Where Did My Republican Party Go?

I grew up a Republican. My parents were dyed- in- the- wool Republicans. They voted for Dewey over Truman. My Mother wrote the campaign song ("Get Out And Fight for Ike)" for Dwight Eisenhower in his 1952 Election.

Over time I have probably voted for as many Republican as Democratic Senators and Governors from my State of Ohio. I voted with enthusiasm for George H.W, Bush in his two Presidential campaigns and his son, George W. Bush in 2000.

George H.W. Bush, especially, was and will forever remain a personal hero of mine. I admired most of his policies. I admired how he worked with Gorbachev to help the peaceful transition of the Soviet Union.

 However, above all I admired President Bush's courage, his fundamental decency, his character, and his care for his fellow man.

These are the qualities we seek in all our leaders, above all the President of the United States.

Sadly, worryingly, we do not find them in President Trump.

When will, I ask, responsible Republicans return to the principles that marked the Republicans I respected?  When will they stop standing aside to let the meanness and cruelty and lying and rumor mongering of Donal Trump go unchallenged? When will they again insist that their candidates, especially for the Presidency, embody the highest values of our nation. starting with integrity and respecting the dignity of everyone.

Hearken to these words of then President Eisenhower: "The Republican Party must be known as a progressive organization or it is sunk. I believe that so emphatically that I think far from appeasing or reasoning with the dyed-in-the-wool reactionary fringe, we should completely ignore it and when necessary repudiate it."

The Power of Engaging With History

 

The power of engaging with history does note rest merely in the knowing and remembering of it; though, in any society, remembering is vital.

 

Nor is the power solely in the learning and applying of history’s lessons today; though, in the face of any injustice or challenge, doing so is imperative.

 

No, I believe perhaps the most powerful impact of engaging with history is also the most personal:  that to engage with history, is to know you are not alone.

 

The great American writer James Baldwin said this better than I or just about anyone else could:

 

“You think your pains and your heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.  It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.”

 

Baldwin was writing, in part, about the strength he drew from history when confronting the racism and anti-gay discrimination he faced in mid-20^th century America.

 

But in his eloquent description of personal inspiration, he captures the deep, profound, and universal impact that history can have on the individual standing up for change or facing a major challenge.  It has had that impact on me.  

When facing a challenge or addressing an opportunity like Procter & Gamble's entering a new country, I inevitably came back to recognize I was standing on the shoulders of giants, famous and unknown, who had taken on these challenges and opportunities before me.

 

This is one of the reasons I suppose that I’ve had  pictures of  my two most esteemed previous CEO's--William Cooper Procter and John Smale--on the wall of my office for years. When facing a tough decision, I have asked myself-- what would they have done.  In other words, what action will be in accord with the Purpose and Values of this great Company of ours?

  

"I Never Thought of Myself That Way Until You Said It"

 

This was the mind-opening perspective offered by the pastor of my church several years ago.   

 

He offered it to recognize the impact we have on others by what we say.  Innocently, I am sure, a parishioner was recalling being characterized by someone as "poor.”   To which he replied, "I did really not feel poor until I had been characterized that way.”  

This reminded me of the power of affirming the positive qualities of another person, reinforcing their positive attributes and, on the down side, the negative impact of characterizing them in a way which creates a dark shadow.

 

It takes me back over 60 years to my math teacher in high school.  Knowing I was #1 in his class, I was dumbstruck when he came to me and said I needed to work harder.  I replied, “But I’m already #1 in your class.”  

 

“I know,” he said.  “But you can do better, a lot better.  You’re better than you think you are.”  

 

This is just one example of many other comments from people who made me think about myself differently.  There was the time, for example, when my two-up boss casually said to me, “Someday, we may all be working for you, John.”  I had only been at P&G for about a year at the time.  I could hardly believe what he said.  Some days I was wondering whether I was even going to make it.  

 

But more than a half-century later, I still remember that comment, reminding me that a kind affirming word makes all the difference in the world.

 

 

 

The Pursuit of Truth

 

One of the handful of mandates which I have tried to keep front and center in my mind—and in my actions—is the pursuit of truth.

