Chapter 6
Study Guide by James R. Martin, Ph.D., CMA
Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida
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Chapter 6: The New Mason-Dixon Line
This chapter begins with the story of how the Greek experiment with democracy in 427 BC Athens was corrupted by an immoral man named Cleon who frequently sued his opponents, criticized those in power and made crass public statements that preyed on the emotions of the people to generate support for his opinions. When one of Athens allies (a city state called Mytilene) defected and joined Sparta, Cleon argued for slaughtering the Mytilenian rebels warning that to do otherwise would lead to more wars with others who would defy them. To oppose the mob mentality promoted by Cleon, a man named Diodotus argued that ill-tempered decisions based on false statements were reckless and instead the Athenians should show leniency to win the Mytilenians back as supporters that they still needed. Diodotus narrowly won the vote in the assembly, but the incident showed the dark side of majority rule and was a preview of Athens's decline. Within a decade the Athenians chose to annihilate the island people of Melos, and within three decades a mob assembly voted to execute Socrates. The Athenian democracy never recovered.
This cautionary tale of how self-government can go wrong is relevant for understanding the implications of the Trump administration. The foundations of democracy designed to set boundaries on majority rule are being tested. We also have a foul-mouthed populist politician like Cleon in our midst. Donald Trump's words are powerful and have produced the following consequences.
His words have made it more difficult to sustain civility.
His words have undermined our perceptions of the truth and made it difficult to find common ground.
His words have fanned the flames of the mob mentality our Founders tried to prevent. This is democracy's greatest weakness.
Nasty Man
The words of America's presidents are captured and bound into volumes known as Public Papers of the Presidents. Trump's papers will begin with his inaugural address that describes a scene of American carnage. But the president explained he would insure that America would start winning again under his guidance. Rather than use his address to unite and inspire, his remarks were resentful and painted a bleak picture of the country. However, those words were more eloquent than usual because he read what he was handed. He more often goes off script and shows us the real Donald Trump, a man who is crude and mean spirited. Trump's Papers will be filled with his combative social media comments that dominate his public conversation. He praises someone who has assaulted a journalist, and mocks a sexual-assault accuser's testimony mimicking her voice and the lawyer who questions her. He blasts ABC News, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and the Washington Post as "fake news." The enormous volume of the president's sensationalist rhetoric has laid waste to public decency. Trump's words are dividing Americans. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of US adults believed President Trump "has changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse."
Trump's language inhibits his own agenda and alienates partners on both sides. When the White House staff developed a nearly $2 trillion agreement with the Democrats to fix America's aging infrastructure, Trump walked out of a White House meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying he couldn't work with her until she stopped investigating his administration. This could have been a popular slam dunk for the president, but the prospects for a popular bipartisan infrastructure agreement vanished. Trump is his own worst enemy.
Big Little Lies
Fact-checking has always been important in any White House. Speechwriters develop a draft that is sent to policy experts to insure it's consistent with the administration's policy. A second draft goes to an internal fact-checker to confirm each detail. White House aides read it before it goes to the president or vice president for final review. This was all done for Vice President Pence's speech about the US space program where Pence declared, "At the direction of the president of the United States, it is the stated policy of this administration to return the American astronauts to the moon within the next five years." A few weeks later Trump contradicted the Luna plans he had previously approved of by tweeting "For all the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science."
Some have labeled Trumps misstatements as harmless and even comical, but the problem is that many people believe what he says and he frequently spreads false information that they accept as the truth. A Washington Post analysis found that after only nine hundred days in office, the president made eleven thousand half-true and untrue statements. The president's falsehoods are particularly troubling when they change public attitudes. For example, stating that his opponents are actual criminals, that the FBI is corrupt, and that the judicial system is rigged are damaging our democratic system. The president is a pathological liar and in their attempts to defend him, his aides create new lies about the president's old lies to spin them closer to the truth. The president has taken us down a dark rabbit hole where if people believe something is true, that to the president makes it true. Kellyanne Conway and others who attempt to defend or spin the president's lies have become reality contortionist, or in Kellyanne's words purveyors of "alternative facts." They compromise their own integrity in order to serve him.
Trump's continuous lies are gradually changing the public's perception of what is true and what really matters. The president's falsehoods have excused the overreach of his executive power, damaged the independence of the judiciary and the public's trust in the free press and in our government institutions. For example, the president has called the press "fake news" more than five hundred times, referred to them as "the enemy of the people," and suggested that the government should open federal investigations into their reporting. After Trump first called the media "the enemy of the people," the United States Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the attacks on the free press as an attack on the democratic institutions of the United States. But pipe bombs have been sent to thirteen media outlets that President Trump has attacked by name. His media hate is infectious.
Pixelated Pitchforks
The public mob mentality was one of the Founder's greatest fears. To prevent an unscrupulous person masquerading as the protector of the people from rising to supreme power they created representative government instead of direct democracy, staggered elections to avoid short-sighted impulses of the masses and counted on the countries size to prevent angry factions from spreading too widely. But President Trump has managed to exploit the mob mentality in spite of these built-in protections. The president turns his fake news into instantaneous reality that gets retweeted by tens of thousands before the fact-checkers can catch up. Trump also arms his audiences with weaponized language as he attacks his enemies at arena-sized rallies. Lock her up! Send them back! Shoot them! His language alienates in a way that feeds hateful groupthink. Extremist are using the president's rhetoric to promote their own movements. In a survey nearly three-quarters of Americans agreed that elected officials should not use heated language because it could encourage violence. And although this was not stated in the survey, it could potentially lead to the destruction of democracy by mob rule.
In 1875 Ulysses S. Grant speculated that if the nation were ever torn apart again it would not be a split between North and South along the Mason-Dixon line, but instead the line would be reason with intelligence on one side and ignorance on the other. A political tribalism would be created by the suppression of reason and truth. Today the country is split down the middle and although Trump is not the sole cause of the problem his demagoguery has made it a great deal worse. There are simply too many glass-eyed zombie-like spectators willing to be fooled and easily provoked by his unseemly antics. Because of their "confirmation bias," or the "principle of motivated reasoning" (See the Hornsey and Fielding summary below) they tend to interpret Trump's untruths as evidence to support their preexisting views.
The president is doing exactly what our enemies want him to do - turning us against each other. To find the real "enemy of the people," Trump only needs to look in the mirror!
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Go to the next Chapter: Chapter 7: Apologists. (Summary).
Related summaries:
Crossan, M., W. Furlong and R. D. Austin. 2022. Make leader character your competitive edge. MIT Sloan Management Review (Fall): 1-12. This article includes a leader character framework. (Summary).
Hornsey, M. J. and K. S. Fielding. 2017. Attitude roots and Jiu Jitsu persuasion: Understanding and overcoming the motivated rejection of science. American Psychologist 72(5): 459-473. (Summary).
Martin, J. R. Not dated. Policies of a Second Trump Presidency.
Martin, J. R. Not dated. Summary of Trump's Seven Part Plan to Overturn the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election.
Rosenfeld, G. D. (Editor) and J. Ward (Editor). 2023. Fascism in America: Past and Present. Cambridge University Press. (Summary).
Thurow, L. 1996. The Future of Capitalism: How Today's Economic Forces Shape Tomorrow's World. William Morrow and Company. See Chapter 13: Democracy Versus the Market. (Summary).
Unger, C. 2018. House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia. Dutton. (Note).
