I feel sorry for Donald Drumpf.
I know, I know, it's obvious he thinks everyone else on the planet Earth is or should be envious of him; he spends a lot of energy bragging and a lot of wealth on gold-plating everything in the belief that gold-plated toilets mean "success" and "class" and "winning". That's the world he lives in; every moment of every day, and every detail of every moment, is spent showing off, trying to elicit envy and convince people he's just on top of the world and to be Donald Drumpf is to be the best person anyone could hope to be, ever. It looks exhausting, frankly, the Energizer-Bunny of Conspicuous Consumption trying to spend enough money to believe that spending money is the goal of every life and nothing could possibly be worth more. Even the thing he himself identifies as most important to him, "having a young piece of ass", is a function of wealth; he's bought the twenties of three different women at this point and will no doubt continue doing so until he dies, an ancient has-been still vain of his appearance, making jokes about his alleged sexual performance with yet another twenty-two year old Eastern European men's magazine model.
So why? What's tragic about him, and by extension, the country which has recently answered a lot of polls saying they would vote for him? What's painful and horrible and downright depressing about the America that could possibly imagine Drumpf would "make it great again"? He has no idea what the greatness of this country is. None. He thinks he does; he thinks it's what his own grandfather and father did, coming to the United States and getting rich, buying up slum neighborhoods and raising the rents, evicting former tenants and refusing to rent to black people. If you asked Donald Drumpf what the American Dream is, he'd say it's the idea that anyone can get rich if they are really clever and work hard enough. What else could it possibly mean??? What else IS there?
Donald Drumpf explained in an interview how he sees the world. When he meets someone, what he has to figure out, if he doesn't already know, is whether he is richer than they are and they have to kiss his ass... or if they are richer than he is, and he has to kiss their ass. He delivered this analysis in a boastful tone, as though he was clever to have figured out that this is just how the world works, and so brave and outspoken that he would say out loud how the world works and not pretend that there's anything else going on, ever, other than the ass-kissing ladder of wealth and power. He counts himself as a big man because so many people have to kiss his ass... and if he has to kiss a few richer asses, well, that's where his "all that really matters is a young piece of ass" comes in. So you have to crawl and kowtow to those richer than you... so what, as long as the adoring gaze of the newest model of trophy wife is there to salve the humiliation and make you believe, again, that you are The Man? Of course, I have to kiss richer asses… but look, everybody, I have gold toilets, aren’t you jealous of me? Here’s a nude picture of my model wife, isn’t she hot? It’s hard not to see his frantic need for envy as a salve for the lack of self-respect.
This ladder of humiliation and cowardice is not what the founders of this country meant by a free nation. The situation as Drumpf describes it isn't new, no matter how much he prides himself on being the genius who "figured out" how the asskissing scale functions; kissing ass upwards is exactly how the decadent monarchies of the colonial period in Europe functioned. To be poor meant to grovel to one's "betters", and those "betters" groveled to the lords one step above them, all the way up to the monarchy. The real revolutionary content of the American Revolution was the Jeffersonian ideal of a country of free men supporting themselves through labor-- not wage labor, but free labor on their own property to sustain their own families. Working for a living was no longer to be shameful, but ennobled; joining the parasite aristocracy was no longer to be anyone's goal, and the pride and dignity of self-directed labor supporting one's own family would mean a nation of small property owners respecting themselves and each other.... NOT a ladder of wealth with every man groveling to the richer..and expecting the servility of the poorer. Whether "anyone" born in this country can mount that ladder of wealth isn't even really the point; even if how wealthy one becomes could in fact be separated from one's birth, the American dream is not to become a parasite aristocrat kissing the ass of the sovereign... it is a nation in which no one has to kiss anyone else's ass to survive and thrive.
Recently Hillary Clinton echoed the idea that the American dream is to join the middle class. That speech reminded me, sadly, of a quote from an early labor union leader who said that the goal of the working man is that someday he will no longer have to work with his hands. People will always work with their hands, and it's not labor itself that is demeaning, but the way we demean labor by paying low wages and treating those who work for low wages badly. If Hillary Clinton means that everyone who works industriously should be paid middle class wages and treated with middle class respect, then she's right; if she means our goal ought to be just to get out of the ranks of the working class and become high-priced lawyers, she's very wrong indeed. Joining the white collar middle class and working at a desk can’t be the goal for everyone, insofar as not all necessary labor is desk work; someone is going to have to drive a garbage truck and pick up the bins. The goal must be to make every job a middle class job— with a living wage and decent recognition as honest labor someone needs to do, unless everyone is going to do it for themselves. Middle class describes a status: the higher pay and better conditions and more respect that is currently given to some sorts of work needs to be given to all work.
