Not So Silent

        Last night, before a half empty arena in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Donald Trump continued his apparent attempts at the resurrection of the ghost of Richard Nixon.

        Nixon, was under ever increasing pressure over Viet Nam and increasing awareness that, except for, possibly, Sammy Davis Junior, most Black Americans ( and a fair number if White ones) didn’t really care for him and that he needed to find some sort of unifying catch phrase on which to build support for the second election campaign. He, or more likely an unidentified speechwriter, coined a phrase which Donald Trump reiterated last night.

  

      In October 1969, less than year into Nixon’s first term, there were more massive anti-war demonstrations. With his post inaugural grace period (or “honeymoon” as politicos sometimes call the first six months of a Presidential term) over,  anti-war sentiment was rising and, like LBJ before him, Richard Nixon remained committed to what many Americans, by then including a steadily increasing stream of vocal former draftee veteran survivors, were calling the wrong war, fought for the wrong reason (defense of J.F. Dulles “domino theory”), in the wrong place.

        Within just a few months after being sworn in, Nixon had authorized a series of clandestine bombings over the non-combatant states of Laos and Cambodia. When the news of these broke in the US, they were justified/rationalized as being targeted at Viet Cong “havens” inside these nations. To many it seemed analogous to Canadians bombing New Hampshire because Canadian criminals were hiding there. While evaluations vary widely on the final impact of carpet bombing areas which included thousands of Cambodian civilians, most historians are in accord that the destabilization of the Cambodian government and the rise of a brutal regime under the Khmer Rouge Communist insurgents  ultimately resulted in the death of roughly 1 million Cambodians. (see “The Killing Fields”)

        While Nixon was concerned about domestic order, he was also concerned that it seemed many Americans were becoming strongly disaffected with him over the “Menu” bombings with racial issues a close second. He had often iterated as a campaign promise that he had a “secret” plan to end the war, and it wasn’t happening.  He also recalled the Presidential campaign of George Wallace of Alabama as a third-party candidate in 1968, and had, with the help of willing party hacks, crafted what would become known as the “southern strategy.”

          This was what was refined, later, by Republican strategist Lee Atwater, master of “dirty tricks,” into a series of campaign tactics which were basic to getting votes for Regan and both Bushes. Atwater’s “finest hour” was the infamous and racist Willie Horton ad used in the 1988 campaign to destroy Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis, Even though Atwater died in 1991, his tradition of half-truths and smears survives well into the 21^st century in the personages of Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, Sean Hannity, Rudy Giuliani, and, especially, Donald Trump who, needing no Lee Atwater, makes up his own lies, usually ad lib.   

        For Nixon, the Southern Strategy was a sort of reaching out to Southern Whites with language which said, “I’m saying “this” (“Law and Order” for example) but you know what I really mean (“For white people”)”  It’s called “dog whistle” politics, and one of the key coded messages was delivered in a speech of November, 1969, following the first of what would be an escalating series of anti-war demonstrations leading up to, in May of 1970, 4 deaths at Kent State University.     

        Nixon said, in part, "And so tonight, to you, the great silent majority, my fellow Americans, I ask for your support." (Several years later, sham Pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell would morph the term into “moral majority.”)  Exactly what Nixon meant, only Nixon knew, but to his supporters it connoted being part of a group who shared similar values. They, especially, he hoped Southern Whites, would “get” that Nixon intended racial superiority to be one of those concepts, law and order (again along racial lines) another. Along the way, he hoped this group spirit would also continue supporting the War in Vietnam until he could hammer out a “peace with honor” (his words).

        Yeah, I know, “So what, Mike?”  Well, last night an embattled and embittered narcissist resurrected the same phrase in a rally (read that as “partially taxpayer funded campaign event”) in Tulsa.  Like Nixon, facing dwindling support with an election on the horizon, Trump appealed to the “silent majority.”  

        Anyone literate and even marginally politically aware must grasp that, like Nixon, Trump is desperately appealing to the  electorate's baser instincts of greed and selfishness" as well as the racial divisiveness which Trump has displayed throughout -  I was going to say “his term” here, but it’s a lifelong trait with Trump.

        To say “majority” and link that with “good” is to assert the existence of a “minority” (and everyone knows who minorities are) and suggest that they are somehow children of a lesser God. They are people in America who are not white, is the message. If the majority is moral, then surely the minority must be less so.

        With Nixon, a large portion of emotional makeup of the man was his lifelong inferiority complex. Oddly the somewhat similar actions of Donald Trump are driven by the diametric opposite. He has a narcissistic personality, cultivated by being a child of privilege, the chosen one, reared and given just under half a billion by a racist father who was himself a tax cheat. It seems an almost undistinguishable difference since the actions are similar, but one can almost feel somewhat sorry for Nixon - poor farm kid, second fiddle to an older brother in hid father’s eyes, loved his mother (every public mention of her involved the line “My mother was a saint”) military veteran, struggling most of his life to get up the hill and, moreover, to be loved.

       Trump, on the other hand, was born on the hilltop, prep school reared, draft dodger, rarely mentions parental memories, demands, not hopes, to be adored, and is desperate not to be dragged off the hill, trying to stay there by pandering to those at the bottom with whom, unlike Nixon, he can never even identify and who, in fact, he loathes, except when they vote.

Either way, it is America who pays the price.