Reading the Clues

Always wanting the world to make sense, I love a good detective story. The detective, who knows how to read the clues, proves that the world is intelligible. The meaning of things may be hidden, but it can be discovered. It’s just a matter of observing the evidence lying around, and seeing what the clues disclose.

The world is full of clues. In one of my favorite stories, our main character proves this by thinking about a remark just heard while standing in line to enter a restaurant: “A nine mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain.” He draws one inference after another, and after a series of such steps discovers what must have produced that seemingly random remark. By the end, he has solved a murder.

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WHEN SILENCE IS THE CLUE

A friend, knowing my penchant for solving mysteries, brought me one his life had handed him. He had sent a serious and worthy proposal to an important member of the American elite. Many months had passed and no response had come. What did this mean? Perhaps it never reached the gentleman—fallen between the cracks in transit, or in his office? My friend told me all the steps he’d taken to foreclose that possibility, and I concluded the man had almost certainly seen the proposal.

If he received it, the failure to respond became a deeper mystery. Gentlemen of that elite class generally observed the social courtesies. Any serious communication would reliably get a response, even if it were just to decline the request in a cordial way. That expectation was strengthened by the fact that both sender and recipient were Harvard men, and and the culture of Harvard alumni added a further expectation of basic friendly courtesy toward fellow members of that “club.” So why this anomalous silence?

Following those facts, the mystery could be framed in a new way. No longer just “Why no response?” but now: “What was it about that proposal that made the discourtesy of no response easier than the customary courtesy of a reply?”

My friend departed still faced with a mystery, but pleased that our detective work had likely transmuted the silence into a more meaningful clue—and given him a better question to pursue.

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WHEN THE M.O. IS A DEAD GIVEAWAY

When a police detective investigates a crime, the investigation often focuses on the M.O.—modus operandi—how the criminal goes about committing his crimes. If the criminal has done this sort of thing before, there may be a pattern that connects THIS crime with others—which multiplies the available clues and might lead to identifying the perp.

I did that kind of detective work in developing an op/ed I published in 2014. At that time, and for a number of years before that, I felt driven to solve a crime of the sort that has too often made history a nightmare: the way the nation’s politics were steadily losing the ability to accomplish good for America, and steadily becoming destructive of what has been best about the nation.

The title of this 2014 op/ed was “The Force that Drove Us to Civil War is Back.” The essay began with this: “It’s like facial recognition technology: if the features match up, you conclude, ‘It’s the same guy.’” In this case, the “features” that matched were the M.O. And I followed up that “facial recognition” image with a series of parallels between what the Slave Power had done during the lead-up to the Civil War and what the Republican Party (of that pre-Trump time) had been doing to generate another dangerous conflict in the United States.

A half-dozen remarkable similarities were laid out, and from that common M.O. one could see something profound about human societies: a force can be transmitted through many generations, changing its outward form while retaining the basic pattern by which it can be recognized.

The Civil War defeated the Slave Power, but it did not remove it from the American scene.

Evidently it had bided its time as the years passed, until the force that had helped bring the nation to catastrophe in the 19th century emerged again a century and a half later, swinging like a wrecking ball through American society (its institutions, its body politic, and the well-being of its people).

That kind of “facial recognition” applied to forces moving through a culture over time made a great deal of sense of the world that I hadn’t made before.

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THE CASE OF THE TWO DESTRUCTIVE FORCES

Of course, in human affairs there is always a lot going on. A detective trying to understand the rise of destructive forces powerful enough to act like a wrecking ball on an entire society cannot end his investigation with a single discovery, however important and valid it might be. And so the investigation went on.

Just as the classic detective might ponder how a dead body came to be lying on the carpet in the mansion’s library, I kept wondering, “How did the Republican Party come to this?” (Which was an important part – but only part – of the larger question, “How did the United States come to this?”)

The mystery was this: the Republican Party was a normal American party—the usual mixture of the constructive and destructive, of Good and Evil—for generations, and then it gradually was transformed into a most abnormal major American party. Beginning after the presidency of the first Bush and continuing through the age of Donald Trump, there was a steady darkening of the ways the party operated and of the purposes it pursued, until it finally arrived at something so grotesque and destructive that it would not have been imaginable in an earlier time.

So what could account for such a profound transformation? Why a change in THAT direction over the course of THOSE decades?

It was the matter of the timing that led to a break in the case. For it was during those same decades that something else was clearly changing. An important part of what had been the Democratic coalition since before the Civil War was migrating steadily to take up residence under the Republican tent. In other words, what had been for a century the Solid Democratic South was moving to become the Solid Republican South—because a Democratic President had signed major civil rights legislation outlawing many aspects of the regime of racial oppression that the South had developed for maintaining a separate-and-unequal status for black people, and for keeping power in the hands of Southern whites.

But to see the ominous implications of this migration, one had to know something about how America’s main destructive forces had been distributed politically before that. For the century after the Civil War, the two most powerful forces of “Evil” had been White Supremacy and Corporate Greed. It was the nation’s good fortune that, during that century, these two forces allied themselves with opposing political parties: while the force of racism had its home in the Democratic Party, the force of Corporate Greed had the Republican Party for its political instrument.

While those two forces each wrought plenty of damage during that century, in the political struggle for power they were on opposite sides, so they partially canceled each other out.

But when White Supremacy moved over to the tent of the party of Corporate Greed, the two forces no longer canceled each other out. Instead, there was an alliance of the nation’s strongest forces of “Evil”—an alliance strong enough to take over the once-respectable Republican Party.

(By the turn of the millennium, the force of racism could deliver the votes of a whole region by appealing to the passions of Southern whites, while the force of Corporate Greed could use the power those votes conferred to stack the deck in favor of wealth, to enable money to buy still more political power, and to free corporate powers to do whatever they wanted.)

How did the Republican Party come to this? It became the home of both of the main forces that did the most to hinder the United States from fulfilling its values. It was transformed from the usual mixture of Good and Evil into a party controlled by a unified force that was remarkably consistent in making the world more broken on virtually every issue. (And such consistency of destructiveness is a good definition of “Evil.”)

When it comes to detective work on the large developments in civilized societies, it is often necessary to take a view as if from a great altitude, where connections among seemingly separate phenomena become visible—just as that great detective, Isaac Newton, understood that the force governing the moon’s orbit around the earth was the same force that made an apple fall to the ground.

THE UNSOLVED MYSTERY

Something quite extraordinary has happened in the United States over the past decade: the emergence of a following for Donald Trump, amounting to roughly one-third of the population– a kind of following that’s unlike anything seen before in American history.  To the best of my knowledge, no one before Trump has had a large base of support that apparently cannot be swayed from their allegiance, no matter what he does—even things that would have been an unsurvivable scandal for any previous President.

The abundance of public evidence – renewed by almost every day’s events — that shows clearly a degree of criminality, incompetence, and corruption is not even hidden. When the news shows me the latest misdeeds the likes of which we never saw before, and then reports that “approval of Donald Trump’s Presidency is down to 32%,” I call out to the TV, “Why isn’t it zero percent?”

(How powerful is that core Trump base still? A little detective work provides an answer. Republican Senators—experts in their own political survival if nothing else—demonstrated by their actions that they still regard defying Trump as politically dangerous.

(Consider the confirmation of Todd Blanche as Attorney General. Several Republican Senators had balked at confirming him, and the evidence of Blanche’s utter betrayal of the duties of that office was overwhelming. Yet when the votes were counted, only two Republicans voted no. One was Lisa Murkowski, who has already demonstrated that she can survive Trump’s efforts to defeat her. The other was Susan Collins, fighting for political survival this November in Maine, where showing independence from Trump may be essential to her survival. The rest fell into line.

(Trump’s power to end the careers of Republican Senators depends entirely on his continuing power over Republican voters. So their behavior gives us a clue: they evidently believe Trump still commands enough allegiance among Republican voters to end the careers of those who defy him.)

Here’s the mystery: Why don’t Trump’s virtually daily displays of conduct that Americans in previous eras would have regarded as absolutely disqualifying—and the disastrous consequences of so many of his presidential actions—drive away his core supporters?

I’ve been studying the clues for ten years, but it still doesn’t make sense to me.

I can imagine Trump’s support being above zero.

Some people may be sufficiently angry and wounded that destruction itself brings a kind of gratification—the satisfaction of seeing things smashed, enemies hurt, a world they resent pulled down. They might therefore welcome the kind of destructiveness Trump brings to so much he touches—from destroying the Justice Department as an instrument of the rule of law and turning it into an instrument of revenge, to moving money from renewable energy to fossil fuels, to starting a war that has done great damage to American national security.

Some people could crave a leader who acts the part of the “strong man” who eagerly smites his foes, compels private companies to bow to his power, and places his name and image on public institutions.

But I have known some of that 32% to be people who — in the rest of their lives – are decent, considerate, caring. And who express real patriotic pride in the basic values of American democracy.

How is it that those people continue to give Donald Trump their support despite his virtually daily demonstrations of conduct so unhinged and ugly, so public and unhidden that no one following the daily news could avoid witnessing it, and so destructive of the values they say they cherish?

That’s the mystery I have not been able to solve.