It's not enough for some few people to get out of bad conditions, leaving the bad conditions there to be inflicted on someone else. Recently I heard a man begin an argument against the "Fight for $15" movement among fast food workers by saying that even if we didn't agree that fast food work didn't deserve a living wage, surely we could all agree there was SOME work that wasn't "worth" a wage high enough to live on? For instance, he said, whoever's job is picking up the dogshit in the public park-- that's EASY, and ANYONE could do it, and low status-- surely THAT work didn't "deserve" to be paid $15? People shouldn't be doing that work if they were worth anything-- it shouldn't pay a living wage, it should be paid very little in order to motivate people to get better jobs. Really, this man went on to explain, it was for the benefit of the people who work jobs "like that" that the wages are kept so low-- otherwise, people might settle for living on the wages of that job instead of "making something" of themselves.
Think about that. Think about what's implied by the idea that some work is so "low" that it's shameful for people to do it, and the idea that it's right to make the people who do it suffer in order to make them do something else "better".... and "make something" of oneself. Were we nothing, before? Before someone gets a promotion or a new job with better wages, were they nothing, no one... nobody? And since parks have to get cleaned up and someone IS going to have to pick up the dog crap that thoughtless people leave behind (unless we are going to do it ourselves OR put up with stepping in it)... is someone always going to have to be the nobody who does that job, who people look down on for doing it? Do we want to live in a system where we look down on people for doing necessary labor, and think of their dire poverty as the proper punishment to "make" them do something else “higher”? Defining people as nobodies lets people pretend that it's only skill, or difficulty, or education, or scarcity that makes labor worth anything at all; if it's work "anyone could do", they say, it's hardly worth a living wage. But no matter how many other people might do some work, that work is the actual life of the particular person doing the work. An employer who pays a wage for forty or fifty or sixty hours of someone's life, every week, is getting the labor capacity of one human life. That's not next to nothing... unless we pre-define the people who do it as nobodies whose lives are worth nothing.
In fact, the Liberal economists of the eighteenth century who argued for the enclosure movement did just that; they defined the worth of a poor person's life as nothing at all, unless their labor was directed by a boss and resulted in profits for that employer. Just like the fellow above who argued that the low minimum wage was "for their own good" because it makes people "better themselves", the inventors of the economic Invisible Hand said that the existence of agricultural commons upon which poor villagers could subsist (if the wages offered by large landowners were deemed insufficient) was an evil, producing only "drunkenness and vice". Unless he is working for a wealthier farmer, in other words, a poor person's life is worth nothing to anyone, not even himself, and it's better they not be allowed to live unless working for wages. For their own good, peasants "needed" to be forced to work for wages; otherwise, their existence was an evil. “Drunkenness and vice” has now been updated to “sitting on the couch watching TV” as the worthless waste our lives are presumed to be, if no employer is making a profit from our labor.
The enclosure movement was not unknown to the intellectuals and writers and rebels of the American revolution; they saw people being deprived of the means of self-sufficiency and forced into a subservient relationship with employers who treated them badly and paid them little. Wealthy agricultural magnates with thousands of acres treated their workers with the same contempt that "real Englishmen" voiced for colonials-- one infamous quote from a famous British aristocrat right before the war asked "Why should they be let to live there at all, unless it be to the benefit of the mother country?" The extraction of wealth from the colonies to the metropole was the only excuse for the existence of colonies and colonials; why should they live, except to profit us? The American riposte, of course, was that we live to profit ourselves, not some overlords to whom we owe nothing. And as flawed as the contemporary version of the ideal was-- as limited as their conception of citizenship was, restricting full personhood to free white men-- it has been an ideal that provides the impetus for its own improvement, the ammunition with which women and African-Americans and every other formerly subsumed groups claimed the dignity of freedom and independence.
Wealth is not the American dream. People confuse the American dream with "getting rich" or "joining the middle class" only because the form of the chains that afflict us now tends to be financial; we aren't free because we can't afford it, so if only I were rich enough, I wouldn't have to put up with humiliation and deprivation. I could quit a job I hated that treated me badly, and get a better one where they treat workers decently. If I had the money, I could say no to this… and live until I find something better. When half the American population lives from one paycheck to the next, we need our jobs and are terrified of losing them. We treat people who need help with contempt and the presumption of immorality; if you aren’t comfortably off, you have to prove you aren’t worthless, and there are a lot of people for whom the definition of worth seems to be a function of one’s paycheck and nothing else. Our media equates wealth with being Somebody, to use Robert Fuller's term; whatever rich people do with their lives, whether it makes a salary or not, it's viewed as worthwhile, as Doing Something. If you're poor, you're nobody; no matter what you actually do with your time, no matter how hard you actually work, you're presumptively in need of shaming to "make you make something of yourself."
