Editor’s note: This commentary is by Tom Fels, an independent curator and writer, and author, most recently, of “Buying the Farm: Peace and war on a sixties commune,” (UMass Press, 2012). He lives in North Bennington.
[I]n the recent pitched battle for the Republican nomination for president, the latest turn of events, the potential coronation of candidate Donald Trump, has highlighted one of the serious problems of American public life. It’s not income inequality. It’s not immigration. It’s not race. It’s not American exceptionalism. It’s the matter of telling the truth.
As Trump’s future allies, formerly his competitors, begin to realign themselves and bring their rhetoric into compliance with their new situation, a strange manner of rearguard explanation has come to the fore. In speaking of Trump’s many egregious screeds and precipitous off-the-cuff remarks on the subjects above – the dangers posed by immigrants, foreign manufacturers, milquetoast liberals, women, and other candidates themselves – to which they had previously vociferously objected, they have simply taken to saying that he didn’t mean it.
What? Didn’t mean the core of what he was offering to the nation’s voters? Didn’t mean to state the values on which he is running and on which he is judged? Didn’t mean to malign the entire populations he has offended?
The excuse they give is, “He had to do it.” “There are certain things you have to say to get elected;” then, they say, you change them.
Really?
Of course, some flexibility has to be allowed in approaching the country’s some 250 million voters; in such cases unanimity may be impossible to achieve, and differing ways of expressing a message may be necessary. But the assumption is that there is a message, a set of views, and that candidates and others in public life will express them in order to make themselves clear.
A party which depends on a group whose interests it regularly betrays needs to find a way to keep it in line. The most expedient is often obfuscation, in some cases simply lying.
Not to do this has been a growing trend since the Reagan years. A party which depends on a group whose interests it regularly betrays needs to find a way to keep it in line. The most expedient is often obfuscation, in some cases simply lying. Hence rebels become “freedom fighters,” soldiers become “advisers,” guns are supplied under the rubric “humanitarian goods,” drugs and war become intertwined, and efforts aimed at gutting education are given names like “No Child Left Behind.”
America does have a history of this. What were once liquor stores are now “package” stores; what used to be a weakness for drugs or alcohol is now “substance” abuse. The War Department is now the Department of Defense, and the party that appeals most to the wealthy and has absorbed much of the racist South is fond of calling itself “the party of Lincoln.”
One might well ask: What’s in the package? Abuse of what? Defense of Iraq? Afghanistan? Libya? Granada? And Lincoln – let’s not go there.
In light of the campaign successes of Bernie Sanders and of Trump himself, and on the other side a long parade of perp walks by powerful politicians and leaders in business, perhaps the lesson will become more clear: It’s OK to tell the truth. We need to know. More importantly we need to be able to count on the integrity of those in public life. It’s bad enough that the language can betray us; we count on individuals, especially those who represent us, to eschew that possibility as best they can.
