Human Nature

Posted on October 6, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 6, 2024

Donald Trump has shown the world that he has no leadership skills, unless you confuse leadership with a dizzyingly effective combination of bullying and pandering. His ramblings and idiotic statements often make him seem ignorant and incompetent. His growing anger and frustration and his worsening incoherence make him look irrational, as if he’s losing contact with reality and slowly sinking into delusional dementia. His narcissism, particularly his susceptibility to flattery makes him dangerously manipulable. Sometimes the nonsense that comes out of his mouth tempts us to conclude that he’s not very smart, but that’s a dangerous error. He simply lacks any sense of shame or self-awareness.

All of the above is true. Even his supporters don’t deny these things – they just don’t seem to care. Those of us who do care, when we’re not desperately worrying about the future of our country should Trump win, scratch our heads trying to understand why he’s even remotely competitive. When I talk to people about this, more and more I hear that it’s about our seriously flawed human nature. Many smart, well-educated people believe our basic natures compel us to repeat cycles of violence and self-destruction. They believe we’re helpless to break out of that pattern as if failure and devastation were our destiny, and we lack the free will to escape it.

I’m not a historian, theologian, or sociologist, but I wonder about the same things. A hundred years ago, people described the first world war as the “war to end wars.” The death and devastation, the wanton destruction of Europe, the introduction of horrors like poison gas and aerial bombardment were so terrible, surely we’d never be that foolish again. Yet, the only two things that were consistent in the aftermath of the Great War were economic devastation and laying the seeds for a second world war that was orders of magnitude worse. We’re about to find out if the subsequent eighty years were nothing but a setup for a third that destroys civilization, or if we avoid blowing each other up, wrecking the world’s economy and allowing fascism and autocracy to flourish everywhere.

There’s enough compelling evidence to concern us. In the entirety of human history, every civilization, every empire, every “enlightened” nation has ultimately failed. Success and advances in our ability to control our environment have invariably led to decay and decadence, which ultimately destroyed most of what had been gained and built, and each crash was followed by generations dark ages.

Yesterday, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who has spent tens of millions of dollars supporting Trump and the Project 2025 agenda, warned us that if Trump doesn’t win this election it will be the last presidential election ever held in the United States. Of course, that’s just an example of the Trump chaos machine continually projecting his failings and unsavory behavior onto everyone else. No serious person imagines that a Kamala Harris presidency would spell the end of democracy, but a Trump presidency shows every sign of having that intention. It’s Orwellian Doublespeak at its worst, and it’s typical of everything the Trump campaign does.

One of my favorite novels, which I re-read whenever it seems relevant, is Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle For Liebowitz. Published in 1959, as the Cold War was ramping up and the fear of nuclear war gripped most of the country, Miller created a haunting vision of humanity as doomed to destroy itself every time it developed the capacity to do so. He did so with such skill, such ironic dark humor, the reader doesn’t realize they’re being sucked down the rabbit hole of pre-destined cycles of destruction until the chilling conclusion. It’s about human nature and the question of whether knowledge, enlightenment, and spiritual growth give us the tools to exercise free will and end the awful cycle.

After nine years of watching the Trump saga play out with ever increasing violence and threats to the foundations of our Constitution, one might conclude that Miller was right. Why would a country as rich as ours, that in many ways has shown itself to be the most enlightened, generous nation that ever existed, be tearing itself apart the way we are? The answer isn’t complicated.

Trump is a charismatic demigod with a unique ability to tap into the worst, darkest instincts of human nature, and his extreme narcissism, lack of concern for anything but his own wealth and power, and inability to feel shame have brought us to the brink. That his running mate, a highly intelligent, Yale-educated man who decried Trump as an abomination could have been corrupted by him is clear testimony to the destructive power of one man. Trump is the embodiment of the Old Testament serpent that enabled the destruction of humanity’s innocence. If you believe the words in Genesis, you might conclude that Miller was right, that we’re flawed and lack the free will to break out of this cyclical trap.

I refuse to believe that. I refuse to believe that rational, decent Americans will allow this agent of Satan to destroy our country. No, I don’t believe in either Satan or the snake in the garden, but the metaphor is too apt to ignore. We must, we can, we will exile the Trump demon back to where he belongs, either a prison cell or the snake pit of his own mind.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Winds of Change

Posted on October 4, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 4, 2024

We’re told every day that the 2024 presidential race is too close to predict a clear winner. As far as the news media are concerned, the race will stay too close to call until Election Day because that’s in their self-interest. Pundits write articles decrying the unlikely, and probably wrong conclusion that things are so baked in, we’re trapped in stasis, and nothing seems able to budge. Daily, no matter what happens, be it a revelation about Trump’s private words and actions on January 6th, a new celebrity endorsement, a slick debate performance, or a claim that murderous illegal immigrants took over a zoo so they could barbecue a lion, all I hear is “that’s not likely to move the needle.”

