STOP MAKING SENSE

I’ve been lucky enough to have had a lot of great teachers over the years, and I try to use things they’ve said to make sense of our current crisis.  Lately, I’ve been thinking about Frank Nelick, an English professor at the University of Kansas.  I can’t remember the text we were studying, but one day the classroom discussion turned to the topic of lying.  Dr. Nelick offered a practical reason to tell the truth rather than a lie.  A lie, he said, complicates your reality.  The more lies you tell, the better your memory has to be, just to keep your stories straight. 

But that was long ago and far away.  Recent breakthroughs in the art of prevarication threaten to render the concept of truth irrelevant, at least in the realm of public policy.  Donald Trump has been surprisingly effective in eliminating the distinction between fact and fiction.  It’s the one thing he’s turned out to be good at. 

Trump spent a lifetime learning how to lie.  And equally as important, learning who to lie to.  He began his career as a liar in fields like real estate in New York and Florida, casinos, and reality TV, where a certain amount of dissembling is taken for granted.  By 2015, Trump was a nationally known “character,” and Mainstream Media didn’t take him seriously at first.  That gave Trump some extra time to practice his con on a brand-new set of marks.  When he won the nomination, he was ready to lie to the world.  Let Democrats practice “honesty is the best policy” and see how many elections they win.

Trump told his Deplorables what they wanted to hear:  Your problems aren’t your fault.  Those college educated coastal elites, the Democrat snobs who think they’re better than you?  Everything is their fault.  Lost your factory job to automation?  Blame Democrats.  Kid got a drug habit?  Blame Democrats.  Overheard someone in the supermarket speaking Spanish?  Blame Democrats.  PTSD from a tour of duty in Afghanistan?  Blame the Clintons, blame Obama, blame the press, blame anyone but Donald J. Trump.  Because any criticism of Trump is really an attack on you. 

It worked, and it’s still working.  He praises them as winners one minute and pities them as victims the next.  As long as Trump bashes their enemies and tells them he’ll make everything all right, they’ll stick with him.  Dishonesty is the best policy.

It’s also the only real “policy” Donald Trump has.  It got him elected, and it might be enough to get him re-elected.  And that, in turn, is why I can’t work up any enthusiasm for all those great policies being offered by Democratic candidates.  Or rather, it’s one reason why.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m glad the candidates are thinking about issues and developing ways to address them.  I’m not criticizing any candidate who has thought deeply about important issues and shared their conclusions on the campaign trail.  The point I’m trying to make applies to all the entire field, and to their supporters as well. 

I’m arguing that getting bogged down in policy specifics is a counterproductive way to campaign.  Who are all those details for, anyway?  Most voters aren’t policy wonks.  They aren’t going to choose a candidate based on a comparison of rival spread sheets. 

Besides, developing policies is the easy part.  Implementing them is harder.  Can the candidate with all those great policies win a national election?  Can they, in other words, convince 70 million people to vote for them?  And if they win, do they know how to turn their ideas into legislation?

Another annoying thing about a detailed policy proposal is that, if it comes from a Democrat, it will trigger an immediate chorus of “how are you going to pay for that” from Beltway pundits.  Oddly enough, many of the very pundits who fret about fiscal responsibility under a Democrat look the other way when Republicans are in charge.  The Guardians of Conventional Wisdom didn’t badger George W. Bush about how he intended to pay for the war in Iraq.  They watched with straight faces while Paul Ryan touted the Laffer Curve as proof that tax cuts for billionaires would pay for themselves. 

The moral of the story?  Magical thinking is fine when it comes to paying for wars and tax cuts, but when progressive policies are under discussion, it’s strictly cash on the barrelhead.

Here’s what I think.  If we’re lucky enough to elect a Democrat in 2020, our new president will be in for a rough ride.  He or she will inherit several simultaneous crises.  They’re all real, they’re all urgent, and they’ll all be Democratic problems as soon as the last line of the oath of office is spoken. 

Other new presidents have inherited problems from their predecessors.  But Donald Trump made things worse by introducing the concepts of fake news and alternative facts into our political discourse.  He made it nearly impossible for Americans to talk to each other about politics.  It’s not just that Democrats and Republicans don’t trust each other, although they don’t.  It’s that they live in different realities. 

I monitor discussion boards on the Right.  Not the overt wingnut sites, but articles and reader comments from “respectable” conservative sites like NATIONAL REVIEW and THE RESURGENT.  They’re full of Trump fans spouting complete gibberish.  I mean, literal nonsense.  It would be amusing if it weren’t so scary.  These people will deny the legitimacy of any election that Trump loses.  Not all of them, certainly, but millions for sure.  They’re furious already, and Trump will see to it that they stay furious through election day.  And after, if he loses.

What Democrats need most is a nominee who understands that well-crafted policies and superior debating skills are irrelevant to beating Donald Trump.  In the unlikely event that Trump bothers to show up at one of the scheduled debates (I have my doubts), it won’t be to debate.  It will be to put on a show for his base.

I want the Democratic nominee to be able to counterattack effectively– not by responding in kind, but calmly, and with humor.  Stay out of the weeds on policy and keep the focus on Donald Trump’s dishonesty, his cruelty, and his incompetence. 

More free advice for Democratic presidential candidates.  Yes, Trump is a monster.  But calling him a monster builds him up in the eyes of his followers.  Luckily, Trump is also a fool, and he’s left an extensive trail of video evidence to prove it.  Use his own words in your ads to make him look silly.  Show clips from his rallies, where he babbles incoherently.  Show clips of his supporters being deplorable.  Show clips of world leaders mocking him.  The Democrat’s message should be: “Seriously? Do you want four more years of this?  Tantrums and tweet storms are no substitute for competence.  Let’s ratchet down the crazy and get back to work.” 

Trump is the enemy.  Attack him, not your Democratic rivals.