In this last election Donald Trump’s campaign’s symbol could well have been two, very large middle fingers directed at the institutions of America, but mostly, the institution of government. Everything government managed, he claimed,  was broken, compromised, crooked or foolish–in a word, government couldn’t do anything right anymore. And HE himself was the only institution that America could rely on to make it all better. And yes, he was an institution all by himself, and one, he constantly reminded us, that made everything he touched work. The Trump Institution–an institution of one–built buildings and golf courses around the world. The giant “T” was on buildings, steaks, water, a University, helicopters and on and on. And so, if Trump could seemingly make anything work that he devoted his considerable energies to, he could make government work too by bringing his self-professed legendary negotiating and organizing skills to bear on everything from environmental regulations, corporations that sent their jobs overseas, balky foreign countries that constantly used, abused, and cost America money. Trump was the anti-government running to take it over and make it hum like one of his businesses.

As most of us have experienced more than once in our lives, dealing with the government can be a study in frustration and inefficiency and often–perhaps most often, produces results that are far less than satisfying.  Government is the one, singular institution in nation that must balance all of the competing interests competing for attention and results. If we want to drive a car, we have to get a license and have insurance and obey speed limits, and get our exhaust emissions evaluated. If we want to bake and sell cakes, cookies and dougnuts, we have to buy a license from our local government that conforms with state and federal regulations, and be willing to sell to everybody whether or not we agree with the values of the consumer who walks through the door to buy our goods. If we want to build a house, we have to make sure that we don’t build it too close to someone else’s house; that it conforms to the latest lateral-force engineering standards and energy codes; pump our waste into the storm and sewer lines and pay fees to do so, build within a certain number of feet to the property lines, and, and, and… Government’s answer to almost every request is either a, “yes, but”, or a simple; “no, you can’t.” In other words, often, government by its very nature operates in ways that are guaranteed to frustrate.

‘Mankind are disposed to suffer evils while evils are sufferable.’ Thomas Jefferson in the opening paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. Every Government-imposed rebuke or compromise, or even worse, absolute NO to our requests are little evils to citizens who just simply want to get what they want. And, since so much of what we do is regulated by government, those little evils accumulate (“The shed you built in your back yard was done without a permit and exceeds the allowable impermeable surface area and doesn’t channel the roof water into acceptable bio-swales in order for you to keep your roof water on your property and to restore groundwater. Tear it down” or “Yes, I DID hire a laborer for one day to help me do some framing, and I did pay him cash, but I only needed him for one day and it wasn’t worth hiring someone that requires me to register with L&I, pay him on a paycheck, deduct Social Security, income taxes and Unemployment for just 6 hours! Why are you fining me for that?“)  So, Jefferson, later in the paragraph added, “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government…  This is the principle articulated by the Founding Fathers as the “right to Revolution.” After awhile, most of us, even good Liberals will have suffered a few too many “abuses and usurpations” which can cumulatively inspire a revolutionary  impulse.  And most of us fuss and fume and tell stories of our latest outrage dealing with “bureaucrats” (said best with a snarl and scowl) over our favorite beverages and then get on with our lives. And, as was intended, in a Republic, elections are designed to be ‘little revolutions’ that allow us to throw out the hated tyrants, vent our frustrations, and assuage our anger and tension. Quite literally, the architects of our system crafted a system that allowed us to leverage some control over too-intrusive government by establishing elections every few years in order to keep the frustrations from exploding into paroxysms of  violence and bloodshed. Elections are the pressure valves that keep the steam from blowing up the vessel.

One of the most common things heard by citizens around election time is, “I hate BOTH candidates! Why does it seem I always have to vote for the lesser of two evils?” I have voted in every election since 1976, and I have never voted in an election where I did not hear this. Sometimes the protests are more vociferous, others more muted. But it is a consistent and persistent refrain. Churchill is helpful here: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” And this is true. Add to this the simple fact that, as every teacher of World History knows, the study of human history is largely the study of the rise and fall of civilizations, and thus, governing systems. Mankind has been trying for a long time to get it right with very mixed results.

One of the inherent problems in designing political systems is that at best, they can be expected to keep enough people happy enough of the time to keep them from overthrowing the system. As Jeremy Bentham said:. The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.  Governments are created by men-in America’s case by men who were more realists than idealists. And they sparked and then managed that very rare Revolution in which most of the Founders and leaders of the Revolution died as old men in their own beds. But we have now come to a juncture in our own history where the inherent conflicts within democratic governance have magnified to the point that has created a crisis of confidence: An elected President who seemingly  represents a threat to the continued existence of our Republic. Such was the election of 2016.