I’m skeptical. If we buy into the notion that everyone’s mind is made up, what’s the point of spending billions of dollars on TV ads and rallies? The idea that minds can’t be changed is utter nonsense. Just ask corporations that spend fortunes on mass advertising and mailings. Most will tell you a positive one percent return makes it worthwhile even if the other ninety-nine percent ignore them.

I couldn’t care less who Taylor Swift or Bruce Springsteen thinks should win in November, but hundreds of thousands of Swifties running out to register to vote because Taylor told them to is very significant, and it’s something that’s not likely to show up in polls. On the other hand, when literally hundreds of Republicans who never supported a Democrat in their lifetimes wait in line every week to pick up a microphone and tell their fellow Americans why, from their direct experience with Trump, they believe he is a terrible danger to the country, I take that seriously.

The election will turn on what a small percentage of self-proclaimed independent or undecided voters in a handful of states do on November 4th. That means all the ads and rallies have two purposes. One is keeping each side’s base engaged to increase turnout. The other, obviously, is to help undecided voters make up their minds.

What do we know about those supposedly undecided people? We know they’re thoughtful and they do their own thinking and fact-checking. We know they’re educated, serious people. We also know that they’re not followers looking for someone else to tell them what they should believe. When someone like Liz Cheney stands next to Kamala Harris and tells the world that Donald Trump should never be allowed to wield power again, and he responds on his pet network that Cheney and Harris are both stupid, how are those independent, smart thinkers likely to react?

Consider the vice-presidential debate. The initial response by TV commentators was that JD Vance was slick, and clearly won on debate points, while Tim Walz’s answers weren’t as smooth or polished. Conclusion: not likely to move the needle. But by the next day, commentators had generally changed their tune. Now it was Vance was clearly well-prepared and the more talented debater, but he lied almost every time he opened his mouth, and his refusal to give a clear answer about whether Trump lost the 2020 election had undermined his debate performance. Suddenly, Walz’s common man, imperfect debating style was homey and likable.

Neither Trump’s nor Harris’s base were likely to be moved by any of that. But what about the million or so voters who watched and listened with their brains engaged? I believe those things matter very much to undecided voters, and they’re part of a rising trend toward valuing truth and the rule of law over lies and hateful personal attacks that lack substance. The reason these people are undecided is that they care very much about their country. If they were into the kind of craziness and chaos that is the MAGA movement’s primary asset, they wouldn’t be undecided.

Seeing and hearing Cheney, yesterday, felt like a refreshing breeze. That she is but one of thousands by now, if you’ve been counting, makes that breeze a gradually rising wind that in the end will decide who our president is. That wind is blowing in only one direction. There is no group called Democrats for Trump out there at his rallies, only Elon Musk, a black-sheep Kennedy, and a nutcase who makes pillows. If all the Republicans who privately despise and fear Trump grow a pair and stand up the way Cheney, Adam Kinsinger, and the vast majority of people who know Trump well or worked for him did, all of those independent or disaffected voters will notice, and Harris will win by a margin that shocks everyone (except me and a few close friends.)

Are you listening, Mitch? Imagine what a spectacle it would be to hear Mitch McConnell endorse Harris, though I doubt he has the integrity to do it.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Unfit, Unqualified, and Batshit Crazy

Posted on October 1, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, October 1, 2024

Yesterday, The New York Times endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump for president, declaring that Trump was unfit to lead and an extreme danger to the country. Harris was lauded as “the only patriotic choice” in the presidential election. The Times praised her policies, qualifications, and record as a prosecutor and California Attorney General, but their endorsement had more to do with Trump’s negatives than Harris herself. In our polarized nation, for many Harris voters, her most important quality as a candidate is that she sounds like a skilled prosecutor whenever she lists his transgressions.

Given Trump’s long-standing animus toward The Times, no one was surprised by the endorsement, but unlike previous endorsements motivated by policy and politics, this one was backed up by a long list of Republicans, former Trump associates and employees, and members of his family. Today, The Times published statements by ninety-one of them who explained whyTrump is unfit to serve a president again.

Since the conventions, there have been a myriad of lists of people willing to put their names on record, some at great risk to their careers, warning about the dangers of Trump returning to the White House. They include Trump’s senior Cabinet officers, former and current congressional Republicans, Republican state officials, and his close associates and relatives. These messages are based on Trump’s own words and actions and hold him accountable for his failures in office, like the politically motivated delay of his response to COVID that resulted in the avoidable deaths of a half million Americans.

Perhaps more ominous, many Republicans and others who know Trump best warn that he would be a far worse president than he was the first time. Much of that concern comes from Trump himself, who publicly declared war on his opponents, on immigrants, and the mythical deep state he fantasizes about. He stated unequivocally that he will use the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who stands against him. Yesterday, he added a new wrinkle.

