Meet the ‘Fire-Eaters,’ the Real Antecedents of Donald Trump

[mick silver]

Meet the ‘Fire-Eaters,’ the Real Antecedents of Donald Trump

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/fire-eaters-donald-trump-demagogue-2016-213498#ixzz3wCTjY1EO http://static2.politico.com/dims4/default/902b6af/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F3a%2F84%2F a70cdbe94ff2b379e4cd756d6b80%2F160102-trump-mag-starobin-gty.jpg

[mick silver]

ave we seen anything like Donald Trump before? As his heated rhetoric cuts a seemingly unstoppable swath across the American political landscape, analysts have been almost flummoxed in finding the right comparison. In its recent mega-analysis (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/us/politics/95000-words-many-of-them-ominous-from-donald-trumps-tongue.html?_r=0) of the 95,000 words spoken by Trump over the course of a single given week, the New York Times likened his “fiery language” to the divisive rhetoric of such 20th century American political figures as George Wallace, Joseph McCarthy and Huey Long. Others, alarmed by Trump’s call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” have suggested parallels with the rabble rousers-turned-dictators from Europe’s fascist past, Hitler and Mussolini.
This search for comparisons can be a good way to get a grip on a figure like Trump, whose rapid rise and staying power has defied predictions. But it doesn’t need to stray so far from home. Trump is a profoundly American demagogue, part of a long tradition, and one whose roots go far deeper than the 20th-century populists whose names usually come up. The true pioneers of what might be called the American political tradition of demagoguery were a cadre of Southern orators from the decades leading up to the Civil War, men adept at arousing and manipulating the fears and anxieties of their target audience in the service of their cherished cause—to prod the South into leaving the Union in order to save the institution of slavery and protect Southern “rights” generally. They were known, at least to their critics, as the Fire-Eaters.
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The times were different, of course. But the similarities are remarkable, all the more so viewed at a distance of more than 150 years. The tactics that mark Trump’s approach to politics—the doubling down on his rhetoric when challenged, the resort to insult andinnuendo, the treatment of all politics as personal, the catering to prejudice (Mexican immigrants are “rapists”)—all of them were tactics used by the Fire-Eaters. They took brilliant advantage, as does Trump, of a fragmented, partisan media culture, and even helped stoke a “birther” controversy of their times. And there are intriguing similarities of temperament between The Donald and his precursors.
The Fire-Eaters, then, can offer a revealing window into understanding Trump and his maneuvers—awindow into apprehending this perhaps improbable but nonetheless sturdy archetype, the American demagogue.
***
Asked to name his “biggest weakness” at the CNBC Republican presidential debate back in October, Trump had a ready and candid reply: “I trust people too much,” he said. “And when they let me down, if they let me down, I never forgive.”
A century and a half earlier, Edmund Ruffin of Virginia ventured a remarkably similar and equally frank appreciation of himself. He had an incorrigible “habit,” he bemoaned in the 1850s, of “uttering my opinions of men and things freely and strongly, and uncautiously, as if every one I spoke before was a man of honour and my friend, instead of being, as often was the case, an enemy, a tattler and mischief-maker.”
Born in 1794, the seventh in his generational line to hail from the Old Dominion, Ruffin was the oldest of the three most prominent Fire-Eaters of the antebellum age. The other two were Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, born in 1800, and William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, born in 1814. All were men, as the confession-prone Ruffin also admitted of himself, of “vanity and love of notoriety.”
Barnwell Rhett, as he was known, was described by one associate as “generous hearted” yet with “a vast quantity of cranks.” Less charitably, a colleague once criticized him, as Trump likewise has been faulted, as “self-conceited, impracticable and selfish in the extreme,” with “his ridiculous ambition to lead and dictate in everything.” Yancey, known for his “sweet voice,” and also for a hair-trigger temper, cultivated an image of all-powerfulness in his impact on his listeners and joked about himself as standing “twenty-seven feet high.”
It’s surely possible that a demagogue constitutes a distinct kind of personality, a “natural,” more born than made. Still, the economic and social conditions of the times can offer more, or less, fertile ground for the rise of such figures. The withering of the American middle class has created a sense of pessimism and frightening change that has ripened the appetite for a Trump; in the first part of the 19th century, the faster growth in population of free states relative to slave states gave the white Americans in the South a similar sense of demographic doom.
http://static.politico.com/30/ab/dd637cff451f93ab3a1be7664075/untitled-2.jpg
Donald Trump's precursors: William Lowndes Yancey, Robert Barnwell Rhett, and Edmund Ruffin. | Library of Congress


Then, too, the media culture matters. The Fire-Eaters operated in an age that rewarded politics as theatre, a kind of crude entertainment in an era when the soapbox speech, often in the form of a harangue, was a staple and illiteracy still fairly common, especially in rural areas. The competition for a striving political orator might be, literally, the carnival barker. (Not coincidentally, another insult that has been lobbed at Trump.) The rhetoric tended to be spicy, directed more at the heart and gut than the head, and the same style of expression readily crept into newspapers and pamphlets. There was no such thing, really, as “objective” media—instead there were organs whose unapologetic reason for being was to express and advance a particular political line. That was true of the New York Tribune, the vessel of the abolitionist Horace Greeley, and it was true of the Charleston Mercury, a property of the Rhett family, edited by Barnwell Rhett’s oldest son, R.B. Rhett Jr.
Just as Trump can rely on the Breitbarts of today’s splintered media landscape to blare his every utterance, the Fire-Eaters had the Mercury, a congenial platform for Ruffin and Yancey as well as for the senior Rhett. The Mercury, widely distributed in the South and read in Washington and New York, devoted much of its coverage tothe chronic grievances of the South and what to do about them. Much as Trump seldom presents a policy issue, like immigration, except in portentous, emotion-laden terms, the Fire-Eaters framed nearly everything as a battle for the very existence of the South and an excuse to secede.So it was with an early object of their wrath, the federal tariff, which protected Northern industry and made consumer goods like shoes more expensive. The tariff represented “masked oppression,”Barnwell Rhett told a gathering of South Carolinians in 1828. “The day of open opposition to the pretended powers of the Constitution cannot be far off, and it is that it may not go down in blood that we now call upon you to resist.” In a sense, he was telling the South, Trump-like, “we’re losing.”
Scare mongering is part of any demagogue’s arsenal, and the dire references to “blood” aren’t far out of the Trump playbook. If his proposed ban on Muslim immigration, said to be temporary, is not put in place, “You’re going to have many more World Trade Centers,” Trump told CNN, “many, many more and probably beyond the World Trade Center.” For the Fire-Eaters, the frightful images generally had to do with race. Abolitionists were portrayed as terrorists—all in the mold of John Brown, who tried to ignite a slave rebellion with his raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The summa of Ruffin’s rhetorical oeuvre was a manuscript serialized in the Mercury as “Glimpses of the Future.” Should white Southerners quail at secession, one such peek revealed, they would suffer to see black Union Navy seamen “swaggering through the streets” of Southern ports with an “insolence of manner” and the design of “indoctrinating” the slave population with “abolitionist lessons.” Another in the series offered the prospect of a “Constitutional Coup d’Etat,” with large populous Northern states splitting into two, so that there would be a sufficient number of states to amend the Constitution to ban slavery for good.
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[mick silver]

The Trump twist on “all politics is personal” has him taking obsessive aim at the likes of Carly Fiorina. “Look at that face!” he said of his rival. “Would anyone vote for that?” For the Fire-Eaters, the prime fixation was Abraham Lincoln, whom Barnwell Rhettcalled “a renegade Southerner” (having been born in Kentucky) and “a traitor to the South.” As for Lincoln’s running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, the U.S. senator from Maine, the senior Rhett kicked up the dust of innuendo. Drawing on unsubstantiated reports, seemingly made credible by Hamlin’s swarthy complexion, the Fire-Eater referred to Hamlin as “a man with negro blood in his veins.” There was no apparent attempt, though, to demand to see the man’s birth certificate—Trump, with his call on President Barack Obama to produce that document to quell swamp murmurs of foreign birth, did the Fire-Eaters one better.
In his seeming implication that all Muslim visitors to the U.S. are potential terrorists, and bysuggesting that Mexican immigrants constitute a criminal class, Trump is giving license to what he seems to regard as the prejudices of his core following of middle-aged white men with no more than a high-school education—prejudices that perhaps he shares himself. The Fire-Eaters were occupied with winning over the white Southern man, even the dirt farmer who tilled his own field and had no obvious stake in the slave system. The trick was to try to elevate this man’s social status in a society in which skin color meant everything.
In a floor speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charleston in the spring of 1860, Yancey expounded on the prerogatives of the “master race,” so that even a poor white fellow never should be lowered to the menial task of cleaning and polishing a boot, as it was for the “negro race to do this dirty work which God designed they should do.” The applause was so loud that a delegate from Indiana asked for the galleries to be cleared. The address emboldened slave-state delegates to walk out of the convention, in protest of, in their mind, insufficient Northern Democratic support for slavery—and proved Yancey’s greatest triumph as a Fire-Eater.
Trump has demonstrated a similar theatrical flair at his raucous rallies—like the one held this past summer at the Phoenix convention center. Supporters attired in patriotic garb lined up for hours in advance to get into the hall, creating a “miniature stampede,” as Politico reported (http://www.politico.com/story/2015/07/donald-trump-storms-phoenix-119989), when the doors finally opened. Speaking in front of a giant American flag, Trump didn’t disappoint his flock, at one point ushering onto the stage, for dramatic punch, a father who told of a son, a high-school football star, shot dead by an illegal immigrant. Should Trump win the GOP nomination, one can only imagine the emotive props he will use for his acceptance speech at the party’s convention in Cleveland, in July.
Just as Trump is mocked, relentlessly, by his legions of critics, so were the Fire-Eaters. A Charleston lawyer once published a pamphlet deriding the senior Rhett as “Robert the Disunionist” and suggesting that a “dizzy” brain contributed to his intemperance of speech. But Barnwell Rhett was as impervious to the ridicule as Trump seems to be.
And he was as prone as Trump seems to be to the double down—the signature move, it seems, of any demagogue to up the ante again and again, never to take chips off the table, always to pile the stack higher. First Trump suggested a need for a national database of Muslims, and when challenged on that idea, he called for his ban on all Muslim immigrants. The Fire-Eaters took this sort of tack with Southern merchants concerned that secession would be economically harmful to the region by cutting off the pipeline of loans from Northern banks. It was the North, they began to argue, that would suffer. King Cotton was the supreme source of wealth in America, and with the establishment of a Southern republic, the North would writhe in pain, as “their whole system of commerce and manufactures will be paralyzed or overthrown,” Barnwell Rhett vowed. It got more extreme. “Mobs will break into their palaces,” he continued, and Northern States “will desire to join us.”
That sounded far-fetched, even in the heated moment of the time, and yet this is the inexorable logic of the double down, which makes the demagogue a captive of rhetorical bets which become more and more outrageous. This mode of operation suggests that Trump might be just getting started—especially since polling data show the more extreme his comments or proposals, the larger his following, with his limit, at least as of now, apparently not yet reached. At the most recent Republican presidential candidates’ debate, in Las Vegas, he reaffirmed his vow to kill the families of terrorists, in cold blood, as a deterrent measure—how does that get topped?
***
Of course, any parallel can be stretched too far. Trump often plays the jester and engages in cutting repartee with his questioners; this was not the Fire-Eaters’ way. The Fire-Eaters, with their steadfast insistence on Southern rights and their drumbeat for secession, were models of consistency in their views; Trump is not. He once talked of the merits of a single-payer health care system, not anymore. It wasn’t so very long ago that he was inviting Hillary Clinton to his wedding and contributing to her political campaigns; now on the stump he criticizes her for a light schedule so she can spend (he claims) days on end at home sleeping. Her husband Bill, once Trump’s golf buddy, is now being chastised as a serial abuser of women.
Then again, this is Trump’s first sustained foray into the political arena, and perhaps his quest to build a kind of Fortress America will prove enduring. Certainly the Fire-Eaters, whatever else could be said of them, passed the test of fealty to their convictions. They lived to see the triumph of their mission, with the establishment of a Confederacy of slave states—and then the obliteration of their work, by a war that reconstituted the Union, freed the slaves and left their native region in smoldering ruins. Never did they see themselves as wrong to begin with. Finding the new world too much to bear, Ruffin opted to end things with a bang rather than a whimper—he propped the muzzle of a rifle in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The easy temptation to see the American demagogue as a cynical opportunist is probably best avoided. It is the apparent sincerity of this recurring political type—and their powerful effects on the people they connect with, even as others might dismiss them—that warrants cause for concern.


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/fire-eaters-donald-trump-demagogue-2016-213498#ixzz3wCUMDHPA

[midnight rambler]

Meet the ‘Fire-Eaters,’ the Real Antecedents of Donald Trump

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/fire-eaters-donald-trump-demagogue-2016-213498#ixzz3wCTjY1EO http://static2.politico.com/dims4/default/902b6af/2147483647/resize/1160x%3E/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fstatic.politico.com%2F3a%2F84%2F a70cdbe94ff2b379e4cd756d6b80%2F160102-trump-mag-starobin-gty.jpg

The Donald has hearing aids??

[midnight rambler]

Consider the source...Paul Starobin, joo.

[Cebu_4_2]

The Donald has hearing aids??

Couldn't find anything about it. I wonder if it's one of the receivers like the secret service wear?

[cheka.]

Couldn't find anything about it. I wonder if it's one of the receivers like the secret service wear?

probably strategy team talking to him --- like the nyc media talking heads wear. the control room is controlling them with that ear piece.

when ron paul was doing combat with some dumb bitch in an interview, he was actually taking on a room full of ziofreaks telling her what to say + do

[Cebu_4_2]

probably strategy team talking to him --- like the nyc media talking heads wear. the control room is controlling them with that ear piece.


The 4 top words sent across that reciever: STFU!