“Hitler is made by us,” Martha Graham said in 1942. “He is all our carelessness, our lack of civil responsibility. . . that is what makes him so horrible.” I quoted this in my WSJ review of Mark Franko’s Martha Graham in Love and War back in 2012. I’ve thought about it ever since.
And just as certainly, Trump too was made by us, made with our tacit permission and enabling.
We have tolerated our cultural degradation, our “mainstream” media turning into slavering celebrity scandal sheet, thus legitimizing the likes of Donald Trump.
We have allowed the rise of the “new” Democrats, and their old, old regressive ideology of give to the rich and fuck-all to everybody else, as well as their perverse new methodology of coddling the Republicans. The Dems’ former-opposition has thus been emboldened to turn into what they are now: a radical anti-democracy front.
We American citizens have permitted civics to be deleted from the national curriculum. We have allowed the country to space out into a democracy-averse electorate much of which pays no attention whatsoever to politics and clocks in some of the world’s lowest turnout rates.