On this Memorial Day, Tom Nichols ponders (at The Atlantic) the manly qualities men of his father’s generation valued that are glaringly absent in a commander-in-chief many of them support nonetheless:
I am a son of the working class, and I know these cultural standards. The men I grew up with think of themselves as pretty tough guys, and most of them are. They are not the products of elite universities and cosmopolitan living. These are men whose fathers and grandfathers came from a culture that looks down upon lying, cheating, and bragging, especially about sex or courage. (My father’s best friend got the Silver Star for wiping out a German machine-gun nest in Europe, and I never heard a word about it until after the man’s funeral.)
For all the flaws in their model of manliness, they were men, Nichols writes, “who understood that a man’s word is his bond and that a handshake means something. They are men who still believe in a day’s work for a day’s wages. They feel that you should never thank another man when he hands you a paycheck that you earned. They shoulder most burdens in silence—perhaps to an unhealthy degree—and know that there is honor in making an honest living and raising a family.”
Nichols catalogs Donald Trump’s failings in familiar details we don’t need to repeat here. His behavior before the world would get him beaten and/or shunned by the sorts we’ll rewatch today sacrificing for their mates and their country in Memorial Day film marathons.
Why then do so many working-class males celebrate a tarted up, stimulant–addicted, imitation aristocrat of a president with none of those qualities, a seven-year-old in a “morbidly obese,” 70-something year-old body?
Trump’s fans excuse him in spite of his pretensions to manliness, Nichols speculates, because Trump is not a man, but a boy, a perpetual preadolescent:
In the end, Trump will continue to act like a little boy, and his base, the voters who will stay with him to the end, will excuse him. When a grown man brags about being brave, it is unmanly and distasteful; when a little boy pulls out a cardboard sword and ties a towel around his neck like a cape, it’s endearing. When a rich and powerful old man whines about how unfairly he is being treated, we scowl and judge; when a little boy snuffles in his tears and says that he was bullied—treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, even—we comfort.
[…]
I think that working men, the kind raised as I was, know what kind of “man” Trump is. And still, the gratification they get from seeing Trump enrage the rest of the country is enough to earn their indulgence. I doubt, however, that Trump gives them the same consideration. Perhaps Howard Stern, of all people, said it best: “The oddity in all of this is the people Trump despises most, love him the most. The people who are voting for Trump for the most part … He’d be disgusted by them.” The tragedy is that they are not disgusted by him in return.
Because the enemy of my enemy is my friend?
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.