In late 1979 The Gambler, sung by Kenny Rogers, crossed over from country to pop radio and got played repetitively on our school bus route. I was about fourteen and I didn’t like the song. I especially didn’t like the gambler’s pointless, I thought, and simplistic concluding line, “The best you can hope for is to die in your sleep.” Now, almost forty years older and more aware of the various and tragic ways our mortality can be experienced, I find his observation to be an enduring piece of wisdom. Sometimes things which were stupidly simple as a child become simply profound as an adult.

Five or six years after being subjected to Kenny Rogers, I was in college reading Shakespeare’s King Richard plays. We were assigned to write an essay defending the divine right of kings.  This is, in short, the idea that the king’s right to rule comes directly from God and he is in no way accountable to any of his subjects. Whatever the king says or does is an expression of his authority which is infallible and unquestionable. 

Back then, even setting skepticism aside and allowing for the existence of God, I couldn’t make any sense of the proposition. My brain, raised on the concepts of equality, freedom, rule of law and democracy, could not rationally compute any justification for the divine right of kings. If my professor had asked me to take the number two, multiply it by an orange and give the answer as a musical note, it would have made about as much sense to me.  The idea still makes my American blood boil, but, as with The Gambler, I have to confess that, older now and more knowledgeable about history and human nature, the simple idea makes more sense.

When Donald Trump points to his head and says,  “I think everybody would be very poor because without this thinking you would see numbers [down in the stock market] that you wouldn’t believe…”,  or, when he says, “Nobody knows the system better than me which is why I alone can fix it.”,  he is explicitly appealing to the human desire to believe that the leader has special knowledge and will take care of his people. It’s a two part proposition, first getting people to believe that he alone is special, and second, demanding loyalty for protection—you’re either in the tribe or out. Apparently about 40% of Americans feel that this is the way things should work. 

The founders of our government, on the other hand, structured it with a system checks and balances designed to counter the exact sort of human tendencies that give rise to leaders who believe they are beyond the law. However hypocritical or downright mean it was for our white, wig-wearing, woman-excluding, land-stealing, slave-owning founders to conceive a government based on a constitution, liberty,  individual rights and equality without extending those rights to the rest of people of the country, it was still a profoundly idealistic choice compared to most governments that had come before. The reason the American Experiment is called an experiment is because a democracy based on a constitution hadn’t been tried before.

For most of history most human beings have been ruled by some sort of chief, emperor, chairman, strongman, dictator, czar, king, called it what you will. The idea that the leader is somehow special and better than regular people goes back to prehistory and has all sorts of different permutations. There is something in us, apparently, that is willing, maybe even eager to believe that someone else, a man (usually) in a position of authority, possesses secret, infallibile understanding. This is a very human inclination true to some of our more base and deep seated tendencies, and perhaps the most unAmerican concept imaginable.

Now the idealism of our system is challenged by Trump, a man who intuitively understands the appeal of authoritarianism. It is the way a lot of the world has been and still is—Russia under Putin or pick anyone from the list of leaders Trump admires. You almost can’t blame Trump, who shows no evidence of any personal ideology, for being unable to understand the basis of our republic. It makes about as much sense to him as the divine right of kings did to me years ago.

Trump got elected president, against all the odds, by unabashedly espousing his view of the world (and within his world view, winning is winning no matter who helps you). Imagine how validating that is, not only for his point of view, but also for his loyal subjects. It is hard to picture a peaceful resolution to the conflict between the American Experiment and Donald Trump. I think the best we can hope for is that he dies in his sleep.