Looking at elections as revolutions, this was a particularly nasty one. Over time, certain codes of conduct, certain parameters are established within which candidates operate that could be called norms of political conduct. Political campaigns can certainly be nasty at times, but there are still norms that are, in most cases, respected. Trump was the violator of norms: He called people names; he tore down the press; he challenged the effectiveness of our military and our intelligence services; he mocked a man with disabilities. He established himself as the 800 lb gorilla that rejected all of the normal rules of political discourse that had developed over time which, in his mind, had created and sustained a system that was broken to its core. Whatever his true motivations were are topics for another time. But what is important is that he came into the system as a master at understanding primal human emotions and knowing how to play on those to win support for himself and whatever agenda he was interested in advancing. And he presented himself as the one willing to tear the whole place down.

Donald Trump is a master demagogue: “A person, especially an orator or political leader, who gains power and popularity by arousing the emotions, passions and prejudices of the people.”  Demagogues can only fish in troubled waters–they cannot stir people up who are generally satisfied with their lives. They understand at a visceral level where people are hurting; what their frustrations are; and they know how to play on them, amplify them, stoke them in order to build a constituency grounded in emotion in order to gain their unquestioning support.  And Trump’s demagogy was focused on people who were sick of institutions, professions, establishments–anything and anyone who had served within the system that was, in their own estimation, not working for them anymore. Demagogues do not come to their task as surgeons; they come wielding blunt instruments designed to tear down and then create a new reality based on their own vision of what they believe will work better. And it is the tone of their candidacy that is at least as important as, if not more important than what they are saying.  “Little Marco, Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary.”  Trump railed against the Republican and Democratic parties; he lambasted large corporations that sent their jobs overseas; skewered Hillary for giving speeches to Goldman-Sachs; raged against the mainstream media as the purveyors of lies and distortion; threatened to appoint a special prosecutor and put Hillary in jail. Everything he did was designed to tear down, destroy and degrade, and, as a result, build a loyal constituency that could believe and trust only him. Mainstream journalism and Political Party Establishments were absolutely certain that he could not win, which further served his purposes by proving that the journalistic and political “establishments“, like all other hated institutions were wrong, misguided and corrupt, serving their own needs rather than the interests of “the people” whom Trump was running to champion and represent.

But it is important also to recognize that the outrage that fueled Trump’s rise was aided by corollary trends that were, in their own way, signs of the crumbling of public support for government. The Red State rage, expressed by the less educated , so unceremoniously stripped of their good-paying jobs by cheap foreign labor, who were sinking in alarming numbers into opioid addiction, was perhaps the most monolithic bloc that supported Trump, but there were also White Nationalists who resented the “browning” of our country; the out and out racists that despise Black and Brown people despite, or because of their level of achievement or success; Biblical Fundamentalists, outraged that people of the same sex were demanding marriage in defiance of the Biblically sanctioned, sacred institution of marriage between “one man and one woman.” These were the pro-Trump voters. But he was also elected by center-left people who simply stayed home. The ones whose apathy or certainty about Trump’s loss simply made them not interested enough to go out and cast a vote. And in addition to this were the ones who accepted the false equivalency that both major party candidates were equally corrupt so they would vote their conscience and pull the lever for a third-party candidate. When enough people get complacent, or are caustically cynical about the choices, or simply don’t care enough about the system under which they live to participate in, an enraged, engaged and motivated minority can take over and determine who will lead us. And that is how Trump happened.

So, where are we now? This is an ugly time. But it is not the ugliest time in our history. It is well to remember every 4th of July that it is wrong to say that we have been the United States of America since winning the Revolutionary war and signing the Treaty of Paris in 1781. From 1861-1865 we were the United States of America and the Confederate States of America. Eleven states were so outraged at the perceived Northern assault on Southern institutions, values and traditions that they left the Union. That was a time of overt and undiluted racism, when one section of the nation claimed that one of its fundamental, bedrock principles was the belief that Black human beings were of a lower class destined by God and the Bible to be the slaves of superior White people. “Our new government [The Confederate States of America] is founded upon exactly the opposite idea [that slavery is unjust]; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Confederate States of America Vice President Alexander Stephens.

We are now a nation wracked by division, separated into rival factions, but we are still, one nation. We tore apart in 1861 in a conflict so foreordained (The Civil War) that a far-sighted and long-lived betting man could comfortably have wagered a life’s fortune that it would occur and would have been paid handsomely for his wager. Faustian Bargains do not make for stable contracts. No matter how intelligent and far-sighted people can be at times, they are also capable of  staggering blindness and hypocrisy. It is pretty clear to see, in retrospect, that creating a nation dedicated to the principle of universal human freedom with slavery woven into its very fabric would not play out well. Some bargains guarantee terrible outcomes. And there is a thread that is unbroken all the way from the first ship that came into Jamestown with a load of Black slaves in the early 17th century, through the Civil War and up to today’s divisions. The real and ultimately defining war over the status of skin color, that cost 640,000 lives stretched from 1861-1865, and the results, though long ignored, were codified into law, though many of our skirmishes to this day are woven with the same thread. And, it was in the conduct of the Civil War that Abraham Lincoln articulated the fundamental principle that animated him during the Civil War and that should bring us back together today. And it calls us to put our current trials into perspective, that…

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Abraham Lincoln

Why Trump should not destroy our faith in our democracy.

Tens of millions of Americans have had to reach deep in order to reestablish their sense of balance and to seek for ways to restore our faith in our country since the election of 2016. I endured the election campaign with a shaken, but still firm sense of faith in our basic institutions. The campaign shook the country to its foundations, but the election result was a challenge to that faith. Up until about 9 pm election night on the West Coast, I was still asserting that he could not win. And when it was clear he would, I was devastated-and it is obvious that that was true for millions, if not a majority of Americans. This just could not happen in America!  This seemed like the result at the ballot box that could actually bring the country down-it felt like the end. For may reasons, we elected a man temperamentally unfit to manage the rigors and complexities of governance of a complex, and diverse body politic. He stands as a fundamental threat to the system that elects and governs our nation of 330,000,000 people who spring from every single corner of the earth. In the system that the wisdom of our Founding Fathers created, a Trump was not supposed to happen. It was a “long train of abuses and usurpations” yet to be fully catalogued that brought us this election result- perhaps closer to the bloody confrontation of open warfare than any other since 1860. There was lots of talk about armed rebellion should Clinton get elected, something that for those of us who cast our ballots for her feared more than a little. There were threats that if the election were to go against Trump, the result would have to have been rigged, and he would not accept the result. All the elections in my lifetime were conducted within a set of boundaries that upheld a basic faith that the nation would survive the outcome of the election. Such was not the case for this last one.

So, what is so great about our Democracy? Here is where Lincoln gives me comfort and solace in the midst of the Trump malaise: Abraham Lincoln committed the nation to a war that he could have avoided. When the 11 states that became the Confederate States of America seceded, he could have decided, as was counseled by Horace Greeley to “let the erring sisters go in peace.” But Lincoln had a vision of the United States as an nation dedicated to transcendent principles. America had to meet this challenge that would destroy us and bring us back together to heal our wounds and recommit to the Founding Principles. If this crisis broke us, what we represented to the world would cease to be. The light of human freedom expressed and advanced through the mechanisms of democratic government would expire. We were more than a nation dedicated to creed, or ethnicity or tribe: We were a nation dedicated to transcendent principles: We were a nation created as an experiment dedicated to the principle that every human being had rights derived from nature that preceded the creation of government and that government was instituted in order to promote and advance . And thus, we had to not only survive, but transcend the racial divisions that tore us in two and be better for having done so. Lincoln believed that the nation we were had to rise to any challenge that divided us. He committed the nation to a war so that “government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Imperfect as our nation’s founding was and as imperfect as we are today as a nation, we must survive. America was, to Lincoln, the torch-bearer for the very  best potential of the human being. Ours was the imperfect but perfectible experiment dedicated to principles that were woven into the very fabric of human existence and that with persistence and commitment would continue to shine as a beacon to the future of humanity.

So, despite all those distracted people who brought us this dismal political result, America can survive if we are committed. We have transcended worse and we can also transcend this. There is already much that is happening only three weeks into this administration that is showing  that most of America knows that we are better than this and that with passion and commitment and tireless effort we can put the nation right again. This moment has reminded of us how far we have strayed and what we must do to right ourselves.

And, after all, what other choice do we have?