"Terrible Simplifiers"

OVER THE LAST NUMBER OF MONTHS I have been asked when I’m going to compose some blog posts on the phenomenon that is Donald Trump. It would be easy to accomplish, but I hesitate about writing about someone who might not know the difference between hummus and Hamas. We have all underestimated his appeal to the disenchanted, but as his loss in Iowa revealed last evening, he may be more of a polarizing rather than a populist figure.Donald Trump, along with numerous other seekers of power, forms the embodiment of what Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt called the “terrible simplifiers” – demagogues who seek power and fame by manipulating and exploiting the frustrations of those disenchanted with politics and politicians altogether. To be sure, politics itself these days is often characterized more by underperformance than delivering stable, even inspirational, government. And politicians themselves often appear more willing to play the role of party patsy than to carve out a space in the broader political order for those constituents who elected them.However else you term it, the decay of politics has led to the age of extremism and polarization, perhaps best exemplified presently in Donald Trump. The hyper-inflated kind of politics is easily spotted in the extremism, crippling partisanship, and sectarianism slowly creeping into what was once historically stable politics. The Republican Party in the United States was one of the most credentialed and able political organizations in the world. Today, as it fires off in all directions, it has shifted its historical ability to unite Americans to splintering them and making effective governing almost impossible.Canada has flirted with this kind of extremism but seems able to right itself when it seems to matter, keeping us distinctly different from our southern neighbours in ways that are still functional. As CBC writer Aaron Wherry stated at the end of yesterday’s Iowa voting: “American democracy is good for making Canadian democracy seem perfectly reasonable.” We watch our American cousins with interest and perhaps mild alarm at their flirtation with the terrible simplifiers, but we must be vigilant against such incursions into our own political system.The rise of these great and dividing simplifiers has resulted in countless improvised groups in politics, civil society, and the media that evade proper public scrutiny and hide themselves in the great anonymity of the Web. They create untold opportunities for activities of deceit, confusing a disenchanted citizenry in the process. It all leads to a form of “stupid” politics that cheapens both politician and citizen alike.Demagogues, charlatans, and hyper-partisan politicians have always been with us. What is new, however, is the environment we have allowed them to create within us a citizens that at least permits them easy access to power. This must be resisted at all costs.Democracy is messy and never easy. Voters have always grown disenchanted over time with their elected representatives, and politicians inevitably sink deeper into the party structure than their own constituencies. But such developments are repeatedly overcome by a politics that can still inspire and pull from within us the better angels of our natures – individually and collectively. And we are at our best as citizens when we can contain the negative aspects of extremism and oversimplification. For that to happen, though, we need a good dose of that one quality we have permitted to erode over time: trust.In his best-selling book V is for Vendetta, author Alan Moore notes that, “Demagoguery allows two roles: the torturer and the tortured. Twists people into joyless mannequins that fear and hate, while culture plunges into the abyss.” Excessive politics might belong to some terrible simplifiers, but culture belongs to us – all of us – and must never be permitted to atrophy because some leaders seek to arouse our anger instead of refining our intellect and our passions.