In the midst of lying about the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene, (he was contradicted by four southern governors, three of whom are Republicans,) he advocated that police should be allowed a day of unfettered violence – in effect, a suspension of the Constitution – to deal with people he describes as lowlifes, rapists, and murderers, after which, in his delusion, there would be no more crime. If he could get away with it, Trump would create his own Gestapo and secret police, modeled after what two of his idols, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin created.

Trump’s campaign has gone down so many rabbit holes, many of his supporters worry about him going completely off the rails. His obvious lack of guardrails, boundaries, and self-discipline have Republicans worried that he will lose and take the House and Senate down with him. Trump’s life-long mental illness may finally be overwhelming his ability to function rationally. I’ve heard the term “bat-shit crazy” a dozen times this week during media interviews with Republicans.

On the same Times editorial page, was a column that addressed a question tens of millions of Americans are asking: with all of this damning evidence against him, not to mention his indictments and felony convictions, why isn’t Harris killing him in the polls? That might be the most compelling mystery of our time, destined to be studied by generations of psychologists and sociologists.

But there’s another possibility. What if she really is way ahead, but no one is telling us? That’s not a conspiracy theory, just common sense. There’s good reason to suspect that the polls aren’t accurate – how could they be when they’re largely based on cell phone and email interviews? Who do you know who answers political calls or responds to polling emails? But even if pollsters somehow, against all logic, have polling samples that are representative of likely voters, we’re victims of seriously biased media.

Broadcast and streaming media all love polls, because their sponsors, the people who pay their bills love them. Polls turn elections into sporting events. Having an election without polls would be like watching a football game without a scoreboard. Social media are worse, because they submit to no vetting authority to help us distinguish truth from fiction. Yet, this deception contains a grain of truth that lends it credibility: the dreaded margin of error.

A phrase I often hear is “no clear leader within the margin of error.” On its face, if you believe the numbers they report, it’s a true statement. A poll based on a sample size of a thousand “likely voters” will typically have a margin of error of about four percent. That means that any result that has the candidates within four percentage points of each other qualifies as having no clear leader, but that can be extremely misleading.

I check 538.com, the highly trusted website that presents all respected poll results next to each other, every day. What I see is Harris leading Trump by between two and six points in all the most recent polls. That kind of trend is far more significant than “no clear leader,” but sponsors of athletic events love close games, and elections are no different. My conclusion is that Americans understand how dangerous Trump is far better the media would have us believe. We know he’s unfit, and we’ll demonstrate that on Election Day.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Religious Extremism

Posted on September 26, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 26, 2024

War is humanity at its worst. Things that happen during wars are so terrible, we had to invent new definitions for war crimes, since killing and maiming, which would be capital offenses in civilian life, are routine and accepted in warfare. We even have rules of war and a Geneva Convention, but they’re only followed when doing so serves the propaganda purposes and convenience of the combatants.

Attempts to humanize warfare only make it easier for wars to start. They accept a reality in which war is inevitable and attempt to impose a veneer of civilized behavior and values on something that is neither. If that’s true, why do nations choose killing each other as a knee-jerk reaction rather than reserve war as a last resort when everything else fails?

The answer depends on the conditions that spark the fighting. Wars of revolution against oppression we understand. Wars of desperation fought by people watching their children starve or succumb to preventable diseases are also understandable because those who fight believe they have no other choice. The same is true for the other side of the coin. An autocrat’s first priority is maintaining power and control. Thus, countries like Russia and China launch pre-emptive wars against their own rebellious provinces. These things we abhor, but we understand them.

But there is major cause of war that is beyond rational comprehension: religion. Religious differences may be responsible for more bloodshed and killing than anything else in the history of the world. Millions of indigenous people were murdered in the name of Christianity by early European explorers like Christopher Columbus. Catholics and Protestants went to war against each other for centuries in Europe. The American colonies were settled mostly by people attempting to escape religious prosecution. And, historians tell us there has been an ongoing war between Islam and the Judeo-Christian world since the time of Mohammed, fifteen hundred years ago…

…which brings us to the Middle East. The war over the Holy Land has been raging since the time of Christ. The introduction of Islam to the conflict, six hundred years later, only made it more deadly and intense. Religious extremists are responsbile for every problem that has occurred there in the last hundred years.

In 1920, the League of Nations issued the Mandate for Palestine, which gave Britain stewardship over what is today Israel and Jordan. Included in the mandate was the Balfour Declaration, which required the British to find a homeland for Jews who had inhabited the region for two thousand years. For reasons which today seem inexplicable, the Palestinian people, who had resided there as long as the Jews, were left out. Palestinians are as entitled to their own homeland as Jews, but in World War 1 era Britain, the Zionist movement pressed for a Jewish homeland, while no such support existrd for Palestinians, nor has one ever existed in the Muslim world.

