It Can Happen Here. It's Happening Now.

Political rhetoric can reach - often - for the extreme when discussing a troubling issue or political figure.

Especially during campaign/election cycles, when the mudslinging kicks in and the demonization of a political opponent is a quick-and-easy way to stir up your base to stick to your side.

As this happens often, it's a little hard to convincingly point at a political figure on the national stage and scream ZOMG he's a fascist. Everyone else can just glare at you and say "Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man"

Sometimes, though, you've got no choice. Sometimes, a person on the national stage running for high office will go so far to the extreme that defines Fascism - as Merriam-Webster does as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition" - that you have to point a finger and say "oh dear f-cking God he's a f-cking Fascist."

Such as Donald Trump. Going after immigrants and refugees while exhorting nationalist fervor. Argues for a "strong" Executive who can bully all opposition. Holds campaign gatherings that are starting to resemble brown-shirt rallies. Yup. Talks very much like a raging Fascist.

Scholarly work, however, suggests Trump is a more American variant of fascism: that of the Native Populist. Which is just as dangerous as Fascist, but we're getting into technical details here.

And why do I say Native Populism is a uniquely American version of this -ism? Because we've been here before, and other people have documented the atrocities then too.

Sinclair Lewis' classic work It Can't Happen Here may be a fictional title but it's based on real-world observations of our national mood of the 1930s. Lewis wrote this novel at the peak of the Great Depression when the national mood was dour, a quarter of the people were starving and poor, and the potential for a rabble-rouser to rally the masses to form a dictatorship was high. That last part wasn't paranoia: FDR himself opined that if his first term had failed, his would be the last tenure of a truly elected Presidency.

Lewis based the novel on the tensions of the day, and in particular based his early villainous figure - Buzz Windrip - on real-life political boss Huey Long, a governor/Senator from Louisiana whose bullying political style and censoring of any public criticism were well known across the nation... and did little to damage his appeal to the masses because Long effectively scapegoated his opponents and authored economic policies to attack hated banks and seek mass redistribution of wealth.

Huey Long - and his literary doppelganger - may display some of the historical trappings of fascist leanings, but they are in fact an aspect of a similar -ism: Populism. Where in Fascism the dictatorial absolutism works its way Top-Down (from the power money elites), Populism goes the other way (from the angered masses raging against elites).

Merriam-Webster's definition of populism is lacking (it just refers to "populist" as a "believer in the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people") so a more detailed definition is needed. A recent Newsweek article has something of note:

But populism, during the farmers’ revolt of the 1890s, was also a cultural insurgency—a kind of self-administered political wake for the beleaguered middle American Protestant soul, newly adrift in an urbanized, capitalist nation of immigrant laborers and international bankers, and yearning for the folk egalitarianism of an idealized Jeffersonian republic. This is how populism has come to double as a synonym for modern cultural conservatism. Historian Richard Hofstadter famously branded the Gilded Age agrarian uprising as a precursor to McCarthyism: an outpouring of economic resentments that gave aggrieved farmers license to scapegoat any and all available elites—Jewish bankers, British titans of industry, American robber barons—for their declining cultural influence.

That helps a bit. Populism is basically a mass movement of lower-income groups driven by economic woes but expressing their outrage towards other groups that can be easily defined as "Other" by how they don't fit the majority identity (White Christian Protestant that are not of the cities). Back in the 19th Century, that meant Jews and business owners (and in the South, Blacks). In the 21st Century, that means Muslims, Mexicans and Wall Street bankers (and now Blacks across the nation).

What makes Populism dangerous is that there's little wisdom or patience to it. Relying more on the force of the majority to impose will, and eager for solutions to come immediate and absolute, there's little of the spirit of compromise or respect for the other viewpoints - of either the minorities or even the differing opinions of fellow majority members - to allow for a consensus towards a working solution. Because the quick solution - usually not well-thought, impulsive, and reckless - isn't always the correct one.

Which is what happens in Lewis' novel. Windrip wins the election and imposes his populist will on the nation, acting the bully using his not-so-secret police force called the Minute Men (yes, irony is lost on the real-world modern Far Right) and enacting his wealth redistribution programs to curry favor with the masses, but none of it works out. Suppressing criticism against his regime does little to stop it, and the economic woes that propelled him to office aren't answered by his knee-jerk policies. The novel ends with Windrip suffering an ouster via coup and the nation descending into a series of military takeovers that still do not resolve the problems that the reigning Populist ideology can't solve.

Lewis wrote it as fiction but based it on fact: at the time he wrote it, Huey Long was a legitimate threat to run as a third-party candidate against FDR and whomever would represent the Republicans. Some of the worst traits attributed to Windrip - the silencing of critics, the demolition of political institutions so that Long could swiftly pass his own laws - came from Long's actions as Governor (and then as party boss of Louisiana as Senator using a puppet Governor he controlled). Through that quirk of history, Lewis' novel never came true because Long was assassinated by a relative of a political opponent whom Long was attempting to drive out of power that very day. Without Long's ambitions, his movement faltered and fell more into the racial animus (anti-Semitism) that made it unacceptable by World War II and our nation's fight against the Nazis.

And then there's Alexis de Tocqueville and his seminal work Democracy in America (two volumes). Even though he wrote that back in the 1830s, he perfectly documented the American (Caucasian) mindset and cultural norms of the era and one that has not changed much over the centuries.

While Tocqueville had kind things to say about the American character, the differences in American to European world-views, he also sounded a warning against what he labeled "tyranny of the majority". Chapter Fifteen, if you looked it up:

...I am therefore of opinion that some one social power must always be made to predominate over the others; but I think that liberty is endangered when this power is checked by no obstacles which may retard its course, and force it to moderate its own vehemence...

...Democratic republics extend the practice of currying favor with the many, and they introduce it into a greater number of classes at once: this is one of the most serious reproaches that can be addressed to them...

That is the impulse towards which Populism strives: forcing critics into silence and allowing the representatives of the masses to impose their will in the name of that -ism. To continue:

...Governments usually fall a sacrifice to impotence or to tyranny. In
the former case their power escapes from them; it is wrested from their
grasp in the latter. Many observers, who have witnessed the anarchy of
democratic States, have imagined that the government of those States was naturally weak and impotent. The truth is, that when once hostilities are begun between parties, the government loses its control over society. But I do not think that a democratic power is naturally without force or without resources: say, rather, that it is almost always by the abuse of its force and the misemployment of its resources that a democratic government fails. Anarchy is almost always produced by its tyranny or its mistakes, but not by its want of strength...

...If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force. Anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism...

I need to re-read Tocqueville again to find the more specific elements, but one of the things he warned against was how a political figure would rise up with a mandate from that "tyranny of the majority" to enact policies that punish the minorities. Which is something that came about during the era of Andrew Jackson, someone who did rise up on an anti-elite agenda of demolishing a lot of federalized institutions such as the national bank. And someone with open hostility towards The Other in the form of Native American tribes and foreign influences.

There's been other moments when Populism arose - notably in the 1890s in response to the greed of the Gilded Age - and when Nativism unleashed our darkest demons - the Jim Crow era of lynchings, the internment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor - all of which came after Tocqueville but which he predicted - as both eras were driven by majority fears of The Other - with unerring accuracy.

A lot of that Populism echoes today in the platform and campaign style not just of Trump but with nearly every Republican candidate. Even Jeb (?) with his attempts and re-marketing himself as a down-to-earth fixer is playing to a Populist message (which honestly a rich elitist like Jeb can never sell).  It's just that Trump - with his open calls against Mexican immigrants, his blatant Islamophobia based more on paranoia than historical fact, and his uncompromising bullying of others - is the most overt about it.

And he's the one garnering most of the early polling support.

This is happening now. This isn't fiction, and this isn't a historic review. This is all in real time on our news channels and web sites. And it ought to wake everyone up to the horror that our worst impulses - our nation's terrifying history of racial animus against Blacks, Natives, women, Hispanics, Asians and now Middle Easterners - are being inflamed by a Populist movement spiraling out of control.

