marked that
era as revolutionary concluded that the heart of
the problem was a distinctive mode of
consciousness -- a way of seeing, experiencing,
interpreting, and being in the world. Political
and cultural radicals converged, as
historian Todd Gitlin
concluded, in their demand for a transformation
of “national if not global (or cosmic)
consciousness.”
Nor was
such a system uniquely American, they
discovered. It was nothing less than the
hallmark of Western modernity.
In
exploring the nature of that “far deeper
malady,” Martin Luther King, for instance,
turned to the European philosopher Martin Buber,
who found the root of that consciousness in
modernity’s “I-It” attitude. From early
childhood, he suggested, we learn to see other
people as mere objects (“its”) with no inherent
relation to us. In the process, we easily lose
sight of their full humanity. That, in turn,
allows us free rein to manipulate others (or as
in Vietnam simply destroy them) for our own
imagined benefit.
King particularly
decried such
dehumanization as it played itself out in
American racism: “Segregation substitutes an
‘I-it’ relationship for the ‘I-thou’
relationship and ends up relegating persons to
the status of things.” But he
condemned it no
less strongly in the economic sphere, where it
affected people of all races. “The profit
motive, when it is the sole basis of an economic
system,” he said, “encourages a cutthroat
competition and selfish ambition that inspire
men to be more I-centered than thou-centered...
Capitalism fails to realize that life is
social.”
Another influential thinker of that era was a
German-American philosopher,
Herbert Marcuse.
(Some radicals even marched in rallies carrying
signs reading “Marx, Mao, Marcuse.”) For him,
the dehumanization of modernity was
rooted in the
way science and technology led us to view nature
as a mere collection of “things” having no
inherent relation to us -- things to be
analyzed, controlled, and if necessary destroyed
for our own benefit.
Capitalists use technology, he explained, to
build machines that take charge both of the
workers who run them and of aspects of the
natural world. The capitalists then treat those
workers as so many things, not people. And the
same hierarchy -- boss up here, bossed down
there -- shows up at every level of society from
the nuclear family to the international family
of nations (with its nuclear arsenals). In a
society riddled with structures of domination,
it was no accident that the U.S. was pouring so
much lethal effort into devastating Vietnam.
As
Marcuse saw it, however, the worst trick those
bosses play on us is to manipulate our
consciousness, to seduce us into thinking that
the whole system makes sense and is for our own
good. When those machines are cranking out
products that make workers’ lives more
comfortable, most of them are willing to embrace
and perpetuate a system that treats them as
dominated objects.
Marcuse would not have been surprised to see so
many workers voting for Donald Trump, a
candidate who built his campaign on promises of
ever more intensified domination -- of
marginalized people at home, of “bad
hombres”
needing to be destroyed abroad, and of course,
of nature itself, especially in the form of
fossil fuels
on a planet where the very processes he
championed ensured a future of utter
devastation.
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One
explanation for the electoral success of Trump
was the way he appealed to heartland white
working-class voters who saw their standard of
living and sense of social status steadily
eroding. Living in a world in which hierarchy
and domination are taken for granted, it’s
hardly surprising that many of them took it for
granted as well that the only choice available
was either to be a dominator or to be dominated.
Vote for me, the billionaire businessman (famed
for the phrase “You’re fired!”) implicitly
promised and you, too, will be one of the
dominators. Vote against me and you’re doomed to
remain among the dominated. Like so many other
tricks of the system, this one defied reality
but worked anyway.
Many Trump voters who bought into the system
will find themselves facing even harsher
domination by the 1%. And as the Trumpian
fantasy of man dominating nature triggers
inevitable twenty-first-century
blowback on a
planetary scale, count on growing environmental
and social disasters to bring disproportionate
pain to those already suffering most under the
present system. In every arena, as Marcuse
explained back in the 1960s, the system of
hierarchy and domination remains
self-perpetuating and self-escalating.
“The Long
and Bitter But Beautiful Struggle for a New
World”
What’s
the remedy for this malady, now as lethally
obvious at home as it once was in Vietnam?
“The
end of domination [is] the only truly
revolutionary exigency,” Marcuse wrote. True
freedom, he thought, means freeing humanity from
the hierarchical system that locks us into the
daily struggle to earn a living by selling our
labor. Freedom means liberating our
consciousness to search for our own goals and
being able to pursue them freely. In Martin
Luther King’s words, freedom is “the opportunity
to fulfill my total capacity untrammeled by any
artificial barrier.”
How to
put an end not only to America’s war in Vietnam,
but to a whole culture built on domination?
King’s answer on that April 4th was deceptively
simple: “Love is somehow the key that unlocks
the door... The first hope in our inventory must
be the hope that love is going to have the last
word.”
The simplicity in that statement was deceptive
because love is itself such a
complicated word. King
often explained
that the Greeks had three words for love:
eros (aesthetic or romantic love),
philia (friendship), and agape
(self-sacrificing devotion to others). He left
no doubt that he considered agape far
superior to the other two.
The
emerging counterculture of those years certainly
agreed with him on the centrality of love to
human liberation. After all, it was
“the love generation.” But its mantra -- “If it
feels good, do it” -- made King’s rejection of
eros in the name of self-negating
agape a non-starter for them.
King,
however, offered another view of love, which was
far more congenial to the counterculture. Love
unites whatever is separated, he preached. This
is the kind of love that God uses in his work.
We, in turn, are always called upon to imitate
God and so to transform our society into what
King called a “beloved community.”
Though few people at the time made the
connection, King’s Christian understanding of
love was strikingly similar to Marcuse’s secular
view of erotic love.