Muslim nations are mostly kingdoms or some form of autocracies. It has never been in the interest of Arab leaders to recognize the rights of Palestinians. Thus, when Israel was created in 1948, the Palestinians were relegated to protectorates in Gaza and the West Bank, then part of Jordan. The Zionists had been offered a home in what is now Uganda in East Africa, but religious fervor demanded that any Jewish homeland contain Jerusalem. Since equally militant Christians and Muslims claimed Jerusalem as their spiritual home, the creation of Israel as a nation amidst neighbors that outnumbered it a hundred to one and vowed its destruction from day one set the stage for the war raging in Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon today.

Everyone has the right to worship or not as they please. Freedom of religion, as defined in the First Amedment to our Constitution is a universal human right. But organized religion’s unholy connection to governments and politics may be one the most dangerous threats to today’s world.

The nations of the ancient world replaced polytheism with monotheism, but they all had their own ideas of who the one true deity was. This single distinction has kept conflicts simmering in the Middle East since 1948. They erupted into war every couple of decades, as the situation was exacerbated by foreign actors who used Israel and its neighbors as surrogates during the Cold War. Today, however, saner heads must realize that killing thousands of people over whose God is the right one is un-Christian, un-Jewish, and un-Muslim. All three religions advocate peace, yet when it comes to each other, they’d rather fire rockets than co-exist.

This has gone on far too long, and the reason is religious extremism. Right-wing militant Israelis who support Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government are as guilty of prolonging the seventy-six-year-old conflict as Muslim extremists. The common denominator in all this is the institution of religion that is more interested in its own power and influence than the lives and health of its people.

It’s time we grew up and weaned ourselves off the crutch of religion. If we don’t, it may destroy us all.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Assassination

Posted on September 16, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 16, 2024

When Catelyn Stark and her entire entourage of lackeys and bodyguards had their throats cut during a state dinner, it was a thing of beauty, artistically. It was a perfect coup executed precisely, and it resulted in enough blood and death to satisfy fans of Game of Thrones. But that was fiction.

I was not a fan, at first, because I thought the graphic violence and sex were gratuitous substitutes for quality writing and acting. I was wrong about that, and the brilliance of George R. R. Martin’s epic story won me over. After a few episodes, the blood and gore seemed almost cartoonish, hardly the thing of horror movies, and that troubles me.

Assassinations are common tropes of fantasy and spy novels. In real life, they are acts of desperation. A political assassination sparked World War 1, and another one threw our country into chaos in 1962, when John F. Kennedy was murdered by Lee Harvey Oswald. The failed attempt by John Hinckley to assassinate Ronald Reagan two months after he was inaugurated averted even worse chaos as the country was still healing from Vietnam.

In some cultures, assassination is an acceptable means of transferring power, as in North Korean leader Kin Jong Un having his uncle murdered. In ours, there is absolutely no justification for attempting to kill a leader, ever. Aside from the basic immorality of the crime, resorting to that kind of violence creates crises that destroy nations or plunge them into horrible conflicts. Then why do they happen?

For two reasons: insanity and politics, not necessarily exclusively of each other. Oswald was a Communist sympathizer who had earlier defected to the Soviet Union and supported Fidel Castro in Cuba. He hated fascism, and while Kennedy was hardly a fascist, in Oswald’s distorted worldview, anyone who attacked Communists had to be a fascist. His history of problems with the law both as a civilian and a U. S. Marine, suggest sociopathic tendencies. John Hinckley, on the other hand, had no political motive. He was just nuts, and his jury concurred.

The two recent attempts on Donald Trump’s life follow similar patterns of motivation. Thomas Matthew Crooks, who attempted to kill Donald Trump in July, was a disturbed young man. He had right-wing leanings, and he had stalked both Trump and President Biden on the internet. We don’t know why he did what he did, but’s it safe to assume he wasn’t entirely sane. And yesterday’s apparently failed attempt to kill Trump by Ryan Wesley Routh seems to have been motivated by his support for Ukraine and his fear that Trump would allow Russia to overwhelm that nation.

It’s easy to blame the divisiveness Trump has promulgated, but it’s more complicated than that. First, none of the four incidents described above was overtly political – that is, none of them appears to have been about a left- or right-wing extremist attempting to kill an opposition leader. That’s the only good news in this madness. One thing that stands out, however, is that all four incidents involved guns the perpetrators shouldn’t have had.

It’s a simple truth that modern America is locked in a battle over sensible gun control laws that is continually being won by right-wing extremists. This has nothing to do with the Second Amendment to the Constitution which was intended to maintain a well-armed, regulated militia. It is about profit and political gain at the expense of a culture that has become wholly irresponsible. The latest school shooting, in Ohio, had more to do with an irresponsible father instilling a young son with the wrong values than anything else.

As a supporter of policies that cause people to think they have right to take up arms to get what they want, it’s reasonable to remind Trump that he is as much a part of the problem as the nut cases who use guns to commit mayhem. Two attempts on his life might make Trump rethink his position on gun control, but it’s more likely that he’ll blame progressives for going after him.