This will not end well, unless more of us turn to the better angels of our nature and not our base instincts.

Presidential Character: Week Thirty-Two, The Two Faces of an Active-Positive Part One

Considering the length of this next President's tenure, and the fact that during his administration our nation was literally in two worlds - the first a massive economic crisis, the second a global war - I've decided to divide this one's entry into two articles.  Hopefully I'll be able to explain why...

My fading memories of AP American History remind me that one of the essay questions used was "Herbert Hoover was a liberal and Franklin D. Roosevelt a conservative, discuss."  In fact, a quick Google search showed me the question is still in use today.  I pity you high-schoolers.

The arguments made were that in practice Hoover the established pro-business Republican had done things considered "liberal" - increased taxes, expanded government - while Roosevelt the radical try-anything Democrat had done things "conservative" - cut taxes, gave business more free range.

The problem with that argument is sticking to the belief that "liberal" and "conservative" are static constructs.  The argument simplified what Hoover and FDR did on their own terms and under the legal and cultural restrictions of the day.  For one thing, a conservative (as politics usually define one) would never had unleashed the 1,001 different agendas that Roosevelt did throughout the New Deal era.  A liberal (as usually defined) would not have viewed government as limited in its authority which kept Hoover from fully resolving the crisis.

This is where viewing the Presidential Character as either Active-Passive and Positive-Negative makes more sense.  An Active-Positive like FDR would have cut taxes if the circumstances called for it, would have allowed more free trade if it made the economy work, would have done things that a modern-era Republican think paradoxically "Reagan did it first".  It's neither truly liberal or truly conservative.  It's Adaptive: the key trait of the A-P President.

FDR came into office at one of the greatest crises in American history.  The Great Depression had become a perfect storm of failing banks, mass unemployment, and financial ineptitude on a scale that would have - and did in Europe - collapsed powerful nations since the days of olde.  The economic collapse had led to regime changes in Italy and Germany, allowing the rise of fascism as a political alternative to the democratic republicanism seemingly failing in the West.  Soviet communism had taken root in Russia and was under the control of one of history's most brutal dictators.  A lot was at stake with FDR's administration: failure didn't mean a One-Term Presidency, it most likely meant a mass riot and the fall of the federal government to one extreme or the other.  And Roosevelt knew it.

Roosevelt brought with him a team of advisors and Cabinet officials that represented the broad spectrum of the political ideology: some were noted die-hard conservatives, some were hard-case liberals one step removed from communism.  Ideology didn't mean much to FDR outside of results: get the economy working again.  He famously said during his 1932 campaign that the thing to do during the crisis was "to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." 

And his administration proved it: a greater number of bills presented to Congress over the first 100 days (the first time an administration measured its efforts by that metric) than had been presented by any previous administration.  Relief projects begun under Hoover supported with greater funding and urgency.  New regulations put in place - like Glass-Steagall - to stop the questionable and chaotic financial speculation that had led to financial collapse.  And the first of several government-backed employment programs under the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed 250,000 young men to farms and conservation projects.

He did all this under withering criticism: from the Republican conservatives who questioned the budget deficits FDR was piling up and the constitutionality of much of the New Deal policies, and from the Far Left who questioned whether Roosevelt was doing enough in sharing the wealth and fixing everything in one broad stroke.  Both extremes noted that for all of the New Deal activity, the economy only barely improved by the end of Roosevelt's first term: Unemployment in particular was still in the double digits (14 percent) barely half of its 1933 high (24 percent).

FDR openly welcomed the hatred, especially from the rich elite that declared Roosevelt "a traitor to his class."  He plowed ahead on his New Deal, adding more projects and trying anything.  And some metrics of the economy were improving - Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was finally going upward after 1933 when during the 1929-32 period it had dropped - along with the nation's mood, well enough that when the 1936 Presidential campaign rolled around FDR won re-election in one of the biggest butt stompings in electoral history.