 

When asked what I most took away from my education at Yale, it was the respect for the pursuit of truth.  When asked what I discovered at Procter & Gamble which most surprised me in the beginning and which was most foundational to my decision to stay with P&G for a career, I cite my recognition of the ever-present commitment to pursue truth no matter where it led and no matter how inconvenient the finding.

 

Little would I have imagined that now in my 80^th year I would have felt the concept of truth being so challenged or feel so compelled to reignite my commitment to taking the time to dig deep enough to try to find it.

 

Undoubtedly, the presidency of Donald Trump has driven much of this animus.  My appreciation of the challenge we face has also been deepened by my re-reading George Orwell’s novel 1984.  Now,  a few weeks after doing that, I have been further motivated by reading the “biography” of 1984, called The Ministry of Truth, written by Dorian Lynskey, This book describes Orwell’s life experience which led to his authoring 1984 shortly before his death in 1949.  It also illuminates the many writers whom Orwell had come to know who influenced his thinking.  Still, with all those influences, there is no doubting the originality of Orwell’s work.

 

The most influential chapter of Orwell's experience came from his participation in the Spanish Civil War.  He went to Spain to support Communists who formed part of the coalition fighting Franco’s Nationalist, Nazi-supported opposition.  His experience in Spain was sobering and disillusioning.  He came to see the cynicism, cruelty and dishonesty of the Communists.  He left this experience feeling there was really no difference between the debilitating totalitarian control of Communism and Nazism.

 

It is mind-opening, though probably not surprising, to see how 1984 has been viewed differently depending on the bias of the beholder.  Liberals viewed it as an indictment of Russia, which it surely was in part.  The right viewed it as an indictment of the liberal left, including the Labor Party in the UK.  The ambiguity in 1984 was part of Orwell’s design, but there was one constant overarching caution in his message, that being the recognition of the challenge we face in pursuing truth.  And how different forms of fanaticism and totalitarianism, enabled more than ever today by technology, can challenge the very existence of the possibility of truth.

 

Orwell’s pronouncement on the importance of the moral value of truth is registered again and again.  Without a consensus reality, Orwell argued, “there can be no argument; the necessary minimum of agreement cannot be reached.”  As Lynskey writes, Orwell was clear-eyed enough to know that one can’t always get to the objective truth but if one doesn’t at least accept that such a thing exists, then all bets are off.

 

 

The dangers of group think are also highlighted again and again.  As Franz Borkenau, an Austrian writer, scribed:  “Civilization is bound to perish not simply by the existence of certain restrictions on the expression or thought...but by the wholesale submission of thinking to orders from a party’s center.”

 

Orwell worried about fanaticism of any type.  In 1940, he wrote, “The future, at any rate the immediate future, is not with the ‘sensible’ men.  The future is with the fanatics.”  How right he was—and still is.

 

Orwell draws the “connection between personal happiness and readiness to believe the incredible.”  It is this “frame of mind” that has induced whole nations to fling themselves into the arms of a Savior.”

 

In 1984, Orwell describes a picture “in the earliest 20^th century” that could well describe today.

 

In an essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” written seven years before 1984, Orwell understood better what he had seen unfolding in Spain:  “For the first time I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship was implied by an ordinary lie. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various ‘party lines.’”

 

This was new, he thought.  Totalitarian regimes were aligned on such a grand scale that Orwell felt that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  Orwell continued, “If the leader says of such and such an event, ‘it never happened’—well it never happened.  If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five.  This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.”  Orwell wrote. And well it should.  

 

Here is the moral and intellectual foundation of 1984.

 

Orwell’s generation experienced the consequences of Big Lies so absurd that they could only be sustained by the extreme control of totalitarianism, the kind depicted in 1984.  As Lynskey points out, and I agree, 21^st century authoritarians don’t need to go that far.  “They don’t require belief in a full-blown ideology, and thus they don’t require violence of terror police,” writes the historian Ann Applebaum, in a 2018 essay for The Atlantic.   “They don’t force people to believe that black is white, war is peace, and state farms have achieved 1000% of their planned production.”  Instead, they rely on “medium-sized lies:  all of them encourage their followers to engage, at least part of the time, with an alternative reality.”