Trump’s ever more extremist positions as a candidate have America frightened, both by the prospects of a second Trump term, and by the divisive, angry climate he created. He has energized the worst tendencies in Americans and attempted to normalize them for his own benefit. I do not support political violence of any kind, but I also have no sympathy for Trump. If you believe in karma, he deserves what he got.

We seem caught in a vicious cycle in this election season. One side continually advocates violence, and then looks on in wonder as it erupts against them. This is the culture Trump has fostered, and it must stop. The sooner he’s off our radar, the better off we’ll be.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Desperation

Posted on September 13, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 13, 2024

As children we were fascinated with animals. Our first books were about lovable, cuddly creatures who talked and played like we did. As we got older, we learned to be wary around animals. My experiences as a Boy Scout were populated by gems of wisdom like, “Don’t ever get between a bear cub and its mother;” “A rattlesnake will only bite you if it feels threatened;” “Never approach a wounded or frightened animal;” and cliches like “As dangerous as a cornered rat.”

We know animals have feelings, and stripped of civilized mores, their reactions to threats are entirely driven by their survival instincts. We think of ourselves as superior to lower animals, but the worse the circumstances we find ourselves in, the more our reactions mimic theirs. Fear, vulnerably, and terror cause us to forget our civilized training, and focus on survival.

Like all animals, if something or someone we care about is threatened, we fight to protect it; if we feel personally endangered, we either cower in fear or strike out pre-emptively; if we’re hurt or terrified, we often act irrationally or unpredictably; if we’re desperate, we’ll do virtually anything to save ourselves. For most of us, situations that evoke those behaviors are rare. We obey our civilized conditioning most of the time, unless we find ourselves in a raging fire or the middle of a terrorist attack.

But those of us who are insecure or suffer from psychiatric disorders, those of us who are unconscionably self-centered and incapable of feeling sympathy or compassion, those of us who are so emotionally retarded and desperate for love and adulation that those needs dominate our every action – those people behave like predatory animals at the slightest provocation.

We often use animals as surrogates. TV commercials use lovable dogs to put viewers in a receptive frame of mind, and scenes of tortured or neglected animals to rend our hearts. Donald Trump and JD Vance’s desperation in the presidential race caused them to fabricate a story about Democrats looking the other way as rapacious, murderous migrants steal and eat people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio, JD Vance’s state. Despite the town’s mayor and Ohio Governor Mike Dewine debunking the crazy rumors, and local police saying there is no evidence any such thing ever occurred, Trump and Vance continue to push the story despite being mocked throughout the news and social media. Why would they do something so ridiculous?

The easy answer is to review how animals react when they feel frightened or trapped, and to recall that stripped of filters and values, we’re animals, too. Donald Trump, who is as amoral, narcissistic, and unfettered as he can be, is the perfect test subject. He knows he’s unqualified to lead, he’s totally ignorant about governing and diplomacy, and his record is one of failure and ignoring the needs of the vast majority of Americans. But he’s obsessed with winning, and in this campaign, of staying out of prison for his crimes. He’s frightened and desperate, so he behaves like the uncivilized animal he is.

But before we conclude that the election is all but over, that the next fifty-two days will see a steady deterioration in his behavior and ability to function rationally, let’s hear what Pete Butttigieg has to say about that. The low-keyed, intelligent, former presidential candidate believes Trump is dissembling and sabotaging his own campaign, but he warns that there’s another, chilling dimension to this madness.

Trump is not just a desperate cornered rat, he’s also a sly fox and a dangerous snake in the grass. Buttigieg believes his craziness is part of a strategy. He says Trump knows he can’t run on his record, and he can’t compete with Kamala Harris on policy because he knows nothing about policy himself, and he denies any connection to Project 2025, which was written by his supporters as a blueprint for a second Trump administration. He is beside himself because the media love Harris and he’s unable to get the spotlight to stay on him.

Buttigieg says Trump’s only remaining course of action is to do and say crazy, outrageous things to force the media to pay attention to him. His base has never cared whether anything he said made sense, so why would they start now? If Pete is right, and I believe he is, Trump is even more unhinged than we thought. He’s terrified of losing, of being rejected by the voters, and ultimately, of being held accountable for his crimes. As such he is as dangerous as a cornered rat or a wounded tiger.

Someone like that must not only be defeated, he must lose by a margin that cannot be questioned, no matter how rabid his base is. I know you’re tired of hearing this, but the next election may be the most important event of our lives.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Conflicting Moralities

Posted on September 12, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 12, 2024

Like most people who slogged through tortuous university educations, I endured several courses in literature and philosophy. It wasn’t apparent back then, but with the perspective of time, I realized that the school of thought that made the greatest impression on me was the German fascination with the contrast between the basic natures of the powerful and the weak.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that there are two distinctly different moralities which he called Master Morality and Slave Morality. The former describes the values of “aristocrats,” the latter of everyone else. Together, they offer insight into Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.

