This is the confusion I grew up with. My father who thought the American president should wear a military uniform to command more respect around the world defended this concept until he was spitting and blue in the face. Nevertheless I am sure he would also be defending Donald Trump against those raging commies who waste money on things like education, care for the sick and elderly and food for the hungry.
You see, just as the constitutional republic protects the individual from the majority, it puts no burden on the majority to take care of the individual. My father agreed with that principle as well. Sort of as ye reap so shall ye sow, with no hindrance and, also, no help from above. At its worst extreme it is evolutionary, the survival of the fittest.
Not sure where he would be on guns. As far as I know he never owned one but he allowed me to have one at the age of 16. (Part of the deal was I had to take a hunter safety course.) It was a single shot .22 that I had outgrown before my parents gave it to me. In those days my friends and I hunted pheasants and deer and what was needed was a 12 gauge shotgun. But, never mind this is not about guns.
As calm as the 50s are remembered to be, there was turmoil. The decade opened with the police action in Korea that led to today's two Koreas one of which is nuclear-armed and threatening. I just learned yesterday that as early as 1950 the United States was involved in Vietnam. A friend of mine who fought in Korea almost had to go there shortly before he was to ship home.
Also at that time Sen. Joseph McCarthy began hunting communists in every nook and cranny in America. My father spoke of him often, looking around every corner and seeing communists too. He was sure communists had infiltrated the government among other pursuits like movies and books. Adlai Stevenson, mild and urbane and an intellectual, ran against Dwight Eisenhower for president twice and lost both times. My father was sure he was a communist.
He thought people like Stevenson wanted one world, a situation somehow entwined with communism, eliminating nations and borders. Stevenson's appointment as U.S, Ambassador to the United Nations confirmed his belief. He would have loved the Trump's wall.
His boogie man was someone or some organization called "they." They caused the problems, they made the rules, they governed our actions. I remember a day in Florida when we were driving around the east coast and we came upon an unpaved road that looked like it led to a beach. Tempted, we stopped and looked down it. He decided not to take that road, saying "they don't want you to use it." Later on I wondered what would have happened if my father instead of Robert Frost approached that junction by the woods. At the time, frustrated, I asked, "who are they?" We drove away in silence. But I took that lesson with me when I started writing and never allowed a "they" without an antecedent explaining who they were.
Included under the "they" umbrella were socialists which was a synonym for Democrat in his mantra. And socialism was one step from communism and the one-world society. Having survived the horrible Roosevelt years and then Truman's in which the New Deal and then World War II dragged America out of its Great Depression with all those social benefits they brought to grease the downhill skid into communism, the man had a lot of "theys" to fear. Meanwhile the country enjoyed a period of calm and prosperity unequalled in history despite all those operatives of the one-world communists. Is it any wonder I grew up to a screaming liberal?
The Democrat-Socialist-Communists of course were the big spenders who drove up the national debt and encouraged all those enemy states like Japan and China and heaven forbid, South Americans to think they could compete with and eventually overcome the United States economically if not physically. Of course over all of this like a black cloud on the horizon, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics loomed with its threat of nuclear warheads backing its push for worldwide communist domination.Then Sputnik went up and scared the hell out of everyone. There were plenty of boogie men to fear and a good part of my father's fears circled around the difference between democracy and constitutional republic.
I have to wonder how he would react today when those free-spending, socialized democrats are in the minority and the conservatives are gutting the republic and undoing what they can of progress made all the way back in Roosevelt's time while driving the annual debt into the trillions to pay off their oligarch overlords. I doubt he would have liked seeing the middle class in which he was firmly entrenched losing ground, while those overlords rake in obscene amounts of money. There are no constitutional republicans left to protect the individual from the majority, but there are plenty who have allowed individuals to drift free by removing the social protections that allow many to survive.
What we have left is the bastard child of both. Instead of the individual needing protection from the majority, we have a minority of the rich ruling the majority and in the process undercutting the protections that a constitutional republic should provide, a minority ruling the majority with the majority often cheering them on believing their world is better for it and making excuses for the excesses for fear of some shadowy threat that could take it all away.
In the process basic truths go end over end, people accept lies or at least excuse them. This is no more evident example than something I saw yesterday. A meme came up on line showing a Nazi flag flying over the White House and the words asked what you would do if you woke up one day and saw that on the news. The overwhelming response was that the Democrats and progressives and liberals had taken over. My brain fried. Does not compute, it kept saying. The fascists, Nazis, oligarchs have manipulated their followers into believing the people working to help them are actually the enemy, the Nazis, the very expression of what the ruling minority is, the oppressors have managed to flip the dialog and put their label on the downtrodden and turned them against their own interests.
The full manifestation may come this summer when the head cheese wants a huge military parade to demonstrate America's might to the world, and perhaps if people like my father had their way, he would review the march wearing full military regalia. I wonder at what point in his rise to power did Hitler exchange his business suit for a military uniform.
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