ILLUSTRATION: THE GLOBE AND MAIL
David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.
When President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil was exasperated last month over tariffs threatened by Donald Trump, he expressed outrage that the American President was refusing to negotiate.
“We are treating this with the utmost seriousness,” he said. “But seriousness does not require subservience. I treat everyone with great respect. But I want to be treated with respect.”
It turns out that, whether by calculation or caprice, Mr. Lula employed the two syllables in the English language – besides “tariffs” – that grab Mr. Trump’s attention and that prompt a visceral reaction in the 47th President.
Those two syllables constitute the word respect.
The final eclipse of the Truman Doctrine, a cornerstone of American foreign policy
For it’s the lack of respect that Mr. Trump experienced as a wealthy New York striver dismissed as a louche, inelegant, vulgar, and social-climbing arriviste that has informed his every breath. It’s the lack of respect the President has for convention and the Constitution, for the rule of law and for the informal laws of presidential precedence, that fuels the hatred of his opponents.
It’s the lack of respect Mr. Trump’s followers feel from American elites that has energized the MAGA movement. It’s the lack of respect the President has shown for academic freedom and the independence of Columbia and Harvard universities that has powered liberals’ court challenges to the President’s attacks.
It’s also the lack of respect Mr. Trump felt that Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky displayed when he failed to wear a business suit or thank his host when visiting the White House earlier this year – an error that Mr. Zelensky ostentatiously did not repeat during his visit for peace negotiations this week.
Respect – or its turbocharged antonym, disrespect – has emerged as the most powerful element of contemporary American life. Respect, or its evil first cousin, disrespect, helps explains the course American politics has taken in the 21st century.
Trump felt Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky displayed a lack of respect when he failed to wear a business suit to the White House – an 'error' that was not repeated this week.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
In some ways, the Otis Redding song made famous by Aretha Franklin is an American political anthem. When the Queen of Soul, who died during the first Trump administration, crooned that “all I’m asking is for a little respect,” she was providing the soundtrack for the country’s public life.
“Media have split the U.S. into two mutually disrespectful communities, basically sorted into urban versus rural populations,” said Geoff Dancy, a University of Toronto political scientist. “These two nations, the blue and the red, watch different news, have different hobbies, believe in different causes, and vote for different parties. All they share is contempt for one another.”
That contempt, born of the yearning for respect, burst into a powerful political blaze during the first Trump campaign, when Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, speaking at a New York City fundraiser in September, 2016, said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”
Republican vice-presidential candidate Mike Pence admonished Ms. Clinton by employing the R-word: “Hillary, they are not a basket of anything,” he said. “They are Americans and they deserve your respect.”
Mr. Trump intuitively saw an opening and seized on it in an Iowa appearance: “While my opponent slanders you as deplorable and irredeemable, I call you hard-working American patriots who love your country and want a better future for all of our people.” The phrase “basket of deplorables” thus was weaponized, not by Ms. Clinton but by Mr. Trump and his supporters.
“Respect is at the heart of the human condition,” said Alexander Hinton, a Rutgers anthropologist. “You can quickly get into demonization and dehumanization, and in the social-media age things can go bad very quickly. It’s easy to spread division and hatred. Lack of respect leads to lots of bad outcomes, even though warring groups share more than they acknowledge.”
Prof. Hinton’s research found that Mr. Trump’s followers view Democrats as communists and elitists, while Democrats view MAGA supporters as fascists and racists. Both sides view the others as authoritarians.
“Conservatives don’t feel they’re respected as people,” said Ira Bedzow of the Emory University Center for Ethics. “Liberals feel American institutions aren’t being respected. These are different kinds of disrespect but the complaint is that the other side is not respecting something. We now have a politics where both sides feel the other is disrespecting, and dismantling, what they hold dear.”
Hillary Clinton made her infamous 'deplorables' comment while speaking at a New York City fundraiser in September, 2016.PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP / Getty Images
Respect has been central to the American experience from the very first moment – indeed from the very first sentence – of the country’s existence as an independent entity.
A paragraph before Thomas Jefferson spoke of the “self-evident” truths of human equality and “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he wrote in the Declaration of Independence that a “decent respect” for global opinion required the new nation to explain why it was separating from Great Britain.
The drive for “decent respect” has been a main current of American life ever since.
The pre-Civil War struggle over slavery, and then the bloody years of the bitter 1861-1865 conflict, were a decades-long battle between those who argued that slavery constituted a violation of human respect and those who argued that abolitionists didn’t respect the Southern ethos and lifestyle.
The push and pull over reform that has been one of the leitmotifs of American politics – from the Populist era of the 1890s to the Progressive era of the first decade of the 20th century, all the way to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and finally to Barack Obama’s overhaul of the health care system – largely was about respect for those who fell behind in the country’s frantic marathon to prosperity.
And, lest we forget, the responses to those self-proclaimed reform movements – the Republican ascendancy of the 1920s, Ronald Reagan’s rebellion against big government, Mr. Trump’s MAGA offensive – were partially efforts to restore respect for the individual in a country where, according to Treasury Department figures, federal government spending now is US$6.75-trillion, just under a quarter of GDP.
