Trump: What a Liberal Believes

I DEDIDED RECENTLY, if for no other reason than to protect my grip on sanity, that I must say what I think of President Donald J. Trump. After all, freedom of expression is one of our cherished rights. 

I’ve been a liberal most of my life, although conservative friends sometimes claim I’m not. They don’t seem to understand what liberals believe. For starters, liberals love America just as much as they do.

We may even love core American values more.

In my case, over the strenuous objections of my father and ignoring the tears of my mother, I enlisted in the United States Marines in December 1968. I thought American values were vastly superior to communist ideology then and still do. Here I might note that several “patriotic” Americans, who can be counted on to wear flag lapel pins, even on their pajamas, were happy not to enlist. 

They include Dick Cheney, who piled up five draft deferments and Mr. Trump, who earned five more.

(President Bill Clinton never bothered to serve. Yet, to my knowledge he never draped himself in the Stars and Stripes, which conservatives are always anxious to do.)

The author, c. 1974.
Pictured after discharge from the Marines, of course.

LET ME ALSO STATE emphatically that among liberal friends I’ve never heard anyone in the last forty years tout communism as a preferred economic system. We liberals do believe in regulation of Big Business. We were happy to see British Petroleum held accountable for ignoring safety regulations (hated word to those on the right), getting eleven workers killed during the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April 2010, and dumping 4.9 million barrels of oil into the sea. 

In the same way, no self-respecting liberal trusts a Wall Street hedge fund manager any farther than you can heave a barrel of BP oil.

Nor do liberals believe government is the answer. Liberals believe you can change and improve human society, sometimes through government action. 

Huge difference, my conservative friends.

My path to liberalism began in the 1960s. My grandfather, Rutherford Hayes Viall, was born the same year Republican President Hayes took office and named accordingly. If my father ever voted for a Democrat, I’m not aware. As a teen, however, I watched Southern deputies crack the skulls of African Americans who had the audacity to demand the right to vote. I remember when Negroes (then called) could not sit at the front of an Alabama bus, occupy a seat at a North Carolina lunch counter or check out a biography of Robert E. Lee at a South Carolina library.

I watched Adolph Rupp’s all-white basketball teams fly back and forth on the court at the University of Kentucky. I was happy when an all-black team from Texas Western defeated Kentucky in the National Championship game in 1966.

IN THE 1970s, I WATCHED women join the fight against inequality. In those “Make America Great Again” days females could not join a plumbers’ union, drive an eighteen-wheeler or fly a commercial jet for good pay. A stewardess could be relieved of her post if she gained ten pounds. She “aged out” at 35, when companies deemed her too old for male commuters to ogle. If she married, she was also finished. I remember working in a cafeteria at Ohio University in 1973, and how cooks (all female) asked me to go to the freezer and get boxes of hamburgers so they could grill. State law limited to 25 pounds the weight females could be asked to lift on the job. This made it impossible for women to enter a variety of fields.

I also remember when girls were told not to play sports because sweating was unladylike. A young lady was expected to use the word “perspire.” Even the word “sweat” was distasteful on female lips.

I remember when females were said to be too weak to run long distances. I remember 1984, when the Olympics finally introduced the marathon as an event for females, as women increasingly proved sweat wouldn’t kill them.

Joan Benoit won in 2:24:52. If you do the math that means she ran 26.2 miles at a pace of 5:30 per mile.

Try running one mile at that pace yourself.

I BECAME A LIBERAL for many reasons, including distrust of Big Government. Not long after I was discharged from the Marines, I discovered that our leaders weren’t telling the truth about Vietnam. I remember Richard M. Nixon and his minions breaking a wide array of laws. They tapped reporter’s phones without warrant, burglarized doctors’ offices to get “dirt” on opponents, broke into the Watergate, and followed with a vast cover up. I remember how Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew draped themselves in the flag and claimed to love this country a thousand times more than the “nattering nabobs” and “dirty hippies” did.

I became a liberal. 

I still am.

The fundamental question today is this: How does liberalism play out in 2017? I believe values that make this nation great include free expression, free speech and free religion. Like most liberals I support the Second Amendment but believe you can register guns and do more to keep them away from terrorists and the insane. I register my automobile. No state or federal agent has ever tried to take it away. 

