Richard Ford: "The glue that holds America together is not the Constitution, not empathy, not love, but dollars"

American writer Richard Ford, in a 2008 picture.Robert Yager

This interview is part of a series of talks with leading intellectuals, editors, activists, economists and politicians who help to describe the state of affairs before the elections.

In a cozy log cabin, on the very edge of the ocean, next to his home in Maine, Richard Ford's notebooks rest.

His last minute entries, in which he reappears, to the delight of his readers, a household name: Frank Bascombe.

That normal American man, whose adult life has accompanied that of thousands of readers around the world, through that great American novel that the author has administered in spaced installments for more than three decades, helping them to understand the evolution of life intimate of a country that this Tuesday returns to the polls, on the verge of political and moral bankruptcy.

During these months of confinement, between his houses in Maine and Montana, Ford has finished the draft of a new novel of that character who was presented to the world, entering the "permanent period" of his life, recently divorced, in the pages from

(Anagrama, 1986).

Now Frank is an older man, seeking treatment for his sick son, in the era of Donald Trump.

A period that Ford, a subtle observer of a vast country, admits that it is difficult for him to understand without resorting to his imagination.

On the walls of his hut, filled with memories, is an old photograph of two black men digging a hole in the field.

"They're digging Faulkner's grave," explains Ford, smiling.

"Who's the one laughing now, huh?" He says, imagining what the black undertakers would say to the corpse of the great Southern writer, born in Mississippi like himself.

Race, history, ignorance and nihilism are mixed in this talk about a country whose multiple textures Ford knows as few.

Question.

Four years ago he wrote that he could not imagine what a Trump victory would mean for his country.

What has it meant?

Reply.

What it has meant is despair and confusion among the majority of Americans.

But if we were a smart country, which we are not particularly smart, it would be despair and confusion about ourselves.

We shouldn't blame Trump too much because he is just an actor playing the role that he was predictably going to play as he has.

Many Americans wanted an entrepreneur to run the country, as if a country could be run as a company.

Companies have clients and CEOs, while countries have citizens and leaders.

The relationship between a citizen and a leader is very different from that between a client and a CEO.

The problem is not so much with Donald Trump, although he is an idiot, but with us.

How do we allow this to happen?

How have we been so carefree?

How have we looked at our country so badly, taking so much for granted, to allow this to happen?

P.

You, as reflected in your novels, know this country deeply.

He has grown up in the south, lived in the north, in the east, in the west, on the coasts and in the mountains, in rural and urban areas.

Didn't you see it coming?

Do you understand Trumpism?

A.

I'm afraid I only understand conventional explanations.

Using my imagination, which is what novelists do, I try to look beyond these.

And the problem is how to reach the people who are so ignorant about how the country works.

The Constitution, the legislature, the judiciary.

How are you going to educate a huge number of Americans who are unaware of all that?

How are you going to educate racists not to be racists?

How are you going to make a country like ours, such a huge place, with so many different states, be respectful of our history when it is not?

So when you look for the causes of Trump's ancestry, I think one clear is ignorance, another is complacency, another is racism.

They are systemic issues, more than the fact that there is a stratum of dissatisfied unemployed miners in western Pennsylvania.

That is just the easy explanation.

Q. You were

at a Trump rally in South Dakota this summer, you told me, where you were able to mingle with many of his followers.

He said they seemed to share the conviction that they were "undeservingly helpless."

A.

Yes, I think that sentiment unites many Trump supporters.

And it is not supported by the facts.

It is the character that they have created: that the Government has not been their Government, that it has not served them well enough.

But the truth is that it serves them quite well.

He gives them money from social security when they get older.

Pave its roads.

It keeps its schools, its libraries open.

It provides them with minimal healthcare.

It does many things for them, so that image of themselves as an unjustly abused stratum of society is just ignorance.

They are not.

What they are is ignorant.

Do you want to know who is homeless?

Black people without jobs, they are being poorly served.

People with disabilities, they are poorly cared for.

Most of the people at Trump's rally drove big wagons, they drove powerful SUVs, they didn't seem to be doing badly.

Q. He

also told me that, although they would never admit it, they seemed to him “nihilists”, ready to dismantle a country without knowing much about the reasons or consequences.

R.

It is true.

His defense of Trump may begin with a certain philosophical logic: opposition to those who reject him.

But often that degenerates into nihilism, because they forget why they are angry.

They are simply angry.