Nietzsche’s aristocrats, people we would today describe as autocrats and dictators, believe they possess a God-given right to rule over others. They believe themselves to be noble and inherently superior to the masses they govern, almost as if they were a different species. They value power and freedom, but that freedom extends only to those who possess the wealth and power to attain what they desire.

The oppressed, the subjects of the aristocrats, value charity, sympathy, and compassion. To Nietzsche, this was a double-edged sword. On one hand, it enabled slaves and other downtrodden groups to maintain sanity and dignity, because in their powerless, poverty-stricken state, they needed to believe these were good things. But it also defined the aristocrats’ values as evil, kept the masses completely separate from the masters who despised them, and often gave the oppressed the energy they needed to revolt.

According to Nietzsche, these two moralities have driven western civilization for thousands of years. Keeping in mind that Nietzsche’s use of “master” and “slave” are simply surrogates for the powerful and the masses, we can make the case that the current struggle for American democracy between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris is an example of that struggle. Trump exhibits all the attributes of the aristocratic morality while Harris champions the tenets of the morality of the governed or the oppressed, depending who’s speaking.

The traditional view of history is that culture drives morality, but Nietzsche believed the opposite, that morality drives culture. That’s a very powerful concept, and it is a principal foundation of Nazism. Nietzsche, like Karl Marx before him, would describe the ebb and flow of the last century and a half of history as the struggle between the master class attempting to impose its will and the desires of the governed to live freely.

An article titled The Master and Slave Moralities: What He Really Meant offers insight into how this applies to Trump: “Masters are strong, creative, wealthy, and powerful. They can do whatever they like. They love themselves and see themselves as good. They name the opposites of themselves, the weak and feeble, as bad.” In an almost ironic nod toward Trump, the article notes that a system based on Master Morality “isn’t a blank check for sociopathy, but it [acknowledges that] some people might need to step on others to actualize themselves. Nietzsche compares the problem to hawks having it in their nature to eat lambs, [because it is] what the hawk needs to do to fully be a hawk.”

Having no regard for lambs may be natural for a hawk, but in humans, sociopathy and the inability to feel compassion are mental illnesses. They are not characteristics we seek in leaders; they are anathema to basic American values. Nietzsche went on to describe how the attitude of the aristocrats invariably resulted in a revolt of the masses, either physically or by revising attitudes. This occurs when divisiveness and resentment caused by constant overreach of the ruling class reach a boiling point that cannot be sustained.

Today, we see all of this playing out in an attempt by a minority of far-right extremists beholden to Donald Trump to impose their will on everyone else. Such a movement can only succeed in an environment of chaos and confusion that obscures truth, and one that plays on the fears and insecurities of people, especially those who struggle to make ends meet. It also depends on having a leader so psychotically intent on power and believing in the delusion of his own greatness that he appears fearless and indomitable.

Trump wants his opponents to interpret that as strength, but the more we learn about him the clearer it is that it’s just an artificial construct to hide his insecurity and weakness. It’s frightening that the United States could have come to such a pass. If there’s any comfort to be found, it’s in recognizing that if Nietzsche was right, all this has happened before, hundreds of times.

It’s simply the latest struggle between the forces of oppression and those of good will. It’s America’s turn to prove that we’re worth saving.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

If You Watched the Great Debate…

Posted on September 11, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 11, 2024

Usually, presidential debates do not deserve the name debate. A debate whose purpose is to illuminate competing policies and visions for the future can only work when both participants are there in good faith. By that definition, any debate that includes Donald Trump must fail. For Trump, debates are about intimidation, anger, lies, fantasies, and an immense ego constantly competing with good sense.

Last night’s debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris was true to form, except for the outcome. When Hillary Clinton debated Trump in 2016, it was clear that neither she nor her staff were prepared to deal with the onslaught of venomous rants he threw at her. In fairness, neither were any of the fifteen Republicans he vanquished in the primaries. No one was because no one like Donald Trump had ever been on a presidential debate stage before.

Never in all the presidential elections I’ve witnessed has a candidate running for an office that bears responsibility for defending our democracy and our Constitution been as craven and self-centered, so completely devoid of compassion and concern for the American people. For Clinton, it must have felt like going to a petting zoo and finding herself facing an angry, desperate lion in the savannah.

The same tactics that partly unnerved Clinton, didn’t work quite as effectively against Joe Biden in 2020. But in 2024, against an older, frailer Biden who was already trailing badly in the polls because of his age, Trump’s predatory, nonstop assault looked like the Nazi blitzkrieg of Poland. Clearly off his game since Biden dropped out of the race, we knew Trump didn’t possess the discipline to debate Harris properly. That’s partly because Trump has no policy details to offer, but mostly because he’s mentally ill with a narcissistic disorder that leaves him vulnerable to anyone who recognizes his Achilles heel.

