Jay Kuten: Election drama rolling on

Jay Kuten PHOTO/FILE

AS THE clock winds down the three weeks to this presidential election, Americans are imbued with a sense of dread, best described by Yeats' lines of 1919: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ... The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."

I'm trying to stomach the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton. I would like to have written, "rationalise" but that's not apt. The reasons her supporters give amounts to an endorsement for the lesser of two evils -- which is still a vote for evil. Hillary herself, if she were the "best" in Yeats' terms, lacks, not in conviction, but in connection to the hopes and aspirations of the voters. She can tell us whom to vote against but gives little reason or basis for someone to vote for.

Sixty-seven per cent of the voters do not trust her. And there are plenty of reasons for that distrust. The most recent trove of hacked emails referencing her Wall Street talks, show her coziness with the finance industry, her untrammelled support for borderless free trade -- contrary to her current, possibly momentary, opposition to TPP -- her endorsement of two-facedness with a "public and a private" policy position. These revelations might have doomed her nomination if known earlier. To her luck, Trump's decade old trash-talking-predation-bragging video has focused all the negative attention on him.

Hillary's vulnerability on trust is a serious issue, best described by acerbic New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd as "Nixonian paranoia." Her penchant for secrecy, her resistance to transparency, indicates that she does not trust the citizens and the feeling is, therefore, mutual. It's a problem for the poetry of campaigning which seeks a hero, but that common distrust may be a perverse benefit to the prose of governance.

Hillary Clinton's victory and the domestic arc of her presidency are within predictable possibilities. Foreign policy directions are also within anticipation if more problematic. Her hawkish reflexes don't fit comfortably with a national mood, tired of unending war since 2003. Her restraint may come, paradoxically, from the 67 per cent of Americans who don't trust her and thus are less prepared to enthusiastically endorse military adventurism. That restraint may find expression in the streets.

Trump, in his passionate intensity, gives every sign that he'll not go quietly in defeat. Early on his attacks on immigrants, his Islamophobia, his attacks on women and the disabled, had lent respectability to dangerous sentiments of racism and nativism. Neo-Nazis and other far-rightists in the US were finding comfort and legitimacy through his demagogic rants. Now that his central campaign team is composed of the leaders of the extreme right-wing Breitbart News blog, they are pushing his stance to levels of greater toxicity.

Their influence is exemplified in his recent rants against establishment Republicans and the media, which he accuses of "rigging the election" in collusion with Clinton.

Post-election, Trump is likely to join Roger Ailes, dismissed CEO of Fox News, to form an even more conservative news network, one that erases all boundaries between journalism and political activism.

From that perch Trump can continue to lead his avid followers on a far-right path like that of several European right-wing parties, just a shade this side of fascism. Trump's backers, his campaign staff from Breitbart News, would like nothing better than a former Republican presidential nominee, to give such a movement the shiny patina of respectability of a self-proclaimed billionaire populist.

Trump's latest signal of intent was accusing Clinton of being in league with "international bankers".

That old trope of veiled anti-Semitism begins to have a sulphurous smell about it. In debate he called Clinton the devil. That shoe may be on the other foot. To be clear, Trump is without conviction and is neither racist nor anti-Semitic. He simply gives a lot of aid and comfort to those who are.

Yeats' words again best describe that new party of Trumpians: "What rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.