Willing and able to dismantle this country believing that it needs to be dismantled or that they are saving it.

If there were enough of them, they would dismantle everything, like furious rioters setting their own neighborhood on fire.

Q.

As a writer, why do you think Let's Make America Great Again is such a powerful phrase?

R.

It is sentimental.

It is governing with slogans.

It is a nostalgia for the past, but America is much better now than in that past that they idealize.

If you dig into the details of the sentence, what they want is for black people to go back to where they were in 1955, and have a well-defined enemy to hate, like the Russians used to be.

They long for a better time that wasn't so good.

In other words, it is total ignorance.

Ignorance, friend, that's the problem.

Ignorance about the history and founding principles of this country, about our own responsible citizenship.

Ignorance about what a wonderful place America might actually be.

Q.

But hasn't that ignorance always been there?

A.

Well, there are reasons why all this happens now.

Involuntarily, Obama is one of the causes, because he removed all the snakes from under the carpets, from the stones, from the logs.

And then there is education.

People reach adulthood without knowing much about how the state works.

So they can make references to the United States Constitution without having the faintest idea what that Constitution means.

It's just another catchphrase.

Because right now?

There are specific reasons.

Racism, which has not been as visible even though it has always been there, is now prominent.

And ignorance about our institutions has become endemic.

I don't mean that there aren't, for white people, serious economic discrepancies, because there are.

But that doesn't explain everything.

Q.

In the book you just finished, Frank Bascombe returns.

He is an older man in contemporary America.

How does Frank live the Trump era?

A.

I have always tried to keep electoral politics on the periphery of these books, because I am not a great student of politics.

My belief is that what happens in the public sphere radiates into what happens in private life.

So if I can talk about what goes on in private life, if I let that be my primary concern, then I can catch some of the breezes from the larger political atmosphere.

So I keep Trump on the periphery.

There is a phrase at the beginning of

, George Elliot's novel, that goes something like this: "There is no private life that has not been predisposed by a greater public life."

I think that is true.

I don't have to dedicate myself to public life, I can invoke it through private life.

Q.

What is the most important thing at stake in these elections?

R.

There are many things that are in a delicate balance, such as whether or not women can maintain their reproductive rights, for example, which is no small matter.

If people are going to be able to vote or if their right will be suppressed, which is no small question.

If we will continue to allow the sap of this country to flow, which is immigration.

They are not minor issues.

But I think the most important thing we can lose is a sense of optimism about our country.

Not that it is a country where everything is possible, but where a type of personal idealism and optimism can be deposited in our public institutions.

And I think we are in danger of losing that optimism.

Q.

Something seems to be moving on the issue of racial justice.

How are you living all this?

R.

I see him unstoppable.

But I have lived through a period of racial upheaval since I was a child.

So I see what is happening now with Black Lives Matter as something natural, if anything like a holdover, more amplified and intensified, of things that have been going on in this country for a long time.

That is why it is unstoppable.

And it must be unstoppable.

Q.

Have you followed the campaign a lot?

A.

Fortunately I live very far from Washington.

It is one of the things in this country that we can look the other way.

But this is like reality TV, when you see him in the hospital, then driving off, taking ego rides in his SUV and waving like Haile Salassie.

I was surprised he didn't throw dollar bills out the window.

It was completely ridiculous and weird.

But it wasn't funny, because it's real, they are real human beings.

Now, I'll tell you one thing: the weirder Trump gets, and I think that happens when he realizes that he's going to lose, the more hopeful I feel because I think ordinary voters, people who live in West Virginia, in Arizona , who are Republicans, they start to think: "Shit, this guy's the pot is gone."

And I think that's what they should have been thinking the whole time, but they're so cynical that they haven't until now.

Q. You

wrote that Hillary was a bad candidate but there would be a good president.

What about Biden?

R.

Hillary is an elitist, no matter how smart she is.

Biden is not.

Biden is a politician from the old days, almost worn out.

You see guys like Biden who are mayors in cities, members of local councils.

He's one of those types of shaking hands, slapping your shoulder and giving you a good shake.

He knows a funny joke to tell you.

Hillary couldn't do any of that, she just had the wrong instincts.

He was one of those progressive people who think that being smart is all you have to be.

She's probably a lot smarter than Biden, but Biden is a better fit for our country.

He's a much better candidate.

Q.

Is Biden capable of that moral leadership that you attribute to Obama?

A.

