The disarticulating developments of the past month, like no other even in the presidency of Donald Trump, defy easy articulation.
Everything with Trump – his equivocating response to the violence in Charlottesville, defense of Confederate monuments, declaration of a culture war in Phoenix, pardoning of perhaps the country’s leading racist xenophobe, threat to shut down the government unless his wall were funded, his Justice Department’s focus on supposed-discrimination against white college applicants, and stepped-up deportation of Latinos – comes down to his deep-seated resentments and insecurities.
What demands more reflection is why that makes him such a depressingly acute embodiment of a substantial segment of American opinion.
It’s too easy – and too conversation-ending – to dismiss it as racism. Trump’s politics of cultural grievance appeal to those who feel threatened by a horde of alien forces: changing U.S. demographics, yes, but also Islamic terrorism; shifting cultural and religious mores; the reassertion of a (different) multipolar world after America’s recent moment as sole global superpower; the rise of a post-industrial economy with little need for many of today’s workers and communities; an attendant disintegration of those communities’ economies and social structures. One could write a lengthy treatise dissecting these phenomena, their inter-relationships and what to do about them. Or one could simply blame it all on people different from you and promise to destroy them. The latter obviously is more compelling to a large proportion of the population – although hardly a majority.
The right has long criticized liberals for “identity politics” and promoting a sense of victimization, but, since the civil rights movement, conservatives have played the identity card at least as heavily. While the left can hardly claim to have avoided identity politics, there’s a fundamental difference: Liberals see “rights” as something of a public good (like national defense or a scenic view), whose consumption by one individual doesn’t diminish consumption by others. In fact, they believe that all Americans are thereby made better off.
Cartoons on President Donald Trump
In the conservative version of identity politics, however, everything’s a zero-sum game: Freedom from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or other characteristics doesn’t unleash greater human potential to the benefit of all. Instead, it’s a step backward for everyone else, part of the never-ending war of all against all. Your gain is necessarily my loss.
This age-old disagreement as to whether the world is zero-sum or not defines virtually every aspect of our politics today: Trade and immigration, for example, on the one hand benefit society as a whole, but on the other produce losers who then see the entire issue in zero-sum terms. This zero-sum perspective is closely aligned with Trump’s personal sense of a constant war of all-against-all, and a politics in which those who are different must be separated, each with their own “lebensraum,” to end (or, at least, partition) the zero-sum nature of the world.
The majority of Americans do not share this persecution complex, or Trump’s sense of “American carnage.” Most of us live in an America that is still great. But we are living in a false dichotomy between those who see a world of limitless possibilities and those who see it as zero-sum: The fact is that, even with a growing pie overall, in a changing world some will see their share shrinking, even in absolute terms.
Therein lies perhaps the root of our current polarization, an irreconcilable difference in fundamental worldview. Most Trump supporters aren’t racists, let alone white nationalists. They are simply those who see themselves on the losing end of change, with no one in power giving much of a damn. Trump is offering to turn the clock back for them; I worry what will happen when they discover he’s lying. Meanwhile, what are the rest of us offering them?
The split over this in the Democratic Party today is based on similarly outdated conceptions on both sides – between those who want to go back to the New Deal/Great Society era, and those who only want to roll history back to the 1990s. Just as the Republican Party is split between its traditional elite and Trump’s more “populist” base, so too are the Democrats. In both parties, the elite are comfortable with a more pluralist and global America, but the wings are more concerned about their dwindling economic prospects, more inclined to 20th century-style government intervention, and less concerned about, shall we say, politically-correct social views: Bernie Sanders’ campaign, with a Marxian fixation on economics as explanation of all ills, was notably unconcerned with racial and social issues, and his following achieved notoriety for its high concentration of angry young males who might be subjected on most college campuses today to some sort of gender-sensitivity training.
It is hardly inconceivable, then, that the two wings and two elites might realign in common cause. The wings might unite to advocate a more activist government on behalf of economic have-nots, while the elites manage to find a sort of Silicon Valley Consensus: just enough government to support public investment in the needs of the new economy and, otherwise, a basically libertarian attitude toward both social issues and tax policy. This is actually where the country has been headed for at least the last decade; Trump’s candidacy was simply the logical