Creating the elephant who now owns the room

I’m going to write about elephants. Personally, I like elephants, and donkeys, too. Associating politicians with those two creatures is a slur on donkeys and elephants everywhere.

In 19th century America, to “see the elephant” was to have an unusual, memorable experience. Nobody knows where the term started; certainly elephants were rare in America back then, which explains why any remarkable experience was akin to seeing one. Perhaps the first elephant in America was Old Bet, brought here in 1808 by Hachaliah Bailey (distantly related to James Anthony Bailey of Barnum & Bailey fame), who charged people 25 cents to see her. It’s even possible that the phrase originated with a Philadelphia audience talking about seeing a drunken actor in an elephant suit falling into the orchestra pit. At any rate, it likely first appeared in print in 1835, in the writings of our own Georgia author Augustus Baldwin Longstreet.

Speaking of Longstreet, his nephew was Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, and the war of 1861-1865 was one in which soldiers used the phrase “seeing the elephant” to mean that they’d been in combat. Given that, a few political cartoons associated Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party with elephants. The practice survived the war, and the rest is history.

Then there’s another famous phrase: “the elephant in the room.” It, too, is of 19th century origin, though Russian rather than American. Trobriand Islanders, who speak Kilivila, have a word that captures the spirit of this phrase: Mokita, “truth we all know but agree not to talk about.”

So what do elephants have to do with recent political events? Quite a lot.

The Republican Party was formed in a time of great political strife as a purely sectional party, being opposed at the outset to slavery. Thus, at the outset, it was a divisive rather than a unifying influence in America.

Today, division abounds again, but this time within party ranks. The Republican Party is engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that party can permanently endure in the face of the “Two Americas” that are emerging. That’s a much more recent phrase, coined a dozen years ago by — I hate to confess it — John Edwards, the disgraceful former senator. What are these two Americas? The wealthy, the powerful, the Establishment — the so-called “elite” — and the rest of us. Think of the movie “Civil War”now raging on theater screens nationwide: rich playboy Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, versus common, self-sacrificing, unabashed patriot Steve Rogers, i.e., Captain America, and you get the idea.

So which side in this war is responsible for it? Which, to put it another way, is responsible for the rise of Donald Trump?

The “elites” maintain it’s the fault of the party rabble (also known as the voters), whom those “elites” have insulted and treated with contempt — not just for supporting Trump, but for years by ignoring their economic interests. For three decades social conservatives and many blue collar workers have voted Republican. “Trust us,” the Republican Establishment has repeatedly told these folks, and they did. But what have the “elites” done with this trust? They systematically abused it. They adopted a free trade policy that produced, in Ross Perot’s words, a giant sucking sound as our jobs flowed overseas in order to make the rich “elites” still richer. They nominated federal judges who moved left once they were on the bench (think Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and perhaps even John Roberts.) And then there’s the elephant in the room: the national debt, which nobody in Washington cares to mention. In 1981 that debt was around $1 trillion. Today it is $19 trillion, more than our annual gross domestic product. If every dollar produced or earned in America by anyone in 2016 were diverted to pay that debt, we’d still owe a trillion dollars by year’s end. This with Republicans having held the White House for 20 of the past 35 years, and at least one house of Congress for all but six of those years. There’s no way around it: the Republican “elites” colluded in the ballooning of this crippling, catastrophic debt, or at the very least they acquiesced in it.

With this record of gross mismanagement of the public fisc, the “elites” have demonstrated their unfitness to govern and their betrayal of the Republican little guy. Yet they have the gall to blame the little guy for supporting Trump. And until now, many of these Republican “elites” have suggested, if not said outright, they might support Hillary Clinton rather than Trump, just as Ronald Reagan refused to vote for Gerald Ford in 1976. Two Americas, indeed. Better an “elite” insider of the rival party than an outsider of one’s own ticket, even when that insider has more baggage and less reputability than any Democratic nominee of the past half century.

So: who’s really responsible for the political rise of Donald Trump? And if the Republican “elites” refuse to support him, now that he has the nomination locked up, who will really be to blame, not only for Hillary’s victory this November, but for the death by suicide of the Republican Party? One thing is certain: if the “elites” split the party, we’ll all see the elephant, even if it’s just his rear end as he lumbers off into the sunset of history.

Buckner F. Melton, Jr., teaches at Middle Georgia State University.

This story was originally published May 9, 2016 at 9:55 PM with the headline "Creating the elephant who now owns the room."