Seven years ago when the Greenleaf Book Group was preparing to publish my novel “Water Music,” about the personal relationships and professional rivalries of four gay athletes, one of their estimable editors sent me a question that I think about to this day.
One of the story arcs that is ultimately woven into the other three concerns an Iraqi boy, Alí Iskandar, who is taken under the wing of an American contractor during the height of the Iraq War with the promise of mentorship in the United States. Instead the contractor abuses him, enabled by the man’s family. My editor wanted to know why the boy doesn’t at this point run away, call the police, try to get back to his family. By way of answer I told him the story of one of my boss’ West Highland terriers, all rescues. This particular little fellow was kept in a cage all his life. Often in the office, he sits under her desk or, in moments of high energy, retreats to a corner. Once in a space it is hard to coax him out of it. He’s free and yet he’s still in the cage of his mind.
I often think about this when I think about the Republicans. Of all the many questions raised by the last four years, few are more confounding than these two: Why has former President Donald J. Trump attracted such a cult following and why do the Republicans stick with him?
The first has been discussed many times here and elsewhere and includes a number of factors — a disproportionate sense of grievance and entitlement as white people approach majority-minority status by midcentury; the refusal of and inability for self-reinvention; a lack of education and critical thinking skills, abetted by social- and right-wing media fantasists; the demonization of any one deemed “the other” in what has become a zero-sum game. But the main reason for the former is a narcissism that feeds and in turn is fed by Trump’s own narcissism. Trump gives his followers free rein to think they’re perfect and right to be selfish. Yet how many of these people would he actually sit down with and break bread? Trump once said that the Pences were low-class for bringing their dogs with them to Washington D.C. If he thinks they’re low class for having pets, what about the way his followers conducted themselves on Jan. 6? Or was that all right, because it served his tacit if not stated purpose?
The second question is trickier: The Republicans could band together and use the seditious events of Jan. 6 and the second Trump impeachment trial set to begin Feb. 9 to rid themselves of him once and for all. They won’t do it. Instead they’ll support his acolytes in public and his detractors in private in the hopes of having their cake, their principles, and eating it, too, mining Trump’s base in the 2022 and 2024 elections and avoiding the establishment of a MAGA Party that would split their vote and keep the Democrats in power for the foreseeable future.
Like the mind, power is a terrible thing to lose. In John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” the loss of his Heavenly luster leads Lucifer to say “the mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.” But context also drives perception. The idea of the mind being its own place that can transcend suffering is one that psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankel plumbs in “Man’s Search for Meaning,” his haunting memoir of the Nazi death camps and suffering’s lessons for spiritual growth. But this same “triumph of the will” also drove the Nazis themselves. Ideas and things are not necessarily bad. Rather it’s who’s using them and how they’re applied that matter.
The Republicans want to attain and retain power and they don’t care which minority group suffers in order for them to maintain it. Yet power exacts its price in the form of appeasement. And how well does appeasing a bully ever work? Neville Chamberlain sought to appease Adolf Hitler to keep England out of war and himself in power. In the end, England went to war with Germany led by another prime minister who was willing to stand up to Hitler — Winston Churchill.
Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi tried to thread the needle between that country’s powerful military and democracy for the people, who are Buddhist-majority. But her attempt to balance both sides only resulted in the genocide and exile of the Muslim-minority Rohingya and house arrest once again for herself. (State Department insiders will tell you that the situation is more complex than this, that there was little she herself could’ve done to prevent the Rohingya tragedy, given the Buddhists’ suspicion of Muslims and some Muslim violence in her country.) Her dissent and even death would’ve changed nothing.
Perhaps. But sometimes you have to stand up even in a losing cause. Now the people are protesting, demanding her release and the acknowledgement of the results of the recent free and fair election in which the military was the loser. (The military didn’t like the results and seized power. Sound familiar?)
Great things can happen when people band together. Terrible things can happen as well. That’s why we need principled leaders of courage and conviction, people who would be willing to sacrifice even themselves and certainly their status and perks in a just cause. But not their real power, because real power comes from within, not without, and can continue to inspire beyond the grave. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is gone. But his legacy of justice and peaceful protest lives on.
The Republicans, however, are too afraid., and fear is a funny thing. It can paralyze you or it can see you free if you have the courage to meet it.
“Courage is the price life exacts for granting peace,” aviator Amelia Earhart once observed. Perhaps it will never bring peace outside of ourselves. That is beyond the scope of one person to grant. But it can bring the peace within that comes from knowing you did the good and honorable thing.