Radio Free New Hampshire: Ice Cream For Supper

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire, InDepth NH

The third annual No Kings protests took place last weekend. It’s politics as culture for the progressive left, offered with the rationale that turnabout is fair play. These demonstrations posit neither attainable goals, coherent strategies, nor productive methods. They seek only to unite people in their hatred of Donald Trump. It’s a visceral, joyful, and childlike hate. It must feel good.

Hatred is seductive that way. But if those who indulge themselves don’t offer an alternative to what they despise, it can also be counterproductive.

Organizers were glad to see more young people present this time, for which they credited the war in Iran. And that’s a good example of the problem at hand. The left upbraids Trump for failing to clarify his goals; they mourn how many innocent lives are being lost; they chirp at how the world economy is being harmed by Iran’s weaponization of the oil trade. All legitimate points (some more legitimate than others), yet wholly blind to whether the status quo was any better. Opposition to this war tends to be so knee-jerk and morally pure that it finally merges into support for the Iranian regime itself: a crew of venal thugs that just murdered between ten and thirty thousand of their own citizens… for protesting in public.

These anti-Trump demonstrations get a lot of press, anyway. Reporters seem enamored of them because reporters want to be heroes. And in spite of some new youthful faces, they also seem to be dominated by Trump’s own generational cohort: older people with memories of the sixties. The sixties were big when it came to demonstrations. Like journalism itself, demonstrations mattered more back then.

Take how the left stormed the Democratic Convention in Chicago, in 1968. They fought Mayor Daley’s cops on the streets and they fought Hubert Humprey’s delegates in the hall. They were so successful in crippling their own party that Humphrey left town with a profound electoral deficit to make up. He needed to scrap for months to gain momentum again. He only did so towards November, when the party’s regulars finally swallowed their distaste for the spectacle of his nomination. He then lost by mere percentage points to Dick Nixon. His polling was rising by then; Nixon’s was falling; had that campaign lasted another few weeks, Humphrey might have won. He also might have won had those demonstrators not done everything they could to destroy his career for the joy and the pleasure of community upheaval.

By the way, Daley (their most convenient villain) was a dove. Chicago’s infamous ward-heeler actually cared about the workers who voted for him, he disliked seeing American boys sacrificed in the sad war being fought in Viet Nam, and his had been a serious voice for peace in Lyndon Johnson’s White House. The day’s progressives who fought his establishment neither knew nor cared about those facts. It sufficed for them that he had a crew cut, he yelled when he was mad, and he hated rock and roll. Politics was laced with culture then too. (People forget how viscerally Johnson was likewise attacked by the left– for his accent, his face, his personal habits. He could not man-handle a beagle without cliques of Ivy League snobs snickering behind his back.)

Even more than Daley did, more than Johnson did, and more than Humphrey did—all true leaders with bona fide credentials—Donald Trump offers both easy targets for satire and grounds for serious concern. Our president wants his name on the currency. He drapes his portrait over the sides of buildings like the autocrats of yore. He tears down portions of the White House and slathers the rest in gold leaf. He speaks glibly of dominating not only our enemies but our friends, he lacks the gravitas we not only expect but require for international affairs, and he throws more heat than light on nearly every domestic issue.

Yet he also tackles huge problems that his predecessors either ignored or dodged; he both possesses and evinces a fundamental optimism that the world can be a better place for all, in a way that merits sincere appreciation; and even his personality is that rare thing in the modern game – it’s genuine.

The lifeblood of politics has always run more mingled than popular demonstrations can encapsulate. These No Kings protests thrive on simplicity and emotion. Perhaps they serve some role in engaging people and exciting them for the prospect of change. Putting gas in the tank is great. But you still need a map and a place to go. Otherwise it’s candy for breakfast, candy for lunch, and a bowl of ice cream for supper.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.