 

All this brings Lynskey, at the end of his book, to Donald Trump.  “Donald Trump is no Big Brother,” he writes.   Nor is he simply a throwback to the 1930s.  “He has the cruelty and power hunger of a dictator but not the discipline, intellect or ideology.”  Lynskey depicts a more apt comparison being Joe McCarthy, “a demagogue who displayed comparable levels of narcissism, dishonesty, resentment and crude ambition and a similarly uncanny ability to make journalists dance to his tune even as they loathed him.”

 

 Lynskey cites chilling precedents in Orwell’s 1984.  For example, referring to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s call to his supporters to “lock her up.”  Trump meets most of the criteria Orwell used to define fascism:  “Sometimes cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist and anti-liberal.”

 

Capturing our own moment I believe, Orwell contended that such men could only rise to the top when the status quo has failed to satisfy people’s need for justice, security and self-worth.

 

Social media has undoubtedly made the process of disseminating “fake news” (ironically being used to attack “real news”) far easier as it has become the primary news source for millions of Americans without meaningful editorial oversight.

 

In conclusion, Orwell feared that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.”  As Lynskey writes, perhaps Life magazine’s original review of 1984 identified the essence of Orwell’s message best:  “If men continue to believe in such facts as can be tested and to reverence the spirit of truth and seeking greater knowledge, they can never be fully enslaved.”

 

That outcome can never be taken for granted—not today, not ever. 

 

 

                                                  

Give President Trump His Due--But Don't Let Him Off the Hook For His Character

Message to Democrats (and Republicans and Independents, too) – Don’t fall into the error of not giving President Trump his due.

Face it:  The economy is strong.  Stronger than it’s been in a long time.  Sure, part of that strength flows over from the Obama administration.  Sure, presidents take credit for a strong economy more than they are entitled to.  They always have.  Sure, we still have rampant inequality.

However, the de-regulation steps taken by the Trump administration (albeit some of them flawed) and the tax cut (albeit leading to a massive increase in debt and disproportionately skewed to higher incomes) have played a role in the economic recovery—and it is an undeniable fact that the rate of joblessness is at a long-term low and average hourly wages have finally started to edge up.

Also, let’s give credit to the tough steps the Trump administration is taking to claw back some of China’s illegitimate trade practices, practices that have been going on for a long time.  To be clear, I worry we’re risking categorizing China as an existential geo-political threat when, in fact, it’s an economic competitor.  But the card on China’s illegitimate trade practices had to be called by someone and the Trump administration is doing it.  

There are other policies which the Trump administration has pursued which I vigorously opposed:  for example, on immigration (where we need wise bi-partisan legislation) and on the treatment of our closest allies.  

Giving Trump his due where it is justified is not only intellectually correct, it is politically smart.   If people assert that everything he does is bad, nothing would be credible and the spotlight on what I believe matters most—his deeply flawed character—will be diminished.

I won’t belabor here the characteristics of Trump’s character which utterly disqualify him for a position of leadership in any organization with which I’ve been associated.  I will only cite his utter and repeated disregard for the truth, his disrespect for and denigration of others and, for these reasons, his inability to unite the people of our nation around the values on which we were formed.

A final word of caution.  While presidential candidates cannot and should not fail to zero in on Trump’s flawed character, they must be able to also authentically present themselves and a set of economic and social policies which offer the promise of helping to bridge the poisoned atmosphere which separates the country today.

"Don't Let it Happen. It Depends on You"

The Ministry of Truth:  The Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 by Dorian Lynskey

 

I’ve separately written an essay based importantly on this book, summarizing its fundamental message of the need for each of us to stand watch over truth.  I wanted to write further here in order to excerpt some of the most salient messages and quotations from the book and take another crack at summarizing its important message as I receive it.

 

On the fleeting nature of fame, Orwell’s concise review of literature that preceded Orwell’s book in both the late 19^th and 20^thcenturies vividly documents the fleeting nature of fame.  He reviews book after book, popular at the time, that have faded in memory.  None more significant than Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 2000—1887.  Published in 1888, it became the most widely read novel in the United States since Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the most imitated since Jane Eyre.  The book reframed the turbulence of Bellamy’s time as the painful but necessary precursor to a peaceful, socialist utopia.  “Bellamy is the Moses of today,” wrote one commentator.  President Roosevelt read and discussed Bellamy.  The Atlantic Monthly named Looking Backward the second most important book of the past 50 years.  The president of the Book of the Month Club described 1984 as “Bellamy looking backward in reverse.” 

 

*****

 

As a self-critic in the months leading up to the publication of 1984, Orwell talked down the novel, calling it “a beastly book, an awful book really, a good idea ruined.”

 

As one commentator offered on Orwell’s life:  “Nobody considered (him) a failure except for the voice in his head, without which perhaps he wouldn’t have achieved what he did.” 

 Isn’t that true of all of us to one degree or another.  I think so.

 

*****

 

Orwell writing on Gandhi.  Orwell admired Gandhi’s courage and intellectual honesty but recoiled from his abstinence and religiosity.  Who would want to be a saint?  “The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals.”

 

Thankfully, while I have encountered disappointments with people, it has been by far the exception.

 

*****

 

It’s helpful to recognize that, at a time of the kind of troubles which we have now, including Brexit, we have been there before and we overcame them.  It’s striking to read that, contrary to what I would have expected, the jubilation in Britain following the end of World War II was “short lived.”  Rationing, acute housing shortages and the sudden cessation of lend-lease money from the U.S. fostered a widespread sense of anti-climax and gloom.  One study showed that only one in seven Londoners was “happy or elated by the year’s end; 40% were worried or depressed.”

 

Already for some, including Orwell, the challenge of a divided world loomed large in the mid-1940's.  In a prescient newspaper column called “You and the Atom Bomb,” Orwell suggested that this weapon might lock the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (which had not even developed its own bomb yet) into a long and paranoid stalemate.  He pictured a state of “permanent Cold War.”

 

*****

 Orwell's Animal Farm, Lynskey writes, is a scrupulous allegory of Russian history from the Revolution to the Teheran Conference.  Each animal represents an individual:  Napoleon is Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky, Mr. Frederick is Hitler and so on.  The book can be read as a thematic prequel to 1984.  First the revolution betrayed (Animal Farm), then tyranny triumphant (1984).  The commandments of the revolution are reduced to one famous oxymoron:  “All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.”

 

*****

 

Blackballing socialism.  The word socialism is being used today by Trump and other Republicans to instantly denigrate the views of several Democratic candidates.  Interestingly, no one did the blackballing better than Winston Churchill in 1945 as he sought to retain his premiership versus Clement Attlee in the Labor Party.  “There can be no doubt that socialism isn’t separately interwoven with totalitarianism and the abject worship of the state,” Churchill railed.  “No socialist government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could allow a free, sharp or violently worded expression of public discontent.  They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.”

 

Could you imagine anyone saying that today?  Hyperbolic expression is not something we’ve invented today!

 

*****

 

On the need to feverishly hold on to reality.  Hannah Irendt said it succinctly in 1951:  “The stubbornness of reality is relative.  Reality needs us to protect it.”

 

One of the challenges in holding on to reality, more present today than ever, is the ever-present nature of social media.  Here is an uncannily prescient excerpt from 1984:  “The people are not going to revolt.  They will not look up from their screens long enough to notice what’s really happening.”  

 

It gets harder and harder to really know what’s happening when there is such an abundance of exaggerated statements and outright lying before us.  It is truly Orwellian, Lynskey writes, that the phrase “fake news,” created by Orwell, has been turned on its head by Trump to describe real news that is not to his liking, while flagrant lies become “alternative news.”  

 

*****

 

In conclusion, Lynskey observed that the 70^th anniversary of 1984 falls at a dark time for liberal democracy.  Yet, he writes, “There is hope to be taken from the reality that millions of people in the ‘reality-based community’ push back against the ‘medium-sized lie’ to reaffirm that facts do matter, to fight for the preservation of honesty and integrity, and to insist that two and two really do make four.” 