Professor Barber in his text notes why he uses Franklin D. as his model of the Active-Positive:

Roosevelt exhibited... what I see as a major contrast between the Active-Positive type in politics and other types... (they) are freer in their selections from a stylistic repertoire... (they) show how much richer and more varied range of emotional orientations is available to the politician whose character is firmly rooted in self-recognition and self-love.  The Active-Positive not only can perform lovingly or aggressively or with detachment, he can feel those ways.  As Roosevelt's case points out, the genuineness of those feelings can come across powerfully to close associations and to the public at large. (p. 295-6)

The empathy adds to the ability of being Adaptive.  Knowing what the situation is at one moment requires a response.  Realizing the situation can or has changed requires turning that response in a different direction, sometimes in a direction your supporters never saw on the horizon.  While other politicians can "flip-flop" on an issue for cynical reasons, the A-P personality has the confidence to express why the change was made and point out the empathetic reasons for doing so.  Above all is that Confidence: not the stolid "I Must" of an Active-Negative that Barber noted with Hoover, but the reckless "I Can".

But this shows one of the dangers - the second face - of the Active-Positive.  The danger of Overreach.  The "I Can Do This" in the most reckless of moments can be devastating to an A-P President.  Lincoln had that "I Can" feeling with his Emancipation Proclamation, a questionable edict that on the eve of the Civil War's end meant chaos unless the 13th Amendment could get passed.  Jefferson's "I Can" came not with the Louisiana Purchase but with the self-imposed trade embargoes as a response to the Napoleonic wars.

FDR's came with the Court Packing scheme.  Genuinely frustrated with a conservative Supreme Court that struck down some of the more impactful New Deal bills, Roosevelt figured at the start of his second term to use his political capital on a plan to give the President the power to add an extra SCOTUS Justice for every sitting Justice over the age of 70 (in 1937 that meant six new seats).

People outside and within Roosevelt's own administration freaked.  Some of the arguments FDR used in favor of the plan didn't make sense - one of Roosevelt's strongest supporters on the bench at the time was 80 years old for example, meaning age couldn't have been an issue - and the bill quickly got recognized even by New Deal advocates as a serious Executive branch threat to Judicial sovereignty.  Roosevelt may have had confidence in presenting the plan, but for once that famed A-P empathy failed to read the public mood.  Time, the unexpected loss of the legislative proponent to present the bill to Congress, and the changeover of the Supreme Court membership saved FDR the embarrassment of having the Court Packing bill reach a chamber floor and burn up in flames, but it quickly became the biggest failure of FDR's New Deal era.

FDR's two faces - the confident Adaptive leader, the Overreaching politico - would be combined into one  big reason why Roosevelt would eschew the tradition of letting go after two terms of office.  By 1940, there were problems on the national and international level that would stir the interest and challenge of any Active-Positive leader: the Second World War.

And that's where I'll leave off for Part Two. (link to be added later)

Next Up: What Did I Just Tell You?!  PART TWO DAMMIT.

Presidential Character: Week Thirty-One, the Peter Principle Applied to Presidents

While this year-long attempt at documenting Presidents relies on James David Barber's seminal work Presidential Character, I do rely on the occasional outside reference to highlight a point.

For example, bringing up the Peter Principle.  To wit:

...in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence.

Now, an elective office like the Presidency doesn't work as a hierarchy.  As a rule, people are not hired and promoted upward into the Oval Office (well, outside of the Vice Presidents on those rare painful exceptions).  Thing is, people vote for experience: they vote for political figures, military leaders, governors and captains of industry because such candidates have proven themselves in some fashion.  So in a way, a President can be a man who's done wonders at a lower level of prestige and excites the populace into thinking they can do just as well as Leader Of the Free World.

Herbert Hoover was just such a man by 1928.  One of the self-made success stories of the early 20th Century: became a mining engineer in youth, then a mining consultant and leading business figure on the global stage, organized American evacuation from Europe on the outbreak of World War I and turned right around to lead relief effort and food aid for war-stricken Belguim, when the United States entered the war he was put in charge of food administration and effectively managed homeland rationing to ensure priority food supplies got overseas, and he oversaw relief efforts for post-war Germany and war-torn Russia (during the Bolshevik takeover) which were suffering massive famines.  By 1920 Hoover was considered one of the greatest humanitarians the world had seen.

Actively becoming a Republican when politics proved the next challenge in his life, Hoover was placed in Harding's Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce.  Taking control of what was a minor office at the time, Hoover used his initiative to establish a department dedicated to business growth and control of economic affairs.  When confronted with a problem that was lapsing in someone else's Cabinet, Hoover worked it so that Commerce became responsible for its oversight and fixes.  Where previous Presidents Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson were adversarial to corporations, Hoover - being a businessman himself - preferred the "soft power" approach of making business leaders allies instead of enemies.  He worked with banks and savings and loans to rework home mortgaging to promote home ownership to Americans, increasing home construction.  It all culminated in one massive economic boom of the Roaring Twenties.

Hoover was one of the incorruptible men under Harding's administration, and became one of the indispensable men under Coolidge's.  When 1928 rolled around and Coolidge refused to run for another term (well within the unofficial two-term limit), Hoover was practically the only choice the Republicans had for the Presidential nomination.  Despite personal concerns from Coolidge - they apparently didn't get along, the Passive-Negative Coolidge finding Hoover's aggressive personality abrasive at best - Hoover got the nom, easily won against the Democratic challenger Al Smith, and settled into the White House in 1929 under the belief that "no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system."

1929 is traditionally the year the Great Depression started.

There's still an argument about what caused it.  Considering the size and scope of what that Depression was, there had to be a variety of factors culminating in one perfect storm of an economic disaster.  Also, put a hundred economists into a debate room and you'll get a hundred different answers to the simple question "what caused it?"

It could have been any of these things.  The failure of Midwestern farms leading to foreclosures, and then bank failures in the wake of that.  The U.S. government commitment to the gold standard, which kept interest rates too high and limited monetary policy.  Wealth disparity during the 1920s which fed money into investments for the rich rather than spending income for the poor and middle classes.  Massive personal and financial debt across the board, another reason for the bank failures.  Land speculation, especially in Florida (hi again!), and a housing bubble related to that.  Growing unemployment caused by a decline in population numbers due to fewer families and fewer immigrants, which paradoxically made it harder for the flesh-and-blood unemployed to find jobs (it has something to do with the lack of demand in a growing consumer economy).

The infamous Stock Market Crash of October 1929 isn't viewed by the experts as a cause, but a symptom exposing to the world just how bad the economy was getting and turning the economic mood from positive to negative.  (Also, anyone else notice how a good number of those causes are similar to the problems we're facing today...?)

Almost one thing most of the economists would agree on was that the Great Depression wouldn't have been as bad as it had gotten (to some economists, in 1929 it was just a regular recession or panic) if the response to it had not been so badly bungled.

This is where Hoover's personality traits become part of the problem.  This is where being an Active-Negative at heart turned Hoover from one of the 20th Century's greatest men into one of history's greatest failed Presidents.

The defining trait of an Active-Negative President is Uncompromising.  The A-N operates by certain principles or beliefs that cannot bend in the face of "enemies" or those opposed to his work.  To quote Barber about A-Ns:

But the most pervasive feeling in the Active-Negative makeup is "I must."  He is a man under strict orders, required to concentrate, to produce, to follow out his destiny as he sees it.  At any given moment, he feels bound by what he has already undertaken, already promised, already committed...  He finds it hard even to see alternatives to the course he "must" follow, much less change that course when it proves unproductive...  From the inside... the Active-Negative type generates tremendous energies for political domination.  From the outside, he seems at first extraordinarily capable and then extraordinarily rigid, become more and more closed to experience, including the advice of his ardent allies... (p. 82)

Hoover's "I must" moment was the handling of the Depression.  Previous experience as a businessman and Commerce Secretary told him how to react (not act) to the economic crises of 1929: Let the market correct themselves.  Let the businesses fail that are going to fail, and the industries will recover on their own.    Hoover's Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon infamously deemed that to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmer, liquidate real estate..." and that it would make people "work harder and live a more moral life."  However, that meant one thing: liquidate everything in the economy because too many factors were failing all at once.  It also failed to consider the possibility that there was nothing in the economy people could work harder for, as unemployment went up and kept going up during Hoover's tenure.

