It is truly an irony that many sophisticated European liberals now look back at the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H Bush Senior as periods when the western world’s fate lay in safe hands.
But the continuing degradation of rational politics in the US by the modern Republican party is creating a nostalgia even for figures whose credentials to sense and reason were once derided by the self-styled intellectual elite and the fashionable “commentariat” on this side of the Atlantic.
That Donald Trump could be a serious contender for the US presidency is deeply disturbing and is cause for profound anxiety.
That the GOP could find itself in the position of having Trump as its front-runner nominee is, frankly speaking, shocking.
But should we be shocked if the GOP willingly itself allowed itself to be hi-jacked by the Tea Party, by creationists, by media figures such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, and by nitwits such as Sarah Palin?
The extraordinary polarisation of US politics whose early days were so well chronicled in the book Right Nation, and for which Fox News has been midwife, wet-nurse and nanny, has inexorably led to a decline in America’s status as leader of the “free world”.
A harsh and vindictive streak has become obvious in part of the American mainstream political discourse. Waterboarding, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo are but symptoms of an extremist reaction to the difficulties America has encountered as the leading super-power in the post-Cold War world.
Rumsfeld and Cheney were responsible for the extreme damage caused to the moral authority of the US in the eyes of the world. I am glad that I took the opportunity when Minister for Justice to publicly condemn the Guantanamo regime as shocking, even if my remarks were greeted with less than enthusiasm in Iveagh House at the time.
If you doubt the implications of a Trump presidency, I advise you – implore you – to look at the entire “speech” that Trump made to supporters at Fort Dodge in the run up to the Iowa caucuses a few weeks ago. It is described as his “best speech” ever on You-tube where you can find it. The characteristics of self-infatuation, over-weaning self-belief, intolerance, ignorance, vanity and predisposition to be violent are there to be seen in abundance.
That rambling, disconnected hour-long discourse displayed just how unfit Trump is to lead any democracy – least of all America. Just look at it – and be afraid.
It reminded me of an article in the Irish Jesuit quarterly Studies dating back to the Spring of 1933 which I recently read online.
The author, Daniel Binchy, was the then recently-retired Irish Free State “minister” – or ambassador- to Berlin. The article’s subject was none other than Adolph Hitler who had just been appointed Chancellor in the dying days of the Weimar Republic.
Binchy had, by chance, seen Hitler ranting in the beer-halls of Munich in the early 1920’s. He had later, as an Irish diplomat, watched his subsequent progress up the ladder of power. He identified many of the dangerous, psychotic tendencies in Hitler’s personality – the hatred, the self-belief, the virulent anti-Semitism and, above all, his absolute determination to unleash war in Europe.
Binchy’s article was hard-hitting and prophetic. It was, of course, unusual for a diplomat, on laying down his credentials, to launch a devastating critique of the new regime that was coming to power in the country to which he had been accredited. It must have been an embarrassment of sorts to his successor as Irish representative in Berlin.
But what Binchy said needed to be said. And if his opinion – and the opinions of those who thought like him – had been heeded, a great tragedy for the world might have been avoided or mitigated.
So also now it is vital that we do not simply greet the emergence of Trump in silent horror or disdain.
The Fort Dodge speech shows him to be a real menace. We would be foolish to look on his rantings as just some form of idiot buffoonery. That attitude allowed Hitler to take power.
Those of us who believe in democracy and believe in the potential of the US to be a force for good cannot sit silently by while American discourse is hi-jacked by such a menace.
There are even some who secretly hope that the GOP nominate Trump so that the Democrats can win with Clinton. There were people who held similar hopes that some success for Hitler would ensure his ultimate demise.
There is no guarantee at all that Hillary Clinton will sail home to the presidency in November. The plutocrats are lining up their PAC funding to destroy Clinton if they can. The Koch Brothers PAC intends to spend $1 billion to secure a GOP win in November. Fox News is sharpening its fangs for Hillary.
They are just waiting to unleash mordant propaganda on topics ranging from classified emails to Benghazi to Monica Lewinsky. Just wait for it.
Ted Cruz is as problematic in many ways as Trump. The GOP – the party of Abraham Lincoln -has surrendered its soul and its legacy to the naked, vicious politics of anti-Obama dog-whistle racism, combined with intolerance, low rhetoric, and hostility to the migrants in a largely immigrant country.
If the GOP has allowed itself to become the political catspaw of a coalition of “birthers”, racists, homophobes, creationists calling themselves “evangelists”, plutocrats who regard state-funded health-care as a threat to their savings, “pacifists in the war on poverty”, and nutters who want to water-board and bomb their way to international respect, we should worry not just for America but for ourselves.
We have to call them out for what they have become.