There’s another form of disrespect that’s playing a vital role in contemporary American politics: disrespect for history in the face of Mr. Trump’s efforts to erase unsavoury elements from the country’s monuments, museums and libraries; disrespect for the rule of law in court orders the administration has ignored; disrespect for Constitutional principles such as the separation and balance of powers; disrespect for the fundamentals of human kindness and social etiquette; and, in accusing Mr. Obama of “treason” and Joe Biden of being the “worst President,” disrespect for his predecessors.
“Trump’s lack of respect is truly beyond the Framers’ worst nightmares – and ours,” said Jon Michaels, a UCLA law professor. “He’s well on his way to destroying democracy, depleting the institutions that made us safe and prosperous, and breaking the spirit of those prizing science and education, civility and compassion.”
Trump has regularly disrespected his predecessors, calling Joe Biden the 'worst President.'Alex Brandon/The Associated Press
Ms. Clinton was not alone in crossing the respect tripwire. A Republican did it four years earlier.
It came when former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the Republican presidential nominee challenging the incumbent president, Mr. Obama, told a fundraiser of wealthy donors that there were “47 per cent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what,” adding, “All right, there are 47 per cent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.”
It was a massive display of disrespect by a onetime business executive with an estimated net worth at the time of as much as US-$255 million.
“Any time you demean or denigrate people, maybe out of pique, maybe out of frustration, maybe if you think you’re being funny,” said Steven Grossman, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee, “you’re hurting your cause.”
But sometimes respect is the cause itself, grafted onto economic justice.
“Americans often have felt others had no empathy for their viewpoints, that people were out to screw them, or that some people, usually the urban elites, looked down their noses at them,” said Michael Kazin, the Georgetown University historian and author of The Populist Persuasion: An American History.
That notion often has prompted populist movements like the one Mr. Trump leads and the one that produced the Populist Party, whose presidential nominee, James B. Weaver, carried five states in the 1892 election.
Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan spoke of Americans’ “deep feeling of unrest” in the late 1880s, largely because of a wealth gap dividing the period’s Gilded Age plutocrats from the urban strivers of factories and the struggling farmers of the agrarian revolt who comprised the Populist Party.
“The chairman of our great state democratic executive comeety,” one Texas Populist wrote in his imaginative spelling, “calls us skunks, anything that has the sent of the plow handle smells like a polecat to them.”
The disrespect of the period also took its form in jibes about rural Americans from urban Americans – one of the elements that powered the MAGA movement of the early 21st century.
A Republican editor in Kansas decried the agrarian rebels as “men whose feet stank, and the odor from under whose arms would have knocked down a bull, women with voices like a gong, women with dirty fingernails.” That sort of critique rankled members of the Farmer’s Alliance, a group that was subsumed into the Populist Party, with one of its adherents saying, “We are not varmints, but have hearts just like men.”
“No other party in the century,” Jack Beatty wrote in his 2007 book Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900, “cared to shape its program to the need of Americans with dirty fingernails.”
But that’s exactly what Mr. Trump, a plutocrat with scar tissues from the disdain of New York’s elite, did. He mobilized Americans who, as Lorenzo Dow Lewelling of Kansas – a Populist Kansas governor who employed an “I have a dream” idiom in a speech 70 years before Martin Luther King did – put it in 1892, were “guilty of no crime but poverty, intent upon no crime but that of seeking employment.”
Contemporary MAGA conservatives are seeking social and cultural respect, but mid 20th-century conservatives – who chafed under the disrespect of the elites, in this case academic liberals – yearned for respect of a different sort. They sought intellectual respect, and strived to win legitimacy for conservative nostrums and to escape the liberal orthodoxy that their creed was the child of a lesser god.
These 1950s conservatives fought for respect in the faculty lounge and in the public square, and their avatar was a 25-year-old author, William F. Buckley Jr., who burst on the scene with God and Man at Yale.
“Buckley took issue with his Yale professors in a way they could respect,” said Sam Tanenhaus, author of Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America, published in June. “He wanted a reasoned argument from a genuinely educated person, so that he’d be taken seriously by serious people whose respect he wanted.” Four years later Mr. Buckley founded National Review, which in its mission statement said his brand of conservatism “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.”
Contemporary MAGA conservatives are seeking social and cultural respect.NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images
While respect and disrespect have been recurring themes in American politics, they from time to time have lacked the sharp edge, or the pervasive role, that they have in the United States today. There was, in the period following Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare in the 1950s, at least an attempt to replicate the kind of respect Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill shared in early-1940s Great Britain. Despite their strong differences on the question of appeasing Adolf Hitler, there was a deliberate effort to avoid, as Churchill put it, “the rancour and asperity of politics.”
That ideal prevailed in the United States – for a brief time.
“There was more simple human respect in politics in the past,” said Gerry Sikorski, who represented Minnesota in the House of Representatives from 1983 to 1993. “There was a higher sense of civility, and people who were rude were shunned by everyone on both sides of the aisle. It wasn’t a partisan thing. There was a wall of respect you’d never jump over, even with people who were clearly unpleasant.”
That’s not the case any more.
“When civil society breaks down, and when people don’t interact with people with whom they disagree,” said Emory University’s Prof. Bedzow, “it is much easier to disrespect the other side and feel disrespected by the other side.” It may in fact be too easy.