People who not long ago said it was disrespectful to criticize the tenant in the White House seem to have
rediscovered the value of dissent. Well, maybe.By J.D. Tuccille
President Trump is a piece of crap. Former President Obama was a bastard. And Hillary Clinton, who
everybody thought was going to be president, is utterly worthless too.
Oh, that is so refreshing!
For years, we were told that criticizing the occupant of the White House was "rank disrespect," as Jonathan
Capehart wrote in the Washington Post. Opposition to the sitting president was very likely motivated by racism,
Charles M. Blow mused in The New York Times. "Openly defying and brazenly disrespecting your president,
while hoping that he fails, is not called patriotism… It is called treason," insisted one particularly moronic
meme by Occupy Democrats.
But a few years of experience can have a wonderfully transformative effect on political culture. One election
later, and Americans who once insisted that saying mean things about an elected official was unseemly and
unforgivable have rediscovered the liberating potential of dissent.
Maybe.
Even before Donald Trump took office as the 45th president of the United States, California Governor Jerry
Brown (D) vowed to pursue his own foreign policy on environmental issues, bypassing the White House. His
fellow state officials want to extend that independent spirit to all sorts of policies. "We must be defiant whenever
justice, fairness, and righteousness require," State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon* (D-Lakewood) told
his fellow legislators.
Likewise digging in its heels, Boulder, Colorado, declared itself a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants in
defiance of federal law and the new president's border-warrior stance. Political leaders in roughly two dozen
other cities, including Chicago, New York, and Seattle, have taken the same position in opposition to the new
administration.
And, where once Hollywood celebrities issued a thoroughly creepy "pledge to serve Barack Obama" when he
took office as president, eight additional years of seeing the duties of that office exercised led us to singer
Madonna saying she's thought a lot about "blowing up the White House."
Madonna made her comments at a massive Women's March the day after Trump's inauguration during which
hundreds of thousands of regular Americans promised to resist the new chief executive before he's even had
a chance to start rivaling the damage inflicted by his predecessor.
It's all such a welcome change.
"The vision of the president as national guardian and spiritual redeemer is so ubiquitous it goes virtually unnoticed.
Americans, left, right, and other, think of the 'commander in chief' as a superhero, responsible for swooping to the
rescue when danger strikes," Gene Healy wrote in the pages of Reason in 2008. Healy, a vice president at the Cato
Institute and the author of The Cult of the Presidency**, published during the excesses of the George W. Bush years,
warned that Americans place unrealistic expectations on the office of the presidency, and invest messianic faith in
their preferred candidates, making it inevitable that White House residents will seize ever-greater power in response.
"Relimiting the presidency depends on freeing ourselves from a mind-set one century in the making," he added.
Embracing the value of dissent and the right to tell presidents and the government they administer to go to Hell is
a necessary part of breaking that mind-set. It clearly states that the dissenters expect not great things of the latest
winner of the national popularity contest, but terrible things instead. Dissenters clearly don't want the targets of their
defiance to exercise power, let alone to accumulate more.
To criticize government officials—and to embrace the right of others to do the same—is to step back from the cult.
Well, it is if you do it right.
That many of the new resisters who have rediscovered the joy in calling the president a bastard don't quite get it is
obvious from their all-too-ubiquitous "still with her" signs and chants. An unfortunate proportion of the people eager
to take the winner of the presidential election to task aren't at all disenchanted with the presidency—they're just
sorry that the wrong messianic figure took office.
The same can be said of too many of the folks who are happy with the outcome of November's vote. If you're looking
for evidence that the cult of the presidency lives on, you really can't beat the image of a room full of alt-right activists
saluting their guy with cries of "hail Trump!" as happened at a gathering of the National Policy Institute in November.
Yeah, that makes my skin crawl too.
And if fans of the latest White House occupant get all hot and bothered over their fearless leader, some lawmakers
from his party seem to have decided that this is the right moment to raise the stakes on public protest. Washington
state Senator Doug Ericksen (R-Whatcom County), who was Trump's deputy campaign director for the state, wants
to allow felony prosecution of protesters who disrupt economic activity. "We know that groups are planning to disrupt
our economy by conflating the right to protest with illegal activities that harm the rights of others. We need this
legislation to protect the rights of all citizens," he huffed in a press release.
GOP legislators in Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and North Dakota have similarly introduced bills targeting protests. Yes,
these bills specifically target illegal activity associated with protests rather than the speech itself, but they all come
now, when their guy is taking office—not months or years ago when the old regime might have been the target.
So yes, it's cool again to call the president a bastard—for people, some of whom who thought the last chief executive
was just dreamy and beyond reproach and are just pissed that their savior didn't win.
But too many other folks who sputtered under the last administration want to make life a little tougher for dissenters
to their chosen one.
The president, now as always, is a bastard. But for many Americans, the cult of the bastard lives on.
* - Assuredly
not to be confused with the young man who plays third base for the Washington Nationals.
** - Mr. Healy has since written both an afterword on Barack Obama's presidency in . . .
. . . and, a full followup book covering the cult of Barack Obama's presidency:
