I fantasized that I got an e-mail from one of the barn mice in the woodshed last night, it was fraught; “I have to say that Flo is just like Hitler,” the mouse wrote. She kills and tortures and sparks divisions and hatred. She spreads terror and is cruel.  It’s like Weimar in the 30’s out there in the barn and the woodshed.”

A few years ago, a neighbor in my town came over to tell me that President Obama was just like Hitler, he planned to usurp the Constitution and was arming secret militias for a takeover. A few years earlier, living in a hip New Jersey boomer town, some neighbors at a dinner party assured me that President George W. Bush was just like Hitler, he had plans to kill and imprison those who disagreed with him.

This is sort of what passes for political dialogue and thinking in the land of the left and the right, I have my Hitler, you have yours.

I wish I had a dollar for every political figure somebody disliked who they compared to Hitler. There is a lot of Hitler talk these days, I got some messages this week about Donald Trump as the new Hitler. I am paying attention to the election this year, like almost everybody else, and I am determined to pursue my once lost faith: perspective.

I am odd in that I do not hate people who disagree with me, or wish them harm.

I wish I had a dollar for everyone in public life who has been compared to Hitler (yesterday a radio talk show host in South Dakota insisted Hilary Clinton is the new Hitler.) There are enough Hitlers running around to form their own political party.

I’m not doing the Hitler thing, although Flo may come closer to the analogy than Donald Trump and his potty mouth, having seen her stalk pursue, torture and dismember her prey, the legions of persecuted mice and moles in our garden and barn. Talk about genocide.

I am not afraid of politics, or of the election. I am interested now in both.

Whenever I get uneasy, I turned to history and my political guide, the late cultural critic and political observer H.L. Mencken. He reminds me that nothing in politics is new, not even Donald Trump.

Democracy came into the Western World to the tune of sweet and soft music, wrote Mencken in Notes On Democracy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher invented the idea of Democratic Man as an ideal being, full of virtue and justice and romance..”in brief, as Rousseau’s noble savage in smock and jerkin, brought out of the tropical wilds to shame the tyrannical lords and masters of the civilized lands.”

Our democratic idea is that the men and the women at the bottom of the scale – the working class and the poor – are innately wise and compassionate, we call them voters and we expect them to possess a deep reservoir of righteousness and wisdom. They alone are capable of a perfect kind of patriotism; in them is the only hope of peace and happiness on the earth. The cure for the evils of democracy is always more democracy.

Jefferson also feared the sophistication and judgment of the masses, he loaded the government with checks and balances so the inevitable mobs would run into roadblocks and speed bumps.

Mencken was often moved to point out that Democratic Man is only as good and just as is the treatment of him by his government and by the quality of his life. If he is frightened and oppressed and provoked, he will abandoned notions of equal justice and fairness in a flash.

This week,  I met my first Donald Trump supporter, he is a nice man named Ethan, he is a carpenter who works in town. It is curious that so many people follow Trump, and I didn’t know a single one. I do now.  Ethan is a genial man, not a hater. I told him I hadn’t met any other Trump supporter and I was curious why he is supporting him.

“It’s simple,” he said. “If one of those transgender people wants to go to the bathroom in school, the whole country is up in arms about it, rushing to help him out. I’ve been laid off four times,  and make half as much as my father did when he died 20 years ago, and I can’t afford to send my kid to college, and every politician in my life keeps telling me it’s time for the global economy, it will be good for me, but me and my brothers just keep getting screwed. Who’s worrying about me? Donald Trump is.”

Ethan is the Democratic Man, the noble, idealized citizen of Rousseau’s vision. And he is afraid of a lot of things. He is not looking for Hitler, he wants a job he can keep for a few years and is willing to work long and hard at it. I suppose in a way, his vision is small, but his pain and anger are very real. His way of life was taken away from him by the very people who promised on oath to serve and protect him.

—

Fear, wrote Mencken, is the chief driver of American politics, and has always been. “The demagogues, i.e., the professors of mob psychology, who flourish in democratic states are well aware of the fact, and make it the corner-stone of their exact science. Politics under democracy consists wholly of the discovery, chase and scotching of bugaboos. The statesman becomes, in the last analogy, a mere witch-hunter, a glorified smeller and snooper, eternally chanting “Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum!”

The entire history of the United States from its earliest days, wrote Mencken, has been a history of melodramatic pursuits of horrendous monsters, most of them imaginary: the red-coats, Hessians, witches, the monocrats,  banks, trusts, millionaires, the Irish, the Catholics, the Jews, Mormonism, Jefferson Davis, Wall Street, African-Americans, gays, transgender people,  Pancho Villa, German spies, Russian spies, Bolshevik spies (now terrorists, Mexicans, immigrants from the Middle East, Wall Street once more).

It was long noted by historians that most people in a democracy never vote for something, always against something. Rousseau’s Democratic Men And Women often  become a mob in a democracy,  especially if they are afraid. They are manipulated and exploited rather than suppressed and  imprisoned. Everyone claims to love them and speak for them, but nobody does. In countries that are not democratic, mobs are uncommon, they are simply not permitted.

Democratic states tend to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favor of mediocrities, concluded Mencken,  since outspoken people with imagination are driven to the fringes of our culture, they almost never get to be in charge. They are shining marks for demagogues.

The good news, says Mencken, is that the demagogue himself, “when he grows ambitious and tries to posture as a statesman, usually comes to grief.” Every demagogue has his own simplistic bugaboo that taps into the fears of the people – Mexicans are rapists, refugees are terrorists – they seem invincible. But the demagogues seem psychically incapable of sticking to their one hysteria,  they are egomaniacs by definition, they commit the folly of expanding his shallow and unfathomable ideas into a broader program, and thus they expose themselves and alarm the mob into turning on him.

If you believe in history, and I do, this is where we are almost surely heading once more. Mencken would recognize it in a moment, thanks to our manipulable media, it is a great shock to almost everyone.

There is really nothing new about this, although we are being told almost  hourly that this is all so unprecedented the earth will soon be revolving around the moon. Since some of us are frightened, say the pundits, it is important that all of us be frightened. I’ll pass.

Truthfully,  I suspect a lot of good will come from it, we seem to be paying attention now to things we have long and complacently ignored. Jesus said we have to give hope to the poor and the oppressed, and perhaps we will begin to do that when the smoke clears. And although Mencken could be cynical, he believed that democracy was by far the best system yet devised to keep human beings from killing one another.

—

What do I take from this? I will not join any mob, the one on the left, or the one on the right. Both have embraced the habit of demonizing what they don’t agree with, what they fear. The meaning of Hitler is lost, washed away by ignorance and hysteria.  Speaking only for myself, I don’t care to do that. I was born Jewish, and have heard about Hitler all of my life, and I do not see him or his ghost anywhere in the vast spectrum of political imagery and reporting.

The Jews I grew up with knew all too well who Hitler was, and I never heard one of them compare him to anyone else, living or dead.

I am not frightened by this upheaval in our political system, nor am I outraged.  It seems to me like a clogged septic tank that needs pumping. To me,  outrage and fear are the tools of the lost and the lazy. I am committed to understanding what is happening, not in howling with one mob or another, or arguing on Facebook about who is on the left or the right.

I see instead of Hitler, H.L. Mencken’s once famous  Boobus Americanus: “Complacent citizens who vote for politicians based on information proffered y government shills in the mainstream media, or for other vacuous reasons.”

And I see Ethan, a good and hard working man whose work and way of life have been betrayed by the so-called statesmen in both political parties, who have promised him again and again that he and his children will have a better only to find again and again that they have taken his life, his community, his dreams for the future away.

Democracy is not working for him.

I think I’d rather look for Ethan than Hitler.