In this regard, Hoover was a lot like other A-N Presidents - Van Buren, Cleveland, and Buchanan are good examples - when faced with a financial panic.  They too preferred to let the markets correct themselves.  And under normal circumstances, Hoover wouldn't have been far wrong: a brief recession in 1921 corrected itself by letting liquidation do its thing and redistribute capital.  Hoover's failing was thinking that all this economic panic was came from the financial markets re-adjusting itself.  It never occurred to him that parts of the economy were literally disappearing and never coming back.

Hoover instead focused on keeping the federal government solvent: he abhorred the trending Keynesian theories of government spending to "buy out" the economic crisis, and focused instead on keeping the budget balanced (again, sounds a bit familiar don't it).  The Depression cut into those attempts to budget, however, making Hoover even more reluctant to create massive spending projects to fix the Depression first.

This is partly where the Peter Principle comes into play as well.  Hoover, once one of the most competent men on the planet - great organizer, driven, focused on tasks and finishing them - became as President one of the most incompetent leaders at a time of need.  It wasn't so much that Hoover failed to respond - he actually did respond, a good number of government programs started between 1930 to 1932 formed the basis of much of the New Deal of the 1930s, famously with the Hoover Dam construction project - it was that he failed to organize on the scale that the crisis demanded, and for a man once driven to succeed he suddenly looked like he was just sitting there.

His previous jobs - engineer, mine owner, businessman, relief organizer, Commerce Secretary - were ones that did not necessarily require him to "think outside the box" as it were.  Respond to a problem and fix it with the tools at hand (not considering new tools may need to be invented).  Manage something already working and making sure it stays working (keeping the engine going while ignoring the fact the train is charging off a cliff).  Reforming government and adding regulations where needed (but drawing the line at where the private sector must remain free of the public sector).

Being President means making decisions, something that Hoover had done often before and usually successful at it.  But being President also means creating compromise solutions when the situation demands it, making decisions that a President will be uncomfortable making yet would recognize as necessary (an Active-Positive, for example, making a deal he knows will suck for himself or his personal allies but will make life easier for 100 million others).  And in Hoover's case, it meant making decisions (making the public sector more aggressive in job creation, for example) he wouldn't - and didn't - make.

As President, he was faced with a situation - the Great Depression - the size and scope of which was larger than anything seen before, especially in terms of job losses and mass unemployment.  Hoover was being asked by the desperation of the times - the Bonus Army marching on Washington for financial relief, the failure of businesses and banks to reinvest capital to spark a stalled economy - to make the hard decisions and compromises that could have relieved the crisis.  Asking an A-N President like himself to "think outside the box" and consider other economic models as possible fixes would have been akin to asking a whale to try walking on land instead of swimming in water.

Basically, Hoover had gotten promoted to a job he wasn't suited for.  The Presidency was something outside of his temperament.  If he had been Treasury Secretary or still Commerce Secretary in 1929, and the President was an Active-Positive sort calling on Hoover to solve some of the economic woes within his range of influence, I wouldn't doubt that Hoover would have resolved the matter within that term: doing so on the orders and direction of a man more capable of making the decisions Hoover couldn't make.

And we wouldn't have called homeless towns "Hoovervilles".  Hoover's reputation as a humanitarian would have remained intact: the image of him feeding children replacing the images of starving families in the history textbooks.

Remember the evil banker character from John Ford's Stagecoach?  At one point, he rails against the federal government and insists everything would work if there was a businessman in charge of government.  It was Ford's (and Hollywood's) rude judgment on the Hoover administration.  Which wasn't entirely unfair, but harsher than it deserved to be.

(P.S.: I wouldn't put the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on Hoover's shoulders.  That was more a protectionist effort by Congress... which essentially started a trade war/boycott with the rest of the planet that made the Great Depression worse, thanks a bunch Smoot and Hawley)

Next: For this President, I might have to make two separate entries for two thematically different historical eras.