Clearly, Harris and her handlers did. They knew the debate would not be won on policy. Harris presented her vision for a strong middle class, but as usual, Trump couldn’t focus on policy for more than a couple of minutes, when his fractured ego took over. If Trump’s plan was to smother her in a torrent of insane rants, hers was to needle him and get under his skin, and she did that with the accomplished skill of a successful federal prosecutor. She did it without raising her voice or sneering, and she delivered the most telling blows looking him straight in his eyes, while he, noticeably, seemed unable to look at her.

If the debate wasn’t about policy, what was it about? In the cult of personality that is the MAGA movement, Trump’s ego was all it could have been about. We’ve heard from most of the senior members of Trump’s Cabinet, most notably his Chiefs of Staff, Security Advisors, and Defnese Secretaries, about what it was like to be on the inside of his administration. In a world in which military leaders never speak out against their Commander in Chief, each of them described Trump as unfit to lead, incompetent, and dangerous. They told us how everything Trump does is transactional, ego-driven, and primarily focused on his own self-interest and prejudices. But Trump claims he fired them because they couldn’t do their jobs, and now they’re  getting even by undermining his candidacy.

That has worked well enough in the past to fool about two-fifths of America. Trump has always been masterful at turning things around and accusing his accusers of exactly what he is guilty of, and much of America has been unable to see through that. Any professional writer will tell you that a good story must show the reader what happens rather than just tell them about it, and that was Harris’s strategy.

Calling him names and insulting him would simply reduce her to his level. Instead, she calmly and skillfully executed a plan to enable us to watch Trump immolate himself, and he took the bait every time. He took it because he was unable to resist taking it, and he plunged into deeper and deeper rabbit holes every time. And while he fumed and ranted, becoming more incoherent and absurd with each passing moment, Harris smiled, arched her eyebrows, and used subtle body language to let everyone know she was in complete control.

Harris showed us she is ready to lead, and that she possesses both the strength and integrity to be president. But more importantly, she manipulated Trump into showing America why he can’t be trusted with power. If a multi-racial woman, whom he has repeatedly called stupid, weak, and incompetent could rattle him to the point where he was dysfunctional, Americans should ask, today, how easily he could be manipulated by people like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. Trump’s vulnerability is America’s vulnerability, and the world is far too dangerous for us to take that kind of risk.

For me, the best moment was when Harris told Trump that world leaders mocked him, and he responded by spending a full minute telling us how much Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban loves him.

Did you see enough?

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lock ’em Up

Posted on September 10, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 10, 2024

There are many things dictators and wannabe-dictators do to stay in power. The most common is the use of political arrests. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran all do it, and Hungary, which is still technically a democracy almost matches them. In 2020, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban forced a law through his parliament making it illegal to speak out against the government. In 2023, the same Orban forced the same parliament to pass a law making it illegal for any Hungarian to be involved with a foreign power attempting to influence Hungarian policy. Both laws were excuses to imprison anyone Orban considered a threat to him.

Russia and China have never been shy about incarcerating their opponents to keep them quiet, and if that doesn’t work, they tend to turn up dead in the tradition of Josef Stalin who is considered responsible for killing more than eight million of his own people. North Korea seems to have a tradition that murdering a relative is the most effective form of governmental succession. Iran’s intolerance for opposition figures explains why the families of thousands of people connected to the former Shah’s royal family now reside in Europe and North America.

If it’s not obvious where this is headed, look at what Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro did to remain in power. He declared victory in last July’s presidential election, although independent vote recounts showed that he had lost to opposition leader Edmundo Gonzalez by a significant margin. With the possibility of massive unrest or civil war looming, Gonzalez had to be rescued from Venezuela by Spain where he was granted asylum.

If this doesn’t remind you of Donald Trump, we don’t live on the same planet. In 2016, Trump instigated crowds to chant, “Lock her up!” in response to the highly exaggerated Hillary Clinton email scandal. Someone on Clinton’s staff had clearly used poor judgment in allowing her to use her personal email account for government business, as her counterpart in George W. Bush’s cabinet, Colin Powell had admitted doing.

What Clinton inadvertently did wasn’t a crime, and compared to Trump claiming he had a right to retain classified documents after leaving office in clear violation of federal law, it was a trivial matter. By contrast, when the crowd at one of Kamala Harris’s rallies chanted, “Lock Him Up” over the federal indictments and convictions Trump faces, she quieted the crowd and said, “No, we don’t do that.”

Trump believes that the President should have the power to lock up anyone he perceives as a political enemy (if and only if he is the president.) This one minute video shows him insisting that Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden all be imprisoned, and includes a 2016 clip in which he raises the horrifying possibility that if Clinton defeated him we might have a sitting president under criminal indictment who would have to stand trial.

In recent days, Trump has expanded his threats. He says he plans to cast a wide net and prosecute everyone he perceives as disloyal to him. As he has demonstrated repeatedly, Trump makes no distinction between supporting the Constitution and the president and personal loyalty to him.

