My brother Dave called the other day from London after sailing his 32-foot battered boat, Blue Mist, across the Atlantic and through some very stormy weather. Surprisingly, all he wanted to talk about was politics.
It was a difficult voyage, beginning in San Francisco Bay and going south to Ecuador, back north to the Panama Canal, then east and north to Portsmouth, Va., and across to Europe. By the time he left Virginia, Dave had replaced his transmission twice, as well as Blue Mist’s motor, and storm damage required him to make serious sail repairs in Mexico.
Dave is a conservative Republican, and I figured his voyage was perfectly timed to let him ignore the presidential campaign. Decades ago, when he returned from 13 months as a Marine reconnaissance officer in Vietnam, he told stories about the war nonstop for two days, leaving out most of the bad stuff, and he has seldom mentioned it again in my hearing. I assumed he’d prefer silence about this troubling presidential campaign because we were sure to disagree, as we had on the war.
But Dave does much of his sailing alone, picking up a crew member sometimes along the way for a part of the journey, as he did for the Atlantic crossing. They don’t talk a lot because one of them is usually sleeping, so when he sails into port, Dave is ready to talk. Arriving in Europe, he found nearly everyone wanted to talk about Donald Trump. And he hasn’t found anyone very enthusiastic about the possibility of a Trump presidency.
Dave agrees with the Europeans who fear Trump, but this uncharacteristic agreement with my position has not led him to support Hillary Clinton. She has yet to make proposals he considers likely to solve problems such as immigration, ISIS, crime, our educational failures and the economy. He hasn’t yet found anyone to vote for, at least anyone electable, and here in the U.S. there seem to be many people in the same boat, which is not the Blue Mist.
Maybe because I’d been thinking a lot about my brother’s challenges at sea, I was drawn to a book called The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction by Mark Lilla. It’s a book about the dangers in nostalgia — the sentimental longing for the past that often afflicts people of my advanced age.
After hearing “Make America great again” too often, I was feeling pretty unsentimental about nostalgia, and I mentioned Lilla’s book to my daughter Judy, a poet. She reminded me that nostalgia is not always ugly. She talked about our friends the Dejenes from Ethiopia whose father’s high status in their village was partly a result of his having killed a lion when he was young. The Dejene men we know are proud of their father and they talk affectionately about a simpler time in their country and in their village, but none of them claim to want to kill a lion or turn back the clock in Ethiopia.
Turning back the clock politically can lead to changing laws passed to overcome injustice caused by racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and other fears, prejudices and hatreds. Those are laws often passed to protect some of the people Donald Trump appears to think are nothing but trouble.
Mark Lilla explains why nostalgia can be political trouble in our time. “To live a modern life anywhere in the world today,” he says, “subject to perpetual social and technological change, is to experience the psychological equivalent of permanent revolution.” All of us are likely to feel anxiety in the face of rapid change, and when a politician promises to turn back the clock, it can be deeply appealing. Ronald Reagan, who used the slogan “Make America great again” in his 1980 campaign, quickly ordered the removal of the solar panels on the White House after his inauguration. Symbolically, it was a way of fulfilling his promise to return us to the past, but as we begin to experience the reality of climate change, we know it was an act unlikely to please our grandchildren.
Nostalgia works for me as one important explanation for much of Donald Trump’s appeal to millions of people in our country because I think it captures a wider swath of his support than reasons like racism, misogyny, xenophobia and even economic anxiety. Nostalgia offers a kinder, gentler way of understanding people we will be sharing this country with, however the election turns out.
I hope to talk about nostalgia and the election with my brother before Nov. 8, and I will insist that one way to think about voting for the person who will fill the most powerful position in the land might be to think like a senator — say, a senator who must vote yes or no on a flawed bill that barely begins to address climate change. Responsible voters, like responsible politicians, don’t often get to vote for perfection. Boycotting the voting booth or holding onto one’s sense of principle by voting for an unelectable candidate is a luxury our country can’t afford.
Also, I might say something to Dave about New Hampshire’s role in the 2000 presidential election. It’s too simple to say Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the presidency, but when you look at the numbers in New Hampshire, it sure makes you wonder. In 2000 George W. Bush got 48 percent of the New Hampshire popular vote, Al Gore 47 percent. Ralph Nader got almost 4 percent. If Gore had Nader’s votes in New Hampshire in 2000, he would have had four more electoral votes and won the presidency in the Electoral College, 270 to 267, no matter what happened in Florida.
Our ship of state might well have been sailing a different course in 2016.
Bill Nichols, a resident of West Lebanon, can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu. His most recent book is Finding Fox Creek: An Oregon Pilgrimage.