Throughout its 240-year history, the United States has consistently put forward for election and selected for the presidency a series of individuals who have been drawn, overwhelmingly, from among the most politically accomplished and credentialed in the country. Despite alternation in the party holding office and particular policies pursued, the men (as they have heretofore all been men) who have served in the presidential capacity have been qualified, serious, and driven by obvious commitment to public service and the preservation of the virtues of the republic. That Donald J Trump is not drawn from anywhere close to the mainstream of public life and lacks even the most rudimentary experience in politics is beyond dispute. That he is manifestly unqualified to be president of the United States is matter of argument that has been enumerated too many times, in too many places, and to too indisputable of a conclusion to warrant recounting here. That he is a sociopathic narcissist who is dangerously ill-suited to be entrusted with decisions over the use of nuclear weapons is perhaps less of an absolute fact, though one with enough circumstantial evidence to circle the earth ten times. That he has expressed an alarming amount of admiration for self-professed adversaries of the republic he proposes to lead is disturbingly unprecedented. The question, then, is how could a country with a nearly two-and-a-half century record of electing sensible, qualified, individuals to the office of the presidency possibly consider choosing as its executive someone so toweringly unstable and phenomenally risky?
The most potent reason for such a decision would be fear. It has been well-documented for decades by social scientists how impulses driven by fear and terror override rational thought and drive us into decisions that at other times would be justifiably insane. When a situation is literally do-or-die, you would be willing to take a chance that would never be acceptable otherwise. Jump off a 200-foot building to try to reach the one across the street? If it's the only way to escape the maniac with the knife, you just might. That this is as true for societies at large as it is for individuals is no less well-understood. Of societies that have, in moments of fear, confusion, despair and terror taken political and social choices that were risky at the time and self-destructive in the longer term, a full accounting is neither necessary nor possible here, though a few examples may help.
In 68BC, pirates sacked the Roman port of Ostia, burning the consular fleet and capturing senators, causing a massive sense of disorientation and vulnerability in the Roman people. This led directly to the lex Gabinius, granting new executive warmaking and security powers to the consul Pompey Magnus, and later to the series of events that undid the Republic and replaced it with an Empire within 40 years. In the fear and confusion of the aftermath of the terrible 1923 Tokyo earthquake and fire, the population lashed out at ethnic Koreans, prompting (and excusing) a military crackdown that laid the groundwork for the ethno-nationalism and fascism of the next 22 years and consequent military destruction of Japan. And, of course, the United States itself is still grappling with the meaning, implications and consequences of the suite of security policies adopted in the climate of anguish and bewilderment that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Fear does not make for rational policy choices, but rather turns the focus to the enemy, without or within, who must be removed to quell the fear, and the leader who promises to remove that enemy, whatever the costs may be. It is the goal of terrorism to create that fear, and feed that confusion. If there had been a presidential election in the immediate aftermath of September 2001, voters may very well have felt impelled to make as risky an electoral choice as Donald Trump. But the United States today is not in any state of danger as was the case fifteen years ago, as buildings smouldered and thousands lay dead. The country is richer and safer than it has ever been, more secure in its footing in the world, a colossus among its friends and adversaries alike. It should be content and optimistic. But it is nonetheless in the thrall of a great dread, a vast societal panic screaming to us that our world is in collapse, that we should be afraid and nervous, that our supposed "leaders" have lied to us, and that complete submission to a radical new direction is the only course that will make us whole and secure again, costs be damned. It can feel almost as if we have been the victims of an enormous terror attack all over again, and yet, we survey the continent for the wreckage and do not find it.
But we have been the victims of a terror attack, though its form has been so unprecedented, and perpetrated by a group of attackers so unexpected that we have likely failed to identify it for what it is.
Out from the recently-concluded Republican nominating convention, waves of shock, anger, confusion, fear, uncertainty and astonishment swept through the media, the electorate and even the world at large. The event was an exercise in instilling fear, doubt and dismay not only in its own supporters, but in its opponents, as well. It sought to destabilize our confidence in ourselves, in our understanding, and our conviction that our world made sense to us and that we were the masters of our fate and in control of our society. Over and over, we were told of our imminent doom, our national catastrophe, our benighted republic. All norms of political decency were shunted aside as one after another shrieked at us that our disaster was at hand. They told us to fear, and fear intensely, as they recounted the litany of alleged calamities. It was called to order by a howl of rage and rung out by the knell of doomsday.
This event and what followed from it was the attack of terror on our country. Its method was not a violence of war, but of the mind, a more nimble terror that inflicts the same lasting psychic scars of its more warlike cousin, but without the blood, bone and smoke that puts their provenance beyond dispute and stirs our anger against its perpetrators. No, the mass civic slaughter of these four days in Ohio left behind it anger, despair and rage, but also confusion, apprehension and bewilderment.
But it was, all of it, a fraud. It was a calculated manipulation of every man, woman and child in the country. It was first a manipulation of its supporters, to whom it promised an absolute and cathartic deliverance from a giant and fictitious evil at the price of unquestioned loyalty. Even more dangerously, though, it was also a manipulation of its opponents, who have been left with the sense that the thing for which they are fighting may even already be lost, that their leader is an elaborate lie and that they should doubt everything they thought was true. But the elaborate lie belongs to Trump. He and the perpetrators of this terror have taken all of us for dupes and cads and marks. Their fraud is the one that exceeds all others in its scope and reach and moral repugnance. For it is they who have sought to turn the country inwards on itself, so they might discredit all its cherished institutions and demand new ones in their own image, and for their own aggrandizement.
That these kinds of tactics have been regularly applied to powerful and dangerous effect by the kinds of autocratic manipulators who have formerly employed the manager of this campaign should be treated as a coincidence too risky to ignore. That they are being employed to pervert a republic of laws and institutions is a threat to the achievements of Western Civilization. That it is being done in the service of the egomania of a demented narcissist is a tragedy beyond measure. This is the effect of their psychic terror: that we would not even recognize that our fear is wholly their creation.
The abject mendacity and staggering deceit involved in such an act is political and moral crime without modern parallel in American politics. The proper response to the abyssal depths of such extreme depravity should be nothing short of absolute contempt, incontestable betrayal and lucid rage. That those in whom there might be entrusted the safeguarding of the values of the Republic and the welfare of the population should treat those values and that population with such narcissistic scorn reveals them for the hollow frauds that they are. They who would make us fearful to twist for their ends are not suited to lead us anywhere at all. They who treat our passions and our sentiments, our fear and our grief, our pain and our anguish, as playthings for their tricks of power are not only unfit to lead a Republic, but are nothing but morally vacant charlatans. They who would rip out the great, beating heart of the republic and threaten to trample it to death in front of the world for the sake of their avarice and self-regard are psychopathic extortionists of an unparalleled scale. They awaken and animate in us a hideous and fictive terror and then promise deliverance from it if only we would give them the keys to power. But they are the greater threat than the invented monster at which they wave their hands ever-more-wildly. Terror is the tactic, and fraud the strategy. But the provenance of this terror is now clear.
The RNC, in nominating an unqualified, unstable, madman for the office of the presidency, has concluded that the only path to his election is through the sustained terror of the American population and the complete discreditation of all the institutions of American society. As this was unlikely to arise in a condition of relative peace and prosperity, they have instead sought to create it out of thin air and dark words. But it is, all of it, a diet of lies.
It is they who have said repeatedly that we should call terrorism for what it is. So let us do that. Theirs is the terrorism that has been brought down on us this July in Ohio. It was not a terrorism of bombs and bullets and blood, but it was terrorism all the same.
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