History holds that the shortest American political
speech on record belongs to John ‘Long John’ Wentworth when he was running for
Mayor of Chicago in the 1860s.
When a large crowd gathered outside his office,
demanding that he come out and address them a scowling Wentworth was reported
to have said:
“You damn fools, you can either vote for me, or you
can go to hell.”
US President Donald Trump does not have Wentworth’s
gift of brevity, but he is essentially saying the same thing.
While most successful politicians attempt to hold
out an olive branch to their opponents and talk about “governing for everyone”
in their election night speeches, Trump has broken that mould.
Those who demonstrate against his policies are
dismissed as “rabble” and “rent-a-crowd”. The Democrats in Congress are “sad”
news outlets that criticise him are inevitably “failing”, even members of his
own Republican Party who speak out against him “could not even win an election
for dog-catcher”.
Yet time and again, the president has returned to
the heartland of his support with rallies in the mid-west and south of the
country where the jibes and insults to his opponents always raise a cheer. It
is as if the election campaign is still in progress — and in a way it still is.
Almost every action since the inauguration, from the
Mexican wall to the rolling back of climate change initiatives, has been aimed
at shoring up his political base — and when there are things he cannot do
without the support of law-makers in Congress, most notably the axing of his
predecessor’s Affordable Healthcare Act,
he lashes out in one of now infamous Twitter tirades.
Trump’s aim, of course, is to beat the waverers into
submission, but some are refusing to lie down. They include Arizona Senator and
former presidential candidate John McCain, who had is doubts about the
president from the beginning and is now increasingly the focus for mounting
opposition to him within the Republican Party.
In a recent speech accepting an award for his
decades of public service, McCain defended American idealism and condemned
“half-baked, spurious nationalism” that was dividing Americans.
He castigated those who would “abandon the ideals we
have advanced around the globe” and “refuse the obligations of international
leadership”, who would rather “find scapegoats than solve problems”.
“We
live in a land made of ideals, not ‘blood and soil’ (a reference to the Nazi
slogan chanted at recent right-wing rallies which Trump has been hesitant in
condemning). We are the custodians of those ideals at home and abroad.
“We have done great good
in the world, but we will not thrive in a world where our leadership and ideals
are absent. We would not deserve to”.
The saddest thing about
the tenor of McCain’s speech is that it seems to be almost an anachronism in
the current climate.
Governments change and
policies will be framed which take the country in a different direction than
had been the case previously — that is simply part of democracy, and those who
disagree know the time will come when their opposition will be heard.
But what we are
experiencing today is getting perilously close to gang warfare — a battle for
survival with barrages of hate-filled tweets aimed at getting just enough votes
to hang on to power while those who disagree can, in John Wentworth’s words,
“go to hell”.
If the US continues down
this course it is in danger of experiencing greater divisions within its
society than at any time since the Civil War — and that is not a situation the
nation, or indeed the world, can contemplate lightly.
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