Tom Nichols Needs To Get Out More

In the 1985 movie "Runaway Train," John Ryan asks a guy if he's ever seen a riot in a maximum security prison. "Your brains are too small to imagine it," he says.

That's part of the problem Americans have trying to imagine a second Trump term.https://t.co/YnxS8csdS1

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 3, 2024

I did not, for example, think it possible that state troopers would stop women who might try to leave their state to seek an abortion. In his concurrence with the Dobbs v. Jackson decision that threw out Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that such travel bans on pregnant women might be unconstitutional, and no state has tried to enact one—yet.

He hasn’t heard of Texas? Or Ken Paxton? No, Texas Rangers don’t check cars at the Texas border and question pregnant women at airports, but near enough for dammit.

And, of course, now that it affects white people.

No argument there. My point is that tens of millions of other people can't imagine that happening again - along with many other awful things.

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 3, 2024

Actually, Nichols’ argument seems to be that, once Trump said (again!) what he said in the TIME interview (TIME is still in existence?), the country should have risen up as one and demanded: “LOCK HIM UP! LOCK HIM UP!! LOCK HIM UP!!!” And failure to immediately do so is a failure of the collective and individual imagination for which we will all pay.

Jonathan Edwards was never so bleak or dour.

Tom Nichols really needs to disconnect himself from the national self and face the real existential “threat:” that he is one self among many, and we don’t all have to think like him for things to be okay.

Likewise, Americans had a hard time conceiving of a nuclear war until 1983, when ABC showed the made-for-television movie The Day After. The movie (as I wrote here) made an impact not because anyone thought a nuclear exchange would be a walk in the park but because no one could really get their head around what would happen if one took place.

Tom’s a young man; too young to remember CONELRAD and “duck ‘n’ cover” and emergency sirens to be used only for the emergency of a nuclear strike. Dr. Strangelove was a documentary taught to school children. We lived with the threat of tornadoes 🌪️ and nuclear holocaust, and one was as likely as the other. Home underground fallout shelters were a bigger business than tornado rooms in Oklahoma. The whole “prepper” food industry started with the need to stock those shelters with supplies. I watched “The Day After” when I was 28, and the news shows about people weeping after they saw it because they didn’t know the threat. (ABC ran the movie and the prime time news special about audience reaction. It was a win-win.) And all I could think was: “HOW COULD YOU NOT??!!!???” But those were the days of Reagan and “Morning in America” and we’d given up on the national consciousness of surviving nuclear war in the public fallout shelters (all of which, according to TeeVee, seemed to be in downtowns of Eastern seaboard cities far from my suburban home in East Texas). CONELRAD had disappeared from the faces of AM car radios (along with AM radio as the only broadcast game in the car), and my childhood was no longer the childhood of the weeping teenagers in the TeeVee news. Swept away as if it never happened.

Still being swept away, in a critique based on national historical amnesia. Ironic, no?

If Trump returns to office, he will not shoot democracy on Fifth Avenue. He and the people around him will paralyze it, limb by limb. The American public needs to get better at imagining what that would look like.

I’m fairly certain they already are, if only because of history. How many incumbent Presidents supposedly face fierce headwinds every time they stand for re-election? And how many times do incumbents get returned to office, despite the assurances of pundits that the polls show they are in trouble? Gotta have a horse race or it’s not “fair and balanced” and “objective” coverage. Even Trump got more votes in 2020 than he got in 2016, probably because of incumbency. It’s true Biden has to GOTV. It’s also true that campaigns matter; and all predictions of the future are bunk. 

But “Run in circles, scream and shout,” is neither a political strategy nor a way to win friends and positively influence people. Sure does draw eyeballs, though. And keeps you in the “serious” pundit club. Where the elite meet to weep. And shake their heads at the sheeple who don’t immediately recognize the sagacity of agreed upon pundit wisdom.

Agreed upon by pundits, of course. Who else could judge them?