SUNDAY READER –
By Glynn Wilson –

Many journalists and pundits have been scrambling for the past two years to try to understand the mass popularity of TV reality star Donald Trump and how he somehow managed to fool enough of the people into voting for him for president in 2016.

We know a little something about the phenomenon known as the “cult of personality” down here in Alabama, where we lived under a dictator named George C. Wallace for three decades.

I know a little something about this myself. I covered Wallace’s final term in office for Alabama newspapers and wire services. I even pitched a book idea on Wallace to the literary agent of George Orwell in New York back in 1988. Wallace was still alive then, however, and there was no interest in the New York book publishing industry for a story about Wallace, who they hated for being a divisive racist and opportunist politician on the political right.

As a kid growing up in the suburbs of Birmingham in the 1960s, I was exposed to the cult of personality of Wallace through local newspapers and local television news. When Wallace was shot in that Laurel, Maryland parking lot on May 15, 1971, while running for president, I was 14-years-old and didn’t really understand what was going on. As a late Baby Boomer who came of age in the first generation of television and TV news, I had lived through and witnessed the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert “Bobby” Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

I watched the social and cultural changes underway in the 1960s from the safe enclaves of a white flight suburb in the South. Then when I was old enough to join in as the ’60s came to the South in the 1970s, I grew my hair long and started a rock band and became a hippie musician. I even lived on a commune farm of sorts for awhile with some other musicians, as I talk about in my book: Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.

Before that I found out about the Ku Klux Klan. They wore their white robes and hoods and collected money in white paint buckets at a traffic light across from Civitan Park and the Jack’s Hamburgers on First Avenue North at 24th Street in Eastern Jefferson County. My little nuclear family was apolitical for the most part. My dad did not give the Klan money at that traffic light. He rolled the window up tight and drove by without making eye contact.

While we usually watched Walter Cronkite on CBS News at the dinner table every night, I don’t recall my parents ever talking openly about politics. Years later when I thought back on that time to write a book chapter about it, the only explanation I could come up with for this was that the Red Scare of the 1950s and the McCarthy hearings on Communism were too fresh. My parents both worked for public utilities and they were too afraid of losing their jobs to get into politics. That and Alabama was governed by a conservative Southern Democrat or Dixiecrat named George Wallace, who was as much of a dictator surrounded by a cult of personality as any politician in the country.

It was the summer of 1979 before I was exposed to the historical idea of a cult of personality, when I walked into the George Wallace administration building at Jefferson State Community College and saw the giant portrait of Wallace on the wall and signed up for an American history course. A few years later I would go on to write a senior paper at the University of Alabama on the history of Alabama politics from the Populist Era in the late 1800s to the final Wallace term as governor from 1982-86.

At that time we were still fighting the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Historians had written about the cult of personality of Russian leaders like Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. A U.S. historian on the American South named C. Vann Woodward had written that the closest thing the United States had to a totalitarian state was Alabama under Wallace. I quoted him in my paper that gave me the final three credits I needed for a Bachelor of Arts degree.

A cult of personality is said to arise when a politician uses the techniques of mass media propaganda, “the big lie,” spectacle, the arts, patriotism, and sometimes even government-organized demonstrations and rallies to create an idealized, heroic, and worshipful image of a leader, often through unquestioning flattery and praise. Can you see a little of Wallace in Trump? This is often seen in totalitarian or authoritarian countries, from Fidel Castro in Cuba to Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Remember that statue of Saddam being torn down during the Iraq War when George W. Bush was president?

Giant portraits and statues of the leader are erected to portray an almost god-like power of personality. This was true in Alabama under Wallace and it is now true of Trump. Look at the gaudy gold signs on Trump hotel towers around the country and the world. Can you see how Trump is trying to create a cult of personality around himself? During the campaign in 2016, he claimed over and over again that only he could solve our problems. After two years in office and the recent government shutdown, it should be obvious to everyone that this is not true. Yet a third of the population still support Trump, no matter how much he lies and makes our political, social and economic problems worse. His entire reputation from his ghost-written biography the Art of the Deal is fiction. Yet millions of people still believe it. Maybe they want to believe or need to believe it.

The term cult of personality came to prominence in 1956, in Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences,” given on the final day of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, Khrushchev, who was the First Secretary of the Communist Party, criticized the lionization and idealization of Stalin, and, by implication, his Communist contemporary Mao Zedong, as being contrary to Marxist doctrine. The speech was later made public and was part of the “de-Stalinization” process the Soviet Union went through.

Down in Alabama, we never really had a “de-Wallacization” period. We still live with the political system built by Wallace. It’s just that Republicans are now in charge, not Democrats.

So when national commentators wonder at why the people of Alabama and the South still support President Donald J. Trump to such a great extent, they should only look to the history of the state and region.

Then, how are average people supposed to react when no one is providing them with a real, true, alternative narrative? Alt-facts serve their purpose and let them remain in denial, believing that their conservative, Christian, patriotic, nationalist, racist world view is the accurate one.

There are plenty of people in the press and media willing to capitalize on this, and not just Fox News and conservative talk radio. Mass circulation daily newspapers pandered to this view of the world for many years, selling newspapers in the white flight suburbs until they became black flight suburbs.

Why the working class people here are still willing to go along with some great lying leader and vote against their own self interest is not really such a mystery. I explained it a few years ago in a story and video I produced from an interview I conducted with Auburn historian Wayne Flynt: Why Do Working Class People Vote Against Their Economic Interests?

While this story went viral all over the country and the world on the internet back then, it was never repeated by any news organization in the state. It was never covered by any newspaper in Alabama, never talked about on local television news here, and certainly not on conservative talk radio. So not enough people found out about it for it to trickle down to the masses, even though I showed the video at an AFL-CIO convention in Prattville near Montgomery after giving a talk to 350 union leaders. The idea was to get them for the first time in their history to get involved in educating rank and file members about the history and mission of unions in politics and to get involved in the media and public affairs.

Unfortunately there was a backlash against this, and afraid of their own conservative rank and file members, many union leaders hunkered down and became even more conservative and helped elect Trump in 2016.

There is always a tremendous amount of pressure to go along and get along with the strongman leader. The concept of a “strongman” political leader is related to the concept of a cult of personality. A strongman is one who rules by force and runs an autocracy or authoritarian, totalitarian regime. The term is often used interchangeably with “dictator” in the western world. It is common in third world countries where more primitive, developing societies may need a strong leader to transition to a more modern democracy. It is common in Latin America. Remember General Manuel Noriega, who was often dubbed the “Strongman of Panama?”

How do we fight the idea of some percentage of the populations’ apparent need for a strongman?

We need only look to our own early history in the United States, when George Washington resisted the call on the part of some newspapers and others to take on the role of king of America.

Trump would have us rewrite our history and make him a dictator king. This is not a conspiracy theory. His own public statements bear this out as his goal. There is a method to this man’s apparent madness. Clearly he has been studying this since long before he even met Steve Bannon.

How do we combat this? For starters, while many have compared Trump to Adolph Hitler in Germany, perhaps we should all be sharing links to documentaries on Benito Mussolini of Italy. He amassed power even before Hitler by practicing an uber-nationalism that seems to be the model for Steve Bannon and Trump’s campaigns. It was Mussolini who coined the phrase Fascism. He adopted the fasces symbol to represent this political philosophy, with the axe in the middle of the bundle of rods.

Mussolini created a form of radical authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy. This is Trump’s model.

Social Media

While there are a number of problems with the new social media, and people should understand up front that it can’t replace a real news press in this country or any other, it is a powerful tool we could use to great effect to counter the pressures on people to go along with the cult of personality of a strongman leader. It’s easy for some people to just go along with a strong leader. But must of our population has well developed instincts that trend toward democracy and justice. It is just a lot harder to demand justice than it is to beg for mercy, as Shakespeare showed us.

If you are one of those individuals who is willing to work hard to keep this Republic trending toward democracy, not theocracy, oligopoly, monarchy or fascism, then surely you already know how important it is to keep a press alive to tell the stories we need to know so that we will have something to share on social media and educate the public.

For better or worse, this is still a capitalist country. We may like the idea of trending toward some version of democratic socialism or a socialist democracy. I too think that’s where we should be going. Health care should be considered a national right, for example, not something you should have to pay an insurance company for.

But we are not going to get there if we think the press will survive without major financial support. Right-wing conservative news corporations like Sinclair Broadcasting, Sheldon Adelson and Gatehouse Media are already taking over most of the broadcast channels for local TV news and what’s left of the dying newspapers. Conservative, capitalist propaganda has a safe home to spread its gospel.

I’ve been preaching the gospel of the need for a new, well funded web press now for going on 20 years. I don’t know what else to say for enough people to start believing me when I tell you this is just as important for the future of democracy here as any other institution in our society worth protecting, from an independent judiciary to uncorrupted elections.

This is the only tool we have to fight Trump, fascism and this cult of personality. I’m more than willing to do my part. I wake up every day and tell the stories I see to try to help people understand.

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Please do your part. Click on this cartoon link to find out how.