Why are Trump’s speeches full of doom and gloom?
Dahlia Lithwick (bio here), a lawyer and journalist, wrote in Slate (read article here), “Experts on authoritarianism have been warning for years that fostering hopelessness, powerlessness, and political depression is a deliberate tactic of most totalitarian leaders.
One of those experts is Prof. Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat of New York University (profile here). She says fanning despondency “is a tool authoritarians deploy” to acquire power and advance their agendas.
She knows what she’s talking about. She studies their methods. A historian, she wrote a book on the subject. Amazon’s blurb states, “Ruth Ben-Ghiat is the expert on the ‘strongman’ playbook employed by authoritarian demagogues.”
Lithwick says, “Widespread public despair is a strategy. It is a hallmark of authoritarianism to foment broad and enduring mistrust in institutions so that people will come to crave the certainty and determinacy of the strongman. Sowing hopelessness and fear is the fastest way to corrode trust.”
She also makes this interesting observation: “… despair and hopelessness are effective political tactics not just because they build a malleable and suggestible electorate but also because they change our actual brains.” I’ll refrain from commenting about MAGA followers here; you don’t need my help with that.
The rest of Lithwick’s Slate article talks about the hope and enthusiasm that Kamala Harris’s campaign has ignited. It’s reminiscent of Obama’s “Hope and Change” slogan. Now, this is my own observation, but have you noticed the conveyance for uplifting feelings of hope for change among certain large elements of the electorate are black candidates?
Maybe that’s not an accident or coincidence. Until Obama came along, the White House had always been occupied by (mostly) old white men. In earlier days, it was relatively young and energetic candidates like Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy who got people fired up, and do you notice they made it to the White House? But afterwards, old white men took over again, and the public sank back into a semi-permanent funk.
Something is changing in America. Trump just might be the last of the old breed. In 1956, writer Edwin O’Connor wrote a novel called “The Last Hurrah” that became a bestseller and was made into a movie. It’s about an aging politician and “a dying brand of politics.” Wikipedia says (here), “Developments in American public life … have so changed the face of city politics that Skeffington no longer can survive in the new age with younger voters.”
That was a different era and generation of voters, but it almost sounds like it could be a metaphor for what’s unfolding before our eyes now, couldn’t it? The 2024 election is beginning to look like it might be the last hurrah for Trump and old angry white men.
Related story and photo below: Harris’s Atlanta rally had a rock concert vibe (see story here)
