Gore Vidal and Trump

I was messing around with Google search and The Guardian's archives on writers when I thought of pairing Gore Vidal and Donald Trump. Not that I had not thought of pairing the two of them before. I had. What was interesting to find was The man who warned us about Donald Trump, Fox News and the rise of the idiocracy on Salon.

Gore Vidal was one of two writers I continued to read after I gave up any idea of being a writer. The articles makes an interesting poitn, which might explain why I particularly favor his essays:

The forward thinking and openness of Vidal’s early embrace and expression of sexuality stands in stark contrast to the dueling Puritanisms of the present age, where right wing moralists castigate sex in religious language, and left wing moralists prefer to warn of the dangers of sex in therapeutic terminology. Vidal considered himself a man not so much of the left, but of antiquity. Claiming inspiration from Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, and writing one of his best novels, “Julian,” about the apostate emperor who tried to remove Christianity from Rome and restore paganism, Vidal personified the hedonism in existence before the influence of monotheism, and an unwavering loyalty to the early Athenian conception of representative democracy.

The cosmopolitan classicism of Vidal injected his contribution to political and literary culture with wisdom. The wisdom creates an unbreachable divide between Vidal, and for example, William F. Buckley. “Best of Enemies,” the recent documentary on their feud, treats them as equals. In reality, the record shows that unlike Vidal’s fine wine political positioning, Buckley’s retrograde views suffer decay and infirmity with each passing year. He opposed the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the gay rights movement, and he celebrated Joseph McCarthy, supply side economics, and the war in Vietnam.  

The connection pundits continue to trace between Vidal and Buckley, which precedes even the release of the documentary, is a small but significant illustration that America is either incapable or unwilling to learn from history (including its own), its past sins and errors or perspectives alternative to American exceptionalism.

One of the lessons Vidal would use his rhetorical ability and agility to amplify was the historical warning of Ancient Rome: “A nation cannot be a republic and an empire at the same time.” The respect Vidal showcased for America’s founding fathers emanates from the same point of caution. George Washington advised the nation against “foreign entanglements,” and John Adams considered “unnecessary war” society’s “greatest guilt.”

Americans always fixated on the Roman Empire. No, that is not entirely correct: the Founding Fathers and the Framers of the Constitution were quite aware of the Roman Republic's flaws. 

And I hear here much still applicable:

In one of his final essays from 2006, Vidal wrote that America had “entered the Dark Ages.” “What we are seeing,” he explained, “are the obvious characteristics of the West after the fall of Rome: the triumph of religion over reason; the atrophy of education and critical thinking; the integration of religion, the state, and the apparatus of torture—a troika that was for Voltaire the central horror of the pre-Enlightenment world; as well as, today, the political and economic marginalization of our culture.”

None of the horror is possible without, at least, the tacit approval of a large percentage of the American public. Polls reveal that Americans are comfortable with drone killing and torture, that they do not believe in evolutionary biology, and that they no longer read much. Vidal once quipped, “Half of the American people read a newspaper. Half of the American people vote. Let us hope it is the same half.”

Looks like a close question after 2020.