Check out John Wilsey’s essay at The American Conservative comparing Donald Trump’s politics with the political thought of Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.
Here is a taste:
Still, if Tocqueville was right about manners and their significance to American democratic institutions—and full disclosure, I believe that he is—then we are surely living in interesting times. The phenomenon of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump becomes an interesting case study in Tocqueville’s writings about manners. It is hard to be neutral about Trump. Ezra Klein recently expressed what many worried Republicans are thinking—namely, Trump is fun, but are we really prepared to have him represent the United States to the world? And what attracts voters to Trump? Seventy-eight percent of Republican primary voters in South Carolina liked him because he “tells it like it is.”
And how does he do that? He insults. He uses profanity. He bombasts. If you’re really interested, check out this catalogue of Trump insults on the 2016 presidential campaign trail. (Spare yourself. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.) This kind of behavior reveals what he thinks about human dignity. Forget about his pro-choice stances, if you can. Forget about his racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant policy positions, if you must. Just note what comes out of his mouth.
Trump’s statements shock many. I hear a lot of my evangelical Christian friends express their befuddlement, asking things like “Who is supporting him?” and “I don’t know anyone who backs him.” Clearly, a lot of people are. And instead of being shocked by Trump and his buffoonery, we should be shocked at ourselves.
After all, Trump is not an anomaly. He is a reflection of American culture. He is the image of the coarseness and incivility in American culture that has grown more and more pronounced until today, when it is acceptable for a major presidential candidate to refer to one of his opponents as a p***y. He ought to have his mouth washed out with soap. (That was my grandmother’s form of waterboarding.)
When we see Trump, we see ourselves. Trump is a credible candidate today, and he would not have been credible in the past. Trump has always been a boor, but American manners have not always been boorish enough for Trump to find a place in public discourse. Now they are. We have no one to blame but ourselves, we who have become narcissistic, uncivil, civically lazy, obdurate, gullible, uncouth, easily offended, and in the prophet Jeremiah’s words, we are so implacable, we do “not know how to blush.”
Read the entire essay here.