The American dream is the ideal of a country where we treat one another as equals and where no one is Nobody. It's a country where everyone has enough to work for themselves, and not spend their entire lives working for someone else; and even when one person works for another, each can respect the other and not exploit them. The American dream is not a country where "anyone" has a chance to mount higher on the ass-kissing ladder and make more people kiss their asses; it's a country where a free citizenry lives by the labor of our hands and minds and no one has to kiss ass. No matter how much money Donald Drumpf manages to scam out of banks and stockholders and the credulous buyers of his Drumpf University "real estate seminars," he hasn't achieved the American dream, and he isn't fit to make America great again. Whatever he thinks that means, it's evident he doesn't understand the ideal of universal human dignity that was shared by the founders of this republic. Of course, they got it wrong a lot of the time, and committed the same sins of mistreatment of others that I am pointing out here; in one of Martha Washington’s letters, for instance, she complains about a slave being “lazy” and “worthless” because “the moment you take your eyes off her, she’s off working for herself.” Think about that definition of sloth; if your labor is for yourself, rather than for your owner/boss, it’s not really work; you’re only worth what you are worth to them. The ideal of human equality means that we are worth what we are worth to ourselves, our lives are valuable in ourselves, not merely for what someone else can get from us. That ideal does have an economic underpinning; to reach it, everyone has to be able to accumulate enough to be able to afford the property to work for ourselves. The enormous breadth of the American continent, as of yet unowned by the aristocrats who owned every acre of Europe, inspired Americans to think that everyone could work for ourselves, and live with each other as neighbors who respect one another, without overlords or aristocracies to employ us and rule us and look down on us. The conquest of the Americas was a genocidal crime, but not because the ideal of self-sufficient, reciprocally respectful equality is inherently flawed. It remains the most noble and humane ideal yet conceived.
Americans are supposed to exercise the responsibility of governing ourselves, and enjoy the dignity of adults in a community we ourselves rule. In the very first years of the American government, the practice we now know as "lobbying" was actually illegal; one man couldn't hire another to speak for him to his political representative. The sale of influence that Donald Drumpf exults in exposing as "the way things work" is not the way things have to work or the way things are supposed to work; free men and women don't buy and sell political influence in a properly functioning democratic system. For all his willingness to rip off the curtains and tell the public how influence is bought and sold, Drumpf doesn't seem to understand what, if anything, is wrong with that marketplace, any more than he understands what's wrong with thinking of women as pieces of ass; when asked recently whether he sees the long history of his misogynist comments as a problem, Drumpf only laughed and said that the rest of them say things just as bad or worse behind closed doors. It's as though "we're all pigs" is an adequate reply to the charge of being a pig. Being public about one's being an asshole does not make the asshole acceptable.
Drumpf often parades his willingness to expose the corruption of American politics as a virtue-- his vaunted "honesty" and the fact that as a former buyer of politicians, he is not himself bought by anyone else-- but with a weird inability to understand that what he is describing IS actually corruption... not just "the way things are". We don't want a leader who is an expert in corruption, we want one who understands the nature of corruption and how it is different from integrity; I cannot imagine what someone like Donald Drumpf thinks the word integrity means. He is a walking demonstration of a "successful" American citizen who nevertheless is a resounding failure at what the American founders wanted for our citizenry; all his wealth only means he expects almost everyone to kiss his ass, and he himself only has to kiss the relatively few posteriors that are attached to bigger bank accounts. He can't even imagine a life of independence and dignity; only the narcissistic pleasures of imagining others to envy his gold-plated toilets, and the enjoyment of the possession of a trophy wife half his age; even his enjoyment of that "young piece of ass" seems increasingly one of ego rather than eroticism, as he likes to claim ascendance over other men on the basis of "my wife is hotter than yours".
Compare his frantic "dealmaking" and self-aggrandizement and his making of his own name into an advertising brand to the Jeffersonian vision of an America of small producers, each family supporting themselves on their own property, neither lording it over anyone nor needing to bend the knee; an America of dignity and real worth, where people are valued for their labor and the excellence of their contributions to the community and mankind in general. An America where no one measures his worth by how many people he can spit on, and where no one needs to push someone else down to stay afloat. That is the American dream, of life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness unhindered by the social stratifications of class-bound Europe. Replacing the ideal of freedom and dignity with a replacement aristocracy of wealth and crass disrespect would have distressed every one of the men who severed the colonies from the empire and declared that our lives and labors are our own, and we shall keep the value of them for ourselves and decide for ourselves how to take care of our communities and run our country.
We need to take a long look at Donald Drumpf and realize that his life isn't one we envy, because no one who needs to be envied that badly is a free man, no matter how much money he spends; that what Americans deserve is dignity, and money is only a means to that end. Every human life is worthwhile, if only to the person living it, and everyone who labors deserves an income that can support independence and freedom; an American citizen with a job cleaning up public parks should be appreciated for doing a good job and paid enough to live a healthy, safe life. Any American citizen who votes, with a job doing necessary work, the respect and appreciation of his community, and a public library card, has a better life than any man who accepts that has to kiss the ass of someone richer than he... no matter how many gold-plated toilets he puts his name on.