 

For folks like me, 1984, and this biography of it by Lenskey, have a lot to offer.  As Orwell wrote in his preface to Animal Farm, liberal values “are not indestructible and they have to be kept alive by conscious effort.”

 

1984 was Orwell’s final, essential contribution to that collective effort.  In this statement he dictated from bed during his final months, he emphasized the fundamental reason why he wrote it:  not to bind our wills but to strengthen them.  “The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one.  Don’t let it happen.  It depends on you.”

 

 

 

Chilling Perspective on Today--George Orwell's "1984"

Almost 70 years after he wrote it in 1950, I finally got around to reading George Orwell’s acclaimed 1984.  I’ve read about how the story mirrors what we have seen happen in totalitarian regimes throughout history, including today, enabled as it is by enhanced forms of technology and social media.  

 

The story presents the specter of a totalitarian state being able to control the recording of history and individual thought and, from this, gain control. 

 

It introduces the concept of double-think, described as the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them.”  It equates to truth becoming what you choose to make it.

 

All past oligarchies have fallen from power, Orwell writes, “either because they ossified or because they grew soft.  Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, they were overthrown or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force and, once again, were overthrown.  If one is to rule, and continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality, for the secret of ruler-ship is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the power to learn from past mistakes.”

 

“The mutability of the past is the central tenet” of the state.  Why?  For one thing, it is vital that everyone be cut off from the past so there is no risk of comparing current-day conditions to those that have come before.

 

Orwell describes a world made up of three opposing regions, one seemingly liberal (but not really), another called Neo-Bolshevism (clearly mirroring Orwell’s disaffection which grew over time for Communism) and a region comprised mainly of China, which Orwell describes as best “rendered as Obliteration of the Self.”  In their essence, they are the same.

 

It’s eerie to recognize that today, through technology, everyone is being watched in a way that Orwell in 1950 previewed.  It’s also eerie to see from all reports that China is doing with the Muslims exactly what the state was doing in this book:  indoctrinating people to the point where they no longer feel under pressure but rather willingly accept the tenets of the state.

 

There are other elements of the book which eerily pre-date what has happened in history.  It describes each state through a combination of “fighting, bargaining and well-timed strokes of treachery, acquiring a ring of bases completely encircling one or another of the rival states.”   Doesn’t that sound like what Russia feels may feel with the expansion of NATO to its borders?  Or as we see China doing now in Asia and Africa, not through military war but through expanding economic influence.

 

Orwell describes a long-standing tendency to build up the military, using the threat of war as a way to generate patriotism.  “The search for new weapons continues unceasingly and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet.”  That, happily, does not describe fully the far broader focus on innovation today.  But the search for new weapons certainly continues, citing the threat of an other country as the rationale. 

 

It was in this book that the catch-phrase “Big Brother is watching you” was spawned.  Technology has certainly enabled that reality today in a way not possible 70 years ago.  

 

The end of the book offers no hope.  Winston, the protagonist, eventually succumbs to the indoctrination of the Party, under excruciating torture, to finally say, without a hint of dissemblance, that he loves Big Brother.  The book carries a stark warning.  We must resist like the plague anything that prevents individual thought and that denies the foundational importance of the search for the truth and the recognition that there is indeed a truth.  

 

The book reminds us that, throughout history, there have been totalitarian rulers (though few would have described themselves as such) who felt it vital that there be uniformity of thought among its people and were prepared to wreak great harm on those that didn’t fall in line.  It further reminds us that there are human instincts, above all the search for security and belongingness, that can lead a people to accept this control.  To a degree that I would not want to suggest is equivalent to what is described in 1984, that is going on in China today.

 

At the same time, I take hope and heart from the giant protests occurring in Hong Kong as I write this to thwart the government from changing its policy to prevent extradition to Mainland China for trial.  I also take heart from the brave protests also underway in Sudan to remove military rule.  People are dying as I write this. 

 The flame of freedom lives on, as challenged as it is, thanks to heroic individual effort.