Idealism from Hell

Many young people are idealists.  They believe in social purity.  As a consequence, millions of them intend to be warriors dedicated to pursuing public perfection.  They hope to rescue the world from the mess bequeathed them by a bitter elder generation.

We encounter this attitude in the enthusiasm of the college students at Bernie Sanders rallies.  They cheerfully regard themselves as socialists.  The way they see it is if the government can provide a safety net, it should be allowed to save us from every other peril.

We observe it in a competing set of college students who are enthralled by Rand Paul.  These undergraduates are ardent libertarians.  The way they understand things is that if the free marketplace can provide economic prosperity, it ought to be allowed to confer every other benefit of freedom.

Unfortunately, the world is a bit more complicated.  It regularly confronts us with problems that are not solved by ideological purity.  The young, however, don’t know this.  In their inexperience and ignorance, they seek a golden key that will unlock every social mystery.

The young people of Germany did the same almost a century ago.  Their nation had lost the First World War, been devastated by a roaring inflation, and was mired in an economic depression.  They, therefore, wanted it to be great again.  The result was youthful communists battling youthful Nazis on the streets.

While the young can be forgiven their penchant for idealistic extremism, what are we to make of the empty headed extremists who are coming out for Trump rallies?  Don’t they know better than to indulge his muddle-headed call for greatness?

Trump is not usually associated with idealism.  He and his followers are generally regarded as hardheaded realists.  They expect his business acumen to rescue us from the throes of an Obama induced lethargy.  He will obviously point us in the right direction to recapture our national glory.

How is this idealism?  The answer is simple.  Trump’s alleged ability to provide magical answers lies in his “outsider” status.  Because he has not been a politician, he is presumably untainted by the corruption that abounds in Washington.  He therefore sees what jaded members of the establishment cannot.

But do you remember another idealistic outsider.  As I recall, his name was Barack Obama.  He was a community organizer from Chicago who was going to bring hope and change to the nation’s capital.  He too was going to cut the Gordian knot of official ineptitude.

Nonetheless, the notion that outsiders are somehow purer than insiders is regularly belied by history.  Hitler was an outsider.  So was Mussolini.  For that matter, so were Lenin, Mao, and Castro.  All of these proto-saviors claimed to be uncorrupted by the political chaos that preceded them.

Or how about Ross Perot?  This other businessman was going to reform our tax code, but he instead allowed Bill Clinton to eject George Bush the elder from the presidency.  After all, the only things that Bush had accomplished were winning the Gulf War and presiding over an orderly conclusion to the Cold War.

The question should not be who is an insider and who an outsider.  It ought to be who has the character and the skills to deal with the very real difficulties our nation is facing.  Who knows how to get the economy moving again and possesses the foreign policy expertise to contend with Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Caliphate ambitions?

We are living in dangerous times.  A squishy idealism will only make things worse.  I submit that Donald Trump’s qualifications for our highest office are slim to non-existent.   His sole political policy is unbridled narcissism, while his favorite political tactic is the ad hominem attack.

This is not the stuff of which statesmen are made.  It is thus time for voters to grow up.  They must put away the idealistic playthings of their youth and get down to the serious business of evaluating the candidates for president.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University