As today is Halloween, I’d like to discuss a monster. When we say the word, what is the central meaning? It must carry the real or implied trait(s) of predation, cruelty and/or victimization; when we are talking not about the way something looks, but the way it relates to the world, we cannot properly use the term unless there is something destructive of elemental decency in the monster. The behavioral identifier is in peculiarly vile behavior; it is a monster not because of what it looks like, but because of a cruel, predatory, vicious or hateful predilection.
Political culture, in highly civilized societies where civil discourse has come to be seen as integral to the maintenance of self-governance, typically encourages tact and niceties. And when one’s political adversary promotes something demonstrably monstrous, one must tiptoe around the matter and never insinuate that one’s opponent is “a monster.”
The candidate of the Democratic Party has not called her political adversary a monster. She has not done so because it is a violation of her standard of what politics must sustain.
About eleven years ago, I recall my astonishment when my girlfriend (now wife) told me that in Korea Genghis Kahn is viewed as a hero. I told her that outside East Asia he is certainly viewed by historians as a villain. He instructed his armies to not discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, and his men killed countless thousands, perhaps millions, of noncombatant civilians, including small children. None of this was accidental, and it was not collateral, as are the results of dropping a bomb on a city where there are or may be children present; Kahn’s demonic agents (“soldiers”) were expressly instructed to kill everything, and there is even a history that tells of the killing of the pets too; everything that moved in a city of nearly a million people was cut to pieces. And this was not a single act, but repeated at many places during the expansion of the Mongol Horde across central Asia in the early thirteenth century. Kahn’s freakish vindictiveness is not considered acceptable by modern standards, and even in the Middle Ages, Kahn’s actions were viewed as Satanic.
What is a modern monster? If a political candidate proposed to do exactly what Genghis Kahn did – target and kill blameless and completely innocent children – could that candidate be appositely described as a monster?
In a telephone-call-in interview on Fox News in 2015, the 2016 Republican candidate for president of the United States said, in referencing how to deal with terrorists, “You have to take out their families.”
“Take out” is an idiomatic American expression. It can be used to mean eliminate, as in the elimination of a contestant in a game; it can mean lead in a social engagement of some sort, as in “I take out only one girl at a time.” And it means, in discussions about how to deal with wanton terrorists, unambiguously, kill. Several years ago, the American president assigned Seal Team Six the task of taking out the arch-terrorist Bin Laden. There is no gray area: in discussions of terrorists and their apprehension and treatment, “take out” does not suggest anything other than killing.
What kind of person even verbalizes the idea of killing children who are not themselves radicalized or involved in militant or extremist activities and are completely unarmed, but are merely related to, or residing where, a terrorist is believed to have lived? Surely such a creature is not anything that could or should ever assume the mantle of a major political party, and should never be chosen by them as their nominee for president of the United States! This not only must never be a president, our self-respect would preclude it ever becoming a major party nominee.
That has actually happened. In 2016, a monster has been selected by a major political party as their candidate for the presidency of the United States.
That candidate will lose the election, now only eight days away (November 8, 2016). But his electoral defeat will not remove the embarrassment from the United States of America. Sociologists, psychologists, political scientists and historians will spend much time over the next several decades trying to analyze and explain what happened in 2016. But none of their analyses will be able to avoid the charge that monstrousness in a candidate obviously did not disqualify the candidate. Hence, what we had always taken for granted in a potential candidate for president – that he or she was at least a respectable human, not a monster – must be reevaluated. Is there anything that is, or should, abide in the character of a credible candidate? And if we do not have the elemental scruple to nominate candidates that are non-monsters, is there anything base and reprobate that is left to be rejected as unworthy?
The Republican candidate said to the reporters of the press in early 2016 that he could go out onto the street and murder somebody with a gun and “not lose a single vote.” He said this in praise of himself. And he exaggerated, of course. But what his statement revealed was that his words and actions had come to mean little to the people who supported him. They adored what he represented: fearlessness in speech and writing, quasi-manly abrasiveness and hostility in discourse, willingness to upset standards and expectations of every sort – even the expectation that the children were never to be targeted.
But what the Republican revealed in that statement, and what was surely apparent to the discerning mind, was that his followers had begun to respond not to reason, but to the pull of vindictive and vindicating emotion. People liked the idea of the rejection of caution, intellectual circumspection, diplomacy, civility, and the restraint that inheres in integrity. Many of his followers were resentful of the advances made by minorities in recent decades, though some of these advances were modest, and some merely symbolic (like the election of an African-American president). Some of his followers were frightened and irked by frequent news stories about the atrocities of Islamic terrorists, and the idea of focusing on foreigners or immigrants or people of darker complexion became less and less problematical for them. All they needed was for conservative and extremely conservative and radically right radio and TV voices to vilify immigrants of every sort, and they bought continually and more deeply in.
The Americans who supported the monster had excepted themselves from American democracy. They would go to the polls to vote down the rights and dignity and fair treatment of millions of people, all in the quest to putatively, in the ludicrousness of sloganeering, “make America great again.”
When did the monstrous candidate think America had been “great”? A reporter asked him this question in 2015, and he replied that he thought America was at its most magnificent in the early years of the twentieth century, about the time Theodore Roosevelt was president, and about the time that the United Sates was having terrible fits trying to complete the massive construction project that was the Panama Canal.
Most historians conceive American history differently. Historians usually view the arrival of the United States as the most powerful and influential country in the world – in measurable and global terms – as arriving during World War One. The devastation of European economies in the Great War meant that the United States was definitely the most powerful and influential country in the world. (And it has remained this way for the past century.)
1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was president, was a time when women could not vote in national elections, and millions of African-Americans were systematically kept from enfranchisement by virulently racist policies in no less than a dozen American states. So, the Republican candidate’s estimation of American greatness antedated the age of female and nonwhite involvement in American political discourses; what was great was not having to listen to or respect any of “them”.
The Republican candidate has offered political solutions that are indistinguishable from monstrousness. He has nonetheless maintained the support of tens of millions of American voters. And it seems now that there is a consciousness gap: a large percentage of Americans either do not know what the integrants or a veritable civilization are, or they don’t care, and this fact separates them from the other 50%-60% of the electorate that do. But to not know or not care? The sane and democratic and peaceful maintenance of the republic while such large numbers seem nescient in matters of decency and civilizational coherence will be exceedingly difficult. Americans have begun vilifying one-another, never fully realizing that we’re dividing, and that the maxim “divide and conquer” does not expire, and the terrorists definitely gain when we talk not to each other, but past each other.
From the monstrousness of 2016, we will have to travel a long and tortuous road back to anything resembling decency.