The overlap of the Academy Awards and the beginning of the competition of the presidential race offers a reminder of what matters in our existence. The Oscars are worth watching because they celebrate human creativity by actors, directors, writers, and countless craftsman who make the sets, costumes, lighting and so much more causing whole imagined worlds to come to life. 

That fact caused me to recall something the poet and critic Randall Jarrell said: “Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament of our lives, but because it is life itself.” I was also reminded of the scholar Johan Huizinga who proposed the idea of ‘homo ludens’ — man as a playful creator.

These days it is difficult to imagine lavishing such praise on politics or regarding it as an art form, but at its best it also matters and is an important part of life itself in a functioning democracy. Unfortunately, the crude version of our time is often disappointing. 

Each party once had a platform based on competing visions of a governmental ideal. Now, rather than practicing politics as a kind of art form and using it to sell their utopian vision, party politics is largely divisive and antagonistic, designed less to attract and unite an audience and celebrate excellence than to denigrate the opposition, divide and conquer. 

Thus politics becomes not a playful art but a form of warfare or a species of hypocrisy. Republicans, who have tended to promote legislation that panders to high earners and the investor class, pretend to represent working class voters though Democrats are more likely to legislate in their favor.

Donald Trump represents a vicious version of the politician. He calls his rival for the nomination “a destroyer of democracy” which is rich coming from a man who praises such ruthless, barbarous, and anti-democratic leaders as Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban. Trump also frequently apes the Nazi playbook by characterizing his opponents as vermin, promising to prosecute rivals, and to seek retribution. 

Polls show that Trump’s crude style has tended to erode the support of educated voters and of women. Biden beats Trump in appealing to white registered voters with college degrees by 60% to 34%. The pollster Whit Ayres sums up Trump’s divisive messaging as anti-immigration, anti-expertise, anti-intellectual, and anti-establishment. 

There’s an audience for such bile, but pandering to an antagonistic minority threatens to create a yawning class and geographical divide between urban and suburban, small town and rural voters. Not surprisingly Trump’s appeal tends to be to people unlike himself. His business and tv careers were always based on exploiting suckers. Like his voters, he counted on conning them before they could wise up.

The annual rating by historians of all American presidents from worst to best suggests that Trump may appeal to a base but that he is so out of the mainstream and divisive as to be widely unacceptable. The most recent ranking of presidents identified the best as including Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Truman while the worst included Warren Harding, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, and in dead last place Trump: twice impeached, facing criminal trials in Florida, DC, and Georgia, increasingly polarizing, and less likely to be regarded as an artist or a political idealist than as a clear and present danger.