LIBERALS DON’T blindly trust Big Government. That’s a convenient conservative myth. Clearly, history is replete with examples of abusive government, where a well-armed citizenry might have been able to fight back. Think: Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Robert Mugabe, too.

Not to mention the whole Kim il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-Nutjob clan that rules North Korea today.

In fact, one might argue that conservatives, by definition, have sided with bad government for centuries. Conservatives wish to preserve traditional values. They supported King George III in 1776. They burned heretics all across Europe until the last flames flickered out in 1793. The cause of racial segregation was championed by conservative luminaries, from George Wallace, to Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond. 

(Yes, I know Democrats used to be segregationists, too. That’s why I like Harry Truman’s decision to desegregate the U.S. military during the Korean War. I’m a liberal. I believe in progress.)

Conservatives railed against the threat of Catholics immigrants to American values in the 1850s. 

They railed against Chinese immigrants in 1882.

They railed against Italians and Poles and Southern Europeans in the 1920s. 

The rail against all Muslims now.

REMEMBER WHEN RUSH LIMBAUGH and other conservatives claimed that Mr. Obama was Muslim and thereby unfit to serve? As late as September 2015, 43% of Republicans still believed Obama was Muslim. Worse, they were too obtuse to understand that if he was it wouldn’t matter. 

The U. S. Constitution clearly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Look it up if you don’t believe me.

(But it does.)

It is true, not all liberals are religious. A good liberal may or may not attend church or synagogue or mosque.

A good liberal does hold that adherents of all religions as well as agnostics and atheists have equal rights. If a Mormon or Baptist family heads to church on Sunday and an atheist mocks their beliefs, a liberal says let all do as they please. As both a liberal and a former history teacher, I understand how much blood has been spilled across the centuries by one religious group battering and butchering another. 

A good liberal knows that Sunni and Shia factions in Islam are blasting and butchering each other today. 

A liberal has sympathy for the vast majority of Muslims who neither want to butcher or be butchered by zealots. 

And I don’t know a single liberal who would argue that ISIS should not be smashed. 

AS A LIBERAL, HOWEVER, one asks: Is it wise to paint all Muslims as dangerous, to antagonize 1.6 billion people round the globe, if we want to root out those Muslims who are a threat? One fears that the rage of Trump supporters is aimed at all Muslim Americans, an estimated 3.3 million already living on our shores. Are all dangerous? Aren’t most U.S. citizens? Are we getting ready to trample their rights, as our forefathers trampled the rights of Japanese Americans in 1942?

My concern is that we are.

I have serious issues with where our new president is leading us. Mr. Trump and many of his aides threaten a free press. Steve Bannon has expressed the opinion that the media “should keep its mouth shut.” 

To a liberal that sounds like a direct assault on the First Amendment.

A liberal also wonders about—about many matters, really—like President Donald J. Trump’s support for torture. A liberal believes a resort to torture would reduce this great nation to the same low as Saddam Hussein, or the Nazis, or the Spanish Inquisition. Mr. Trump insists torture works.

Yes, it does. Torture worked for centuries to convince victims of the rack and thumbscrew and crushing weights that it was wise to confess to being a witch. But I happen to be a liberal.

I DON’T BELIEVE in witches, even if the Bible warns against them.

POSTSCRIPT: My liberal fears have only been heightened since posting this in February 2017. We have watched a U.S. president vilify the free press as “enemies of the people,” a sentiment almost identical to sentiments expressed by Adolf Hitler in 1934. We have seen Trump deny taking help from the Russians to win the 2016 election—only to turn around recently and say he’d take foreign help again in 2020. We have seen him dangle pardons in front of aides under investigation—and insist he has “the absolute power” to pardon himself if needs be.

A good liberal, like a good conservative, understands the critical role the rule of law plays in any free society.

Therefore, a liberal shudders at this Trumpian notion.

Of course, we can fairly argue policy with our conservative peers. But we should remind them we are just as good Americans as they are. We simply happen to believe stricter gun controls might be wise, since our schools are getting shot up and our murder rate is among the highest in the industrialized world. We believe government should crack down hard on drug companies who gouge the public and push opioids as perfectly safe. We believe in climate change, too—whereas President Trump can’t tell the difference between weather and climate. We believe in climate change because we believe the scientists, and the overwhelming evidence.

IN SUMMARY, we believe Trump is a danger to our country now, and to our children’s and grandchildren’s futures.