What does Donald Trump want?
True story:
One evening in late September 1938 (the 26th or 27th, I believe), Hitler ordered a motorized division of the Wehrmacht to parade through the streets of Berlin. As the soldiers marched and the tanks rolled by, the citizens didn't cheer or elbow each other out of the way in order to get a better view. Instead, they turned and re-entered the buildings they’d just stepped out of, or walked the other way. Those few who did line the streets did so in silence. William Shirer, who witnessed the scene, described it in his diary as "the most striking demonstration against war that I've ever seen."
In London and Paris, governments were scrambling (ineptly, as it turned out) to ensure the continuation of a twenty-year European peace. In the streets of Berlin, the people shied away from a demonstration of German military power, leaving Hitler discomfited and peevish. And behind the scenes in Berlin, high officials of the military, the intelligence service, and the foreign ministry were plotting a coup to remove Hitler from power as soon as he gave the expected order to march on Czechoslovakia. (That order never came, of course - it, and therefore the coup it may well have triggered, were precluded by the Munich Agreement of September 30th).
Nobody - nobody besides Hitler, that is - wanted war. And yet war came. And war lasted. And some twenty million human beings died before it was all over. So it is with bullies. Sic temper tyrannis.
My point: where bullies are concerned, the will of the majority doesn't matter. Unless the bully is resisted with whatever means may be required to stop him, he will get his way and many will suffer.
Human beings - normal human beings - are peaceable; they do not desire conflict. And because they know themselves and most of their fellows to be peaceable and amenable to compromise they find it hard to fathom that the bully enjoys his aggression for its own sake, and that he is not going to stop of his own accord for the simple reason that his objective is not to obtain some particular goal but, rather, to dominate. It rarely occurs to them that every failure to resist a bully enhances his confidence and hence his power, ultimately aggravating the penalty that will have to be paid for having appeased him. Hitler came to power less by cracking heads (although there was plenty of that) than by pushing on a series of open doors, or at least unlocked doors.
The bully puts you in the position of having either to comply or to resist; he gives you no other choice. This is the first, but by no means the final, insult: he forces his way into your life and imposes a set of conditions on you, to which you must respond in some way, even if that response consists of not reacting. He puts your dignity into question. If you prize your dignity at all then he will make you pay for it by requiring you to act out of character and requite force with force, or at the very least with resistance.
Human beings - normal human beings - are peaceable; they do not desire conflict. And because they know themselves and most of their fellows to be peaceable and amenable to compromise they find it hard to fathom that the bully enjoys his aggression for its own sake, and that he is not going to stop of his own accord for the simple reason that his objective is not to obtain some particular goal but, rather, to dominate. It rarely occurs to them that every failure to resist a bully enhances his confidence and hence his power, ultimately aggravating the penalty that will have to be paid for having appeased him. Hitler came to power less by cracking heads (although there was plenty of that) than by pushing on a series of open doors, or at least unlocked doors.
The bully puts you in the position of having either to comply or to resist; he gives you no other choice. This is the first, but by no means the final, insult: he forces his way into your life and imposes a set of conditions on you, to which you must respond in some way, even if that response consists of not reacting. He puts your dignity into question. If you prize your dignity at all then he will make you pay for it by requiring you to act out of character and requite force with force, or at the very least with resistance.
In 1938, nobody wanted war except for Hitler. He got his war. Today, the question before us is: what does Donald Trump want? Let's not wait to find out.