Samuel Damren
Robert Penn Warren was the first poet laureate of the United States. He is more widely known as the author of the novel “All the King’s Men” which won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize in literature.
A phrase from one of Warren’s poems – “the lie we must learn to live by” - depicts the current state of Republican politics. For “Trump’s Men,’” the lie they must learn to live by is the answer to the question: who won the 2020 presidential election?
Everyone knows that for Trump Republicans the answer must be Donald Trump. Everyone also knows it is lie as numerous court decisions and audits by Secretaries of State have repeatedly established.
This litmus test as entrée to positions of power in the Trump administration — that you must lie to prove loyalty to the President — was highlighted in recent Senate hearings on Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton.
Clayton had been a 20-year partner in Sullivan & Cromwell, former Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. With that pedigree, one would not expect he would place loyalty to a president’s false assertion of fact above truth in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Nevertheless, when questioned at the hearing “who won the 2020 presidential election,” it became immediately apparent that Clayton was conflicted.
Clayton knew that he could not truthfully answer the question without offending the President. So, he didn’t. t was painful to watch him attempt to avoid the issue by employing evasive tactics that would never be tolerated at a deposition or in a court of law.
The episode encapsulates one of the principal differences between a democracy and a monarchy. In a monarchy, the King does not simply dictate policy, he – and he alone - also proclaims the “true” facts however “false” those facts may be.
This is one example of what it means to live under the dictatorial rule of a King. There are other examples that Americans are beginning to re-acquaint themselves.
For 250 years, Americans lived without being subject to the oppressive rule of a King. Historian Jude Pfister’s 2021 work, titled “Defining America in the Radical 1760s,” provides a historical window into that prior experience.
In contrast to earlier periods of tranquility, American resentment of the British Crown first began in the early-1760s. It would intensify several-fold in the decade leading up to the Revolutionary War. As explained in Chapter 2 of the book, there were reasons for the abrupt change.
During the initial period of colonization, life in America was brutal and neither sustaining nor profitable. Opportunists initially behind emigration from Britain and Europe to North America were uniformly frustrated that the regions did not yield the easy plunder of gold and silver that the Spanish secured in Central and South America.
As a result, the British Crown took little interest in American affairs leaving the colonies largely self-governed under private party compacts and by local resident Crown administrators. Economic conditions changed in the 1700s when tobacco became a profitable crop in Southern colonies and fur trading, lumber, and mercantile businesses in Northern colonies started to prosper.
Nevertheless, the British Crown in London continued the policy of benign neglect in the governance of the American colonies. It did so, because the Crown was invested in endless warfare across the globe with competing European countries for empire building.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there would be far reaching effects from this policy that were reflected in the colonist’s changing sense of self-identity, economic self-sufficiency and independence.
Representative of this change, Pfister cites the extensive writings of J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, a Frenchman living in North America, who asked “What, then, is the American, this new man?”
According to Crevecoeur, the colonists’ journey to America and, more importantly, the life experience of their descendants beginning in the 1700s caused these “new men” to “forget their former servitude and dependence, to act upon new principles, to entertain new ideas and form new opinions.”
The contrast between the lives of their ancestors in mother countries and the descendants’ lives in America was “inspiring” and caused “heart-felt pleasure.” Unlike Europe, for these generations of “new men,” America “is not composed of great lords who possess everything and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratic families, no counts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so removed from one another.”
In 1763, Britain won the Seven-Years War with France bringing to conclusion decades of global conflict. To address considerable war debt and a debilitated economy, the British Crown unilaterally imposed taxes on its colonials.
Confronted with stubborn resistance, the Crown then moved to re-assert control of King over his colonial “subjects” through the exercise of monarchical powers which the “new Americans” found intolerable.
The next commentary in this series will discuss what it was like for the soon-to-be former colonists to live under these oppressions and compare those circumstances with the present-day acts, intentions, and aspirations of the current President.
A phrase from one of Warren’s poems – “the lie we must learn to live by” - depicts the current state of Republican politics. For “Trump’s Men,’” the lie they must learn to live by is the answer to the question: who won the 2020 presidential election?
Everyone knows that for Trump Republicans the answer must be Donald Trump. Everyone also knows it is lie as numerous court decisions and audits by Secretaries of State have repeatedly established.
This litmus test as entrée to positions of power in the Trump administration — that you must lie to prove loyalty to the President — was highlighted in recent Senate hearings on Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton.
Clayton had been a 20-year partner in Sullivan & Cromwell, former Chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission during Trump’s first term and U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. With that pedigree, one would not expect he would place loyalty to a president’s false assertion of fact above truth in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Nevertheless, when questioned at the hearing “who won the 2020 presidential election,” it became immediately apparent that Clayton was conflicted.
Clayton knew that he could not truthfully answer the question without offending the President. So, he didn’t. t was painful to watch him attempt to avoid the issue by employing evasive tactics that would never be tolerated at a deposition or in a court of law.
The episode encapsulates one of the principal differences between a democracy and a monarchy. In a monarchy, the King does not simply dictate policy, he – and he alone - also proclaims the “true” facts however “false” those facts may be.
This is one example of what it means to live under the dictatorial rule of a King. There are other examples that Americans are beginning to re-acquaint themselves.
For 250 years, Americans lived without being subject to the oppressive rule of a King. Historian Jude Pfister’s 2021 work, titled “Defining America in the Radical 1760s,” provides a historical window into that prior experience.
In contrast to earlier periods of tranquility, American resentment of the British Crown first began in the early-1760s. It would intensify several-fold in the decade leading up to the Revolutionary War. As explained in Chapter 2 of the book, there were reasons for the abrupt change.
During the initial period of colonization, life in America was brutal and neither sustaining nor profitable. Opportunists initially behind emigration from Britain and Europe to North America were uniformly frustrated that the regions did not yield the easy plunder of gold and silver that the Spanish secured in Central and South America.
As a result, the British Crown took little interest in American affairs leaving the colonies largely self-governed under private party compacts and by local resident Crown administrators. Economic conditions changed in the 1700s when tobacco became a profitable crop in Southern colonies and fur trading, lumber, and mercantile businesses in Northern colonies started to prosper.
Nevertheless, the British Crown in London continued the policy of benign neglect in the governance of the American colonies. It did so, because the Crown was invested in endless warfare across the globe with competing European countries for empire building.
On the other side of the Atlantic, there would be far reaching effects from this policy that were reflected in the colonist’s changing sense of self-identity, economic self-sufficiency and independence.
Representative of this change, Pfister cites the extensive writings of J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur, a Frenchman living in North America, who asked “What, then, is the American, this new man?”
According to Crevecoeur, the colonists’ journey to America and, more importantly, the life experience of their descendants beginning in the 1700s caused these “new men” to “forget their former servitude and dependence, to act upon new principles, to entertain new ideas and form new opinions.”
The contrast between the lives of their ancestors in mother countries and the descendants’ lives in America was “inspiring” and caused “heart-felt pleasure.” Unlike Europe, for these generations of “new men,” America “is not composed of great lords who possess everything and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratic families, no counts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so removed from one another.”
In 1763, Britain won the Seven-Years War with France bringing to conclusion decades of global conflict. To address considerable war debt and a debilitated economy, the British Crown unilaterally imposed taxes on its colonials.
Confronted with stubborn resistance, the Crown then moved to re-assert control of King over his colonial “subjects” through the exercise of monarchical powers which the “new Americans” found intolerable.
The next commentary in this series will discuss what it was like for the soon-to-be former colonists to live under these oppressions and compare those circumstances with the present-day acts, intentions, and aspirations of the current President.
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