Baron Wormser: Era of Ill Will

   I remember the phrase from my high school American history textbook: “The Era of Good Feeling.” Did I get that one correct on the multiple choice test? Did I identify it with the administrations of James Monroe? Probably I did. Probably I also asked my teacher, an earnest yet good-natured young man who probably moved into some other vocational endeavor not long after, something to the effect that if there were a capitalized “Era of Good Feeling” did that mean everything else in American history was an “Era of Bad Feeling”? Or did it not work that way? Was it, rather, that the original era existed all by itself, that comparisons were uncalled for, that it was a little episode in the nation’s not very long history, a quiet crumb at the loud feast. I don’t recall my teacher answering such a question, though I do recall his habitual shrug and half-smile. A degree of adolescent sarcasm enlivened his day. He claimed he wanted to make us think.

   I can’t say that the phrase has haunted me. I only find myself dusting it off because we are so manifestly in an Era of Ill Will. I will let go of Era of Bad Feeling because modern times has seemed one long era of such feeling. Perhaps if one parses all the wars, plagues, persecutions, and slaughters, all times qualify. “Ill will,” however, seems particularly apposite to the Age of Trump. Here is someone who enjoys hectoring, bullying, lying, ridiculing, mocking, dismissing, disrespecting, casting blame and who makes a joke of it, thereby having it both ways. Brought up as I was by parents who were positive Americans in the sense that they believed in good will toward other Americans, who believed that friendliness was a cardinal virtue, that “How you doing?” was an honest question, I have been taken aback by the deluge of ill will Trump has unleashed. Is this one nation under vituperation? Is the sum of the greatness he seeks to call forth “again,” nothing more than a small mountain of resentment? 

   Americans, apparently, are bedeviled not only by wanting and the anxiety and ill will that goes with wanting but also by possessing. Whatever you have you can lose: your gun rights, your sanctified prejudices, your Disneyfied innocence. They cannot win and Trump speaks to their frustration. The state of being that many such Americans inhabit is a curious one. The dissatisfaction is not about economic principles. Most Americans never study economics in high school and have only a hazy idea that something called “capitalism” is running the show. Corporations exist in their own globalist ether; lobbyists and tax shelters are, at the most, a distant rumor.  The dissatisfaction is not political in any coherent sense. Trump’s platform is based on denial of whatever he wants to deny: no Earth-conserving issues, no reasons as to why the United States has challenges about immigration, no real history about anything. A few decades after the Era of Good Feeling, Americans conceived a Know-Nothing party. The phrase retains its bitter, taunting savor.

   The dissatisfaction is not spiritual because Trump abjures any form of the spiritual beyond convenient nods to the evangelicals who vote for him. But—to use a phrase my high school history teacher favored—make no mistake, the dissatisfaction is very real, real enough to motivate many millions to applaud someone who is full to the brim with ill will, sedition, and mega-contempt. His supporters may be driving around in new pickup trucks. They may live in gated communities. They may be working three jobs and barely getting by. They all, however, are fed up. Fed up with what? It seems a fair question. 

   To my mind, they are fed up with many things for which Trump is their vociferous magnet. They are fed up with social agendas. They are fed up with people from other countries who don’t look like what they look like. They are fed up with government, even though they still want highways on which to drive their pickup trucks. They are fed up with having to deal with non-Christians. They are fed up with the rest of the world, as if to ask: Why did God put oceans around the United States? Surely, to let the United States go along by its exceptional self. They are fed up with problems and would much prefer to chant a slogan that will, more or less magically, make everything better. They are fed up with experts who pretend to know everything. They are fed up with enlightened attitudes. They are fed up with phony good will. If all this seems vague, all the better. Animus enjoys a generalized fuel. 

   They aren’t, however, fed up with their wanting because if they were they would stop wanting Trump and start to ponder what contentment might be and what is getting in the way of that contentment, such as the mindless, life-sucking obsession with work and money. Nor are they fed up with possessing because the point of the work and money, beyond securing necessities, is to accumulate more. And, like the fabled pursuit of happiness, “more” has no boundaries. For Americans, it is an endless, bring-on-the-billionaires frontier. Even if Trump is little more than a confidence man, he has the aura of money and money has nothing to do with people. Money exists in its own realm like those percentages the Federal Reserve is always fiddling with. Even though we all spend our lives with money, it seems to have a life of its own. If money comes first as the medium of commerce and if commerce is the engine of life as we know it, then who cares about positive feelings about other people? Compared to things and money, people don’t have much status except in their own minds. If character, for instance, mattered, Trump never would have gotten out of the gate. But character, a very human attribute, doesn’t matter when compared not just to messages of discontentment but to the privilege of discontentment—a privilege open to everyone.

   An unhappy truth to this situation is that it’s easier to be against something than to be for something, particularly since any ideal is bound to have flaws. The great religions offer aspiration that typically doesn’t go much beyond personal salvation and tribal identification. Political ideals in a democracy have famous feet of clay since the genius of self-interest is a ruling principle. “Politician” is not a term of praise. The sheer frightfulness of the modern world is at work, too. Optimistic liberals believe the ship of state can be righted through this and that amelioration, that there is more to legislation than favoritism, whereas many who support Trump not only don’t believe in the ship of state but don’t want there to be such a thing in the first place. Nor does Trump who sees the office he seeks once more as a personal entitlement from which he can settle scores and fulminate. In essence, he says, “Damn the nation” and many, under the guise of patriotism, agree with him. As history has shown more than once, denunciation is heady, volatile stuff.

   All of which is to say that the enormous attention paid to one man who won’t shut up is a symptom of something that is not just rotten but something like nihilistic. All the stress on getting and spending and using machines to help get and spend has, over decades, lessened the human factor. How much we mean to one another becomes more and more questionable. We are remote and increasingly live there. Life is efficient but less livable. We read about one another and hear news about one another and maybe we wonder and maybe we merely recoil while we reach for another packaged snack and the remote. Based on such reading and viewing and the endless sensationalism thrown at us, we are—to give an old-fashioned example—much less likely to pick up hitchhikers and look forward to conversations with them about this “great” land they are traveling through and what that land means to each of us. Fear is in many American bones and shows every sign of getting worse. The irony is a neat one: standing up for someone who magnifies fear in the name of greatness and insinuates loathing. That combination seems sadly American—a hollowness eager to proclaim its substance. All the denunciations seek to erect a fence to keep out “others.” Or perhaps a wall. “Let ill will flourish” is a miserable motto but, at this besieged, overheated point, an accurate one. 

Copyright 2024 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry, 2023). He founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar.