Turning Our Backs on Hate and Cruelty

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  Turning our back on hate and cruelty.

   

  Sunday night’s hours long Trump rally in Madison Square Garden really should be described as a “rally of hate.”  Hate for immigrants, hate for Democrats, hate for everyone not beholden to Trump’s message. 

   

  I have felt for a long time that, in the end, the majority of the American public will turn its back on Trump’s hate and cruelty.  I turned this morning to the close of one of my favorite books of all time, Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America:  The Battle for our Better Angels.  In the conclusion, tagged by Meacham as “keep history in mind,” he takes us back to Joe McCarthy and words that Richard Rovere wrote in 1959, five years after McCarthy’s fall.  He was reflecting on the meaning of McCarthy:  “I cannot easily conceive of circumstances in which McCarthy, either faulted as he was or freed of his displayed disabling weaknesses, could have become President of the United States or could have seized the reins of power on any terms.  To visualize him in the White House, one has I think to imagine a radical change in the national character and will and taste.”  There was, though, no guarantee against such a radical  change, ,Rovere observed. “But if I am right in thinking we had been, by and large lucky “there is no assurance that our luck will hold.” 

  
  

  
  

  And it didn’t.

   

  Meacham writes that the past and the present tell us that demagogues can only thrive when a substantial portion of the people want them to.

  
  

  
  

  In the American commonwealth, James Bryce warned of the dangers of a renegade president.  Quoting Meacham, “Bryce’s view is not that the individual himself, from the White House, could overthrow the Constitution.  Disaster would come, Bryce believed, at the hands of a demagogic president with an enthusiastic public base.  “A bold president who knew himself to be supported by a majority in the country might be tempted to override the law, and the private minority of the population which the law affords,” Bryce wrote.  “He might be a tyrant, not against the masses, but with the masses.” 

  
  

  
  

  Again, Meacham:  “The cheery news is that hope is not lost.

  
  

  
  

  “ The people have often made mistakes,” Harry Truman said, “but given time and the facts, they will make the correction.”

   

  I hope and I believe now is the time when  the people have had enough of the facts that they will make the correction by rejecting the hate and venom embodied in this man, Donald J. Trump. 

   

  I embrace the paragraph with which Meacham concludes this great book:  “For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight.  There is in fact no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however, besieged, are always ready for battle.”

   

  As Kamala Harris is saying in her closing words to the American people:  “We will go forward; we will not turn back; we will win.”

  
  

  
  

  May we make it so.