People used to refer to President Reagan as “teflon Reagan” because none of the scandals or missteps in his administration ever hurt him politically. But Reagan, like Harry Truman, understood that the buck stopped with him, and he always stood up and accepted responsibility for his actions and those of his subordinates. He understood that Americans are forgiving of people who admit their errors. But Trump is neither Ronald Reagan nor a principled Conservative. In the fight for the minds of the several thousand undecided voters in battleground states, I’m betting those voters will see the difference.

Trump has benefitted from a different form of teflon coating than Reagan’s. Known everywhere as a serial liar, and somehow, not paying a price for it, he now winks at us when he tells us his plans to become a dictator and tear up the Constitution, as though it’s all just a big joke. But it’s not. As the majority of his former cabinet and top military leaders, including his ultra-Conservative Vice President, Mike Pence have assured us, Trump’s plans to undermine our democracy aren’t lies. He means every word of it, and he is unfit to ever wield power again.

As tonight’s debate looms, for the sake of our future, I hope Kamala Harris is able to drive the point home. As Hillary Clinton advised her, the surest way to defeat Trump is to give him enough rope to self-destruct, and I believe Harris will.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Debate 2.0

Posted on September 4, 2024 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, September 4, 2024

Debate 2.0 is a direct consequence of Debate 1.0, in which Donald Trump put on a shameless display of ignoring every rule and shot gunning President Biden with a nonstop assault of lies, exaggerations, and complete fabrications. At the time, we who believe that re-electing Trump would have catastrophic consequences for America could only hang our heads. In retrospect, it’s doubtful that any of us, expecting a rational debate and unprepared for the kind of attack Trump launched would have handled it well, but for the nearly 82-year-old president who was still weakened from a bout with COVID, Debate 1.0 raised questions like – what if Putin or Xi went after him with the same tactics?

Those questions may or may not have been fair. Backed by talented aides and the best minds available, facing off in the Situation Room in a crisis or at a G7 or summit meeting is something Biden has been doing for decades – he could still do it in his sleep. But perception is everything in politics, and younger voters who think older people should be content to be grandparents had lost confidence in him. Since a Trump victory in November would be the worst possible outcome for America, the Democrats turned lemons into lemonade posturing Biden’s withdrawal as passing the torch to the next generation.

If his behavior since Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee is a good indicator, Debate 2.0, which will be aired Tuesday, September 10th on ABC, will feature Trump trying to make it a replay of Debate 1.0. He’ll try but he won’t succeed. The reason Trump has been so successful at destroying the traditional Conservative movement and the Republican Party is that until Trump, no one had encountered a politician who possessed his unique combination of shameless narcissism, willingness to lie and pander about every issue to anyone who could help him win, and the personality of a vicious predator. Trump turned the political arena into a Roman gladiator stage.

While it’s shocking to recall Trump knocking off every contender in 2016 like a bunch of dominoes, we’ve seen his magic wane since then. He lost in 2020, and he is generally seen as the reason Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in 2020 and regained only the barest majority in 2022. What we learned from all that is that women, people of color, and other educated suburbanites reject the core of who Trump is, and they’re wise to the fact that there is no policy substance in anything he says. It’s really simple – Trump will flip on a dime if he sees an opportunity to increase his wealth or power. The health and security of the United States matters to him only in that if the country fails it will take Trump’s fortune down with it.

The message today is that forewarned is forearmed, and Kamala Harris is younger, healthier, smarter, and quicker on her feet than Trump. Imagine the kind of mind it takes to be a successful prosecutor and to have worked her way up from law clerk to state’s attorney to California Attorney General to U. S. Senator to Vice President, and then increase that by an order of magnitude because Harris did all that as a mixed-race woman. Watching her for the last six weeks, I was most impressed by how calm and cool she was. She hasn’t missed a beat or misspoken; she hasn’t seemed the least bit nervous or flustered; and she has demonstrated that she can work a crowd almost as well as Barack Obama. When she speaks, whether in a packed basketball arena or a stadium, she has them eating out of her hand. And when the crowd is mostly black, she has them in such thrall they sound like a revival meeting.

On September 10th, when Harris and Trump face off, not only will she not be flustered or intimidated by him, she will be the one who appears calm and controlled. If he interrupts or talks over her (muted microphones can’t prevent that) she will smile sweetly and say, “I’m speaking, Donald.” When he attempts to insult or denigrate her, she will simply repeat his list of indictments and convictions, perhaps going back to some of Donald’s best known rip-offs like Trump University. She will remind him that she is a respected prosecutor while he is a convicted felon guilty of fraud and sexually assaulting women. And all Trump will see and hear is that a black/Indian woman is stripping him naked in front of a hundred million viewers.

Debate 2.0 may not have the disastrous immediate impact Debate 1.0 had, but it will leave no doubt in the minds of undecided voters that Donald Trump is a grifter and a bitter old man desperate to stay out of prison. He doesn’t belong on the same stage as Kamala Harris.

Posted in Articles | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment