The American Political System as Laughingstock or Trainwreck
I’m not sure whether Donald Trump has ever heard of Eugene Debs, the austerely incorruptible early leader of America’s Socialist Party. But I think there’s a growing likelihood that their two names will soon be paired in many news stories as we move towards the 2024 election.
Although almost forgotten today, Debs was a very prominent political figure a century ago, and he usually received brief mention in my introductory history textbooks, which occasionally noted the five times he had run for the Presidency on the Socialist Party ticket. His high- water mark came in the 1912 election when he pulled a remarkable 6% of the national vote, possibly even influencing the outcome of the bitter three-way race between incumbent President Howard Taft, former President Theodore Roosevelt, and New Jersey Gov. Woodrow Wilson, which was won by the latter. Historian James Chace, former managing editor of Foreign Affairs, told that story in an interesting 2004 book.
The horrific First World War broke out the year after Wilson was inaugurated, and Debs, a strong anti-militarist, sat out the 1916 race as Wilson won a very narrow reelection victory partly on the strength of the campaign slogan “He kept us out of war.” But America’s industrial giants had sold enormous quantities of munitions to the Allies, much of it on credit, and without an Allied victory, those loans could never be repaid. So once the votes were counted and after a failed attempt to negotiate peace, Wilson soon reversed himself and took America into the stalemated European conflict.
Armies of many millions had already spent several years clashing on the Western Front, and only an enormous American force could tip the balance, so Wilson enacted a military draft, the first and only such measure in our national history except for the Civil War fought more than two generations earlier. Forcing millions of Americans to fight and die thousands of miles from home in a foreign war proved extremely unpopular in many parts of the country, and harsh sedition laws were soon passed, threatening long prison sentences for anyone who challenged those controversial government policies.
At a 1918 political rally, Debs made some disparaging remarks about his government’s actions and the military draft, and he was quickly prosecuted and convicted despite his free speech defense, receiving a ten-year sentence in federal prison. That exemplary punishment hardly deterred him or his committed supporters, so the Socialist Party nominated him as its candidate in the 1920 Presidential race. Despite campaigning from his prison cell, he still won nearly a million votes— 3.4% of the total. That achievement probably became the most memorable incident of his long career, and was almost always worth a sentence in history textbooks written many decades later.
That bizarre story of a candidate running for the Presidency while serving time in federal prison has surely brought a smile to the faces of generations of high school and college students, an amusing historical tidbit that leavened the otherwise dull profusion of obscure names and dates from a century ago. But today the sheer political insanity of America’s Democratic Party establishment has now brought our unfortunate country to a far stranger situation. Depending upon the speed of the judicial process, we face the very real prospect of former President Donald J. Trump running—and winning—the Presidency while sitting on his cot in state or federal prison.
Media is the oxygen of political campaigns, and Trump’s totally unexpected primary and general election victories in 2016 were driven by the massive attention he received for his sometimes outrageous public statements, coverage greatly amplified by the unprecedented number of Twitter followers he had quickly amassed on social media. His bitter political enemies recognized the enormous, unfiltered power of that latter communication tool, and after he reached the White House, they exerted enormous pressure upon Twitter to begin censoring him. The notion of an American tech company restricting the political speech of a sitting American President seemed like something out of a Monty Python sketch, but it actually happened. Meanwhile, many of his leading activist supporters and pundit allies were completely purged from that platform, blows that greatly hindered his reelection campaign. Then after his November defeat and Joseph Biden’s inauguration, Trump himself suffered the same fate, with his Twitter account permanently suspended.
With Trump banned from Twitter in early 2021, his political standing soon ebbed away as more and more of his low-information political base gradually forgot about him. This led many observers to conclude that his time had passed and some rival would likely capture the Republican nomination in the 2024 primaries.
However, that decline was quickly reversed when Trump’s bitterly self- destructive Democratic Party enemies launched a series of prosecutions against him on a variety of different charges, ranging from mishandling secret documents to paying hush money to a former girlfriend to election fraud, all rather dubious charges. With such exciting new topics, the endless Trump Political Reality show had suddenly returned as popular entertainment, regaining the very high ratings it had previously enjoyed. Trump once again became the great hero of his populist Republican supporters, with recent polls showing he was drawing far more support in the 2024 primaries than all his Republican rivals combined.
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