Fortunately for Biden, everything he does will be measured against Trump.

So you don't have to do anything very big.

You will win on the moral ground simply by not doing anything horrible.

But he is a guy with the right institutes, he is intelligent, he has great empathy, he has street intelligence, and he knows the state institutions very well, he has been in them for 47 years.

He will be a perfectly acceptable president, and we won't have to worry about him four years later, if he lives.

You will be happy to leave the stage and give it to someone else.

So, for me, it's perfect for the moment.

Almost any other of those who competed would have been perfect as well, but due to the quirks of our democracy, we can only allow one in two white elders to be president right now.

That's going to stop being that way soon.

All those older white men are in retirement.

It is another generation that must handle this.

Like when Kennedy became president.

When Bill Clinton came in I thought, okay, okay, this is my generation's chance to show how well we can do this.

And he did a pretty good job, although he just couldn't get out of the way of himself.

But I think another generation will take over in the Democrats, and that's promising.

Q.

How did the Republican Party become Trump's party?

A.

I don't know the answer to that because I have never been a Republican.

I have never voted Republican.

I do know that it is not a monolithic party, and that they are much more disciplined than the Democrats.

They are much more successful in organizing their people, and they are very good, within the confines of their ideology, at subordinating one thing to another.

They will happily allow Trump to abuse women, for example if, at the same time, they get a Supreme Court justice.

They're really capable of prioritizing those things very well, something the Democrats are useless at.

So I don't know what they will do.

I know they will have hard times.

But somehow, if we get Trump out of there, I don't give a shit what they do.

Q.

Are you afraid that Trump will resist leaving power?

A.

He's bragging about it all day, but he's bragging about things all the time, anyway.

I do not know.

But it scares me.

I am afraid of the violence in our streets.

I really fear that there is violent resistance to Trump being removed from the White House by the right wing, the racists, the QAnon people and the like.

I hope there are sane people who will whisper in Trump's ear: "Man, you've lost the election, don't do any more harm to this country just because it serves your wishes, or the wishes of these memos who follow you."

I do not know.

That is the biggest source of anxiety I feel right now.

I am 100% confident that he will not win the popular vote, but what he will do with what he does get, I don't know.

Nobody knows.

Someone will have to step forward.

Will it be the military, or your family?

I do not know.

Q.

12 years ago, in Dublin, you told me that if McCain won, you would consider packing your bags and leaving the country.

Do you have your bags packed in case Trump wins again?

A.

As you said, that was 12 years ago.

I am now 76. And my wife has absolutely no interest in leaving the country.

76 is a strange age.

I feel very young and I am very old.

And I believe that many things are possible that maybe they are not.

I also believe that Trump is not going to be re-elected.

We did not leave when Trump was elected, as many people did, we have resisted these four years of hopelessness and madness, we are not going to leave now.

Q.

You have friends all over the world.

Do you feel the pressure?

Do you think about the repercussions for the world of what you do on Tuesday?

A.

I am a bit skeptical of all that.

I don't see the United States as a model for the rest of the world.

I believe that most countries have important problems and aspirations that have nothing to do with us.

I see that mentality that we are a beacon to the world is worn down.

We are a country that had endemic slavery since the 16th century, we have nothing to brag about.

We have been putting people in danger our entire existence.

We have huge inequalities.

Also a lot of prosperity, that's true.

If you mean that the hope of the world depends on the prosperity of the United States, perhaps there is an argument.

But below that, we have very serious problems here, on this continent that we try to govern from a small area of ​​ten square kilometers where you are now.

Q.

What has an observer like you learned from your country in these months of forced seclusion by the pandemic?

A. You

already knew how unruly Americans are.

But this is a country founded on the sanctity of property rights, and I didn't really understand to what extent that right to property, and the value of property, could affect people when its value decreases.

I guess I was unprepared for the willingness of people to sacrifice their lives or those of their neighbors so that they could have their pizzeria open.

That was a bit of a shock to me.

Everything gravitates around American independence, but it is much more complicated than that.

It makes me think that the mucilago, the glue that holds America together, is not the Constitution, it is not empathy, it is not love of neighbor, it is dollars.

When you take those dollars away, all those other high-sounding social institutions are vitiated, seriously weakened.

That was a surprise to me.

That people do not prioritize the health and well-being of their peers over the need to earn money.

I know that there has to be a balance, that there cannot be one without the other, but it amazes me to what extent empathy has lost ground in this country.

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