The tone-deafness of 'just two dolls'

"I don't like holidays," he raged. "Christmas shopping? In my day, we didn't have shopping malls with hundreds of stores with gifts people really want. We had one store and it had no gifts.... That's the way it was, and we liked it!"

That skit clearly made an impression on me. Because when President Trump recently said it was fine that his policies would mean fewer toys for children, my mind immediately flashed back to that long-ago rant by the Grumpy Old Man.

"Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls," Trump blithely told reporters on April 30. "And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally."

In an NBC interview a few days later, he repeated the point. "They don't need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five."

As numerous commentators observed, Trump's message — fewer toys for children will be good for America — makes for bad politics and worse economics. It's the kind of attitude traditionally associated with grumpy old socialists but now increasingly echoed by so-called national conservatives in the MAGAsphere.

Beyond that, however, what strikes me is how wholly at odds such attitudes are with America's traditional view of itself.

What are the elements of Americanism? Traditional answers would likely include some combination of individualism, equality, freedom, democracy, and patriotism, along with values like ethnic and religious pluralism, a strong work ethic, and a belief in progress.

To one extent or another, all of those are components of what is often called the American way of life. Yet there is a strong case to be made that material abundance and consumer choice are also essential features of the American idea. Generations of would-be immigrants dreamed of coming to the United States not only for its freedoms but because here the "streets were paved with gold." It is no fluke that America's most beloved holiday is neither the Fourth of July, which celebrates the nation's independence, nor Memorial Day, which honors those who gave their lives to preserve that independence. The foremost American holiday is Thanksgiving, which revolves around feasting with friends and family as an expression of gratitude for the bounty of this land.

In 1943, to illustrate what Franklin D. Roosevelt called "Freedom From Want," Norman Rockwell created a classic image of holiday opulence. In America, the painting suggests, the ideal is not merely to have enough; it is to have plenty. Rockwell later said he wondered whether he had been right to depict such well-fed prosperity at a time when so many people, in America and around the world, were destitute. But "Freedom From Want" was quickly embraced by the public and has become an iconic representation of American life.

Strictly speaking, of course, Trump is right: No child needs 30 dolls, just as no supermarket shopper needs a choice of 30 brands of coffee, and no one needs to have access to hundreds of streaming services for music, movies, and podcasts. For that matter, no one needs to live in a mansion like Mar-a-Lago. But everyone does need freedom. And America's extraordinary, over-the-top cornucopia of consumer choices is a testament to what freedom — including the freedom to trade with willing buyers and sellers, unimpeded by arbitrary government shackles — makes possible.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the essayist P.J. O'Rourke wrote with exhilaration of America's victory in the Cold War. "The fight against life-hating, soul-denying, slavish communism — which has shaped the world's politics this whole wretched century — was over," he exulted.

The best thing about that victory, O'Rourke continued, was that it was achieved not primarily by force of arms but through the moral power of consumer abundance.

To be sure, he wrote, "ICBMs and Green Berets and aid to the contras ... were important, but in the end we beat them with Levi's 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of communist indoctrination and propaganda were drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system with all its tanks and guns, gulag camps, and secret police has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian sneakers."

Was that just American chauvinism? Hardly. Just a few months earlier, Boris Yeltsin — then newly elected to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and a member of the Communist Party — had visited Texas in the course of a nine-day visit to the United States. Of everything he saw during that trip, it was a visit to a Houston supermarket that made the greatest impression on the future Russian president.

"When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons, and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people," Yeltsin would later write. That was the moment, one of his aides reportedly said, that "the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed" inside his boss.

Telling Americans to accept fewer choices and pay higher prices in the name of a greater good would be a mistake for any politician — think of the harm Jimmy Carter did to his reelection prospects with his "malaise" speech in 1979. It is bizarre indeed to hear such a claim from Trump, who campaigned for office on the promise of a new "golden age" and assured Americans they would "become so rich" if they returned him to the White House.

As a billionaire who has never known privation and a solipsist who has never been able to see the world through the eyes of others, the president may simply be incapable of grasping that the vast array of consumer choices that so astonished Yeltsin is an essential component of what makes America great. But his message could hardly be more tone-deaf.

Abundance and choice are more than just economic outcomes in the United States; they are cultural touchstones — symbols of the freedom that sets America apart. Downplaying the value of plenty is no vision for the future. It is more like a throwback to a "Grumpy Old Man" crankily insisting that one store with no gifts is all anyone really needs.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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