Marcuse saw eros as the fulfillment of
desire. He also saw it as anything but selfish,
since it flows from what Freud called the id,
which always wants to abolish ego boundaries and
recover that sense of oneness with everything we
all had as infants.
When we
experience anyone or anything erotically, we
feel that we are inherently interconnected,
“tied together in a single garment of destiny,”
as King so eloquently put it. When boundaries
and separation dissolve, there can be no
question of hierarchy or domination.
Every
moment that hints at such unification brings us
pleasure. In a revolutionary society that
eschews structures of domination for the ideal
of unification, all policies are geared toward
creating more moments of unity and pleasure.
Think
of this as the deep-thought revolution of the
Sixties: radically transformed minds would
create a radically transformed society.
Revolutionaries of that time were, in fact,
trying to wage the very utopian struggle that
King summoned all Americans to in his April 4th
speech, “the long and bitter but beautiful
struggle for a new world.”
50 Years
Later: The Thread That Binds
At this
very moment 50 years ago, a movement resisting a
brutal war of domination in a distant land was
giving birth to a movement calling for the
creation of a new consciousness to heal our
ailing society. Will the resistance movement of
2017 head in a similar direction?
At
first glance, it seems unlikely. After all, ever
since the Vietnam War ended, progressives have
had a tendency to focus on single issues of
injustice or laundry lists of problems. They
have rarely imagined the American system as
anything more than a collection of wrong-headed
policies and wrong-hearted politicians. In
addition, after years of resisting the right
wing as it won victory after victory, and of
watching the Democrats morph into a neoliberal
crew and then into a failing party with its own
dreary laundry lists of issues and
personalities, the capacity to hope for
fundamental change may have gone the way of
Herbert Marcuse and Martin Luther King.
Still,
for those looking hard, a thread of hope exists.
Today’s marches, rallies, and town halls are
packed with veterans of the Sixties who can
remember, if we try, what it felt like to
believe we were fighting not only to stop a war
but to start a revolution in consciousness. No
question about it, we made plenty of mistakes
back then. Now, with so much more experience
(however grim) in our memory banks, perhaps we
might develop more flexible strategies and a
certain faith in taking a more patient,
long-term approach to organizing for change.
Don’t forget as well that, whatever our failings
and the failings of other past movements, we
also have a deep foundation of victories (along
with defeats) to build on. No, there was no
full-scale revolution in our society -- no
surprise there. But in so many facets of our
world, advances happened nonetheless. Think of
how, in those 50 years just past, views on
diversity, social equality, the environment,
healthcare, and so many other issues, which once
existed only on the fringes of our world, have
become thoroughly
mainstream. Taken
as a whole, they represent a partial but still
profound and significant set of changes in
American consciousness.
Of
course, the Sixties not only can’t be
resurrected, but shouldn’t be. (After all, it
should never be forgotten that what they led to
wasn’t a dreamed of new society but the “Reagan
revolution,” as the arc of justice took the
first of its many grim twists and turns.) At
best, the Sixties critique of the system would
have to be updated to include many new
developments.
Even the methods of those Sixties radicals would
need major revisions, given that our world,
especially of communication, now relies so
heavily on blindingly fast changes in
technology. But every time we log onto the
Internet and browse the web, it should remind us
that -- shades of the past -- across this
embattled Earth of ours, we’re all tied together
in a single worldwide web of relations and of
destiny. It’s either going to be one for all
and all for one, or it’s going to be none for
7.4 billion on
a planet heading for hell.
Today
is different, too, because our movement was not
born out of protest against an odious policy,
but against an odious mindset embodied in a
deplorable person who nonetheless managed to
take the Oval Office. He’s so obviously a
symptom of something larger and deeper that
perhaps the protesters of this generation will
grasp more quickly than the radicals of the
Vietnam era that America’s underlying disease is
a destructive mode of consciousness (and not
just a bad combover).
The move from resisting individual policies to
transforming American consciousness may already
have begun in small ways. After all, “love
trumps hate” has become the most common slogan
of the progressive movement. And the word
love is being heard in hard-edged political
discourse, not only on
the left, but
among mainstream political voices like
Van Jones and
Cory Booker.
Once again, there is even talk of “revolutionary
love.”
Of course, the specific policies of the
Republicans and this president (including his
developing
war policies)
must be resisted and the bleeding of the
immediate moment staunched. Yet the urgent
question of the late 1960s remains: What can be
done when there are so many fronts on which to
struggle and the entire system demands constant
vigilant attention? In the age of a president
who regularly sucks all the air out of the room,
how do we even talk about all of this without
being overwhelmed?
In many
ways, the current wave of regressive change and
increasing chaos in Washington should be treated
as a caricature of the system that we all have
been living under for so long. Turn to that
broader dimension and the quest for a new
consciousness may prove the thread that, though
hardly noticed, already ties together the many
facets of the developing resistance movement.
The
largest mobilization for progressive politics
since the Vietnam era offers a unique
opportunity to go beyond simply treating
symptoms and start offering cures for the
underlying illness. If this opportunity is
missed, versions of the same symptoms are likely
to recur, while unpredictable new ones will
undoubtedly emerge for the next 50 years, and as
Martin Luther King predicted, we will go on
marching without end. Surely we deserve a better
future and a better fate.
Ira
Chernus, a
TomDispatch regular,
is professor emeritus of Religious Studies at
the University of Colorado Boulder and author of
the online MythicAmerica:
Essays.
Follow
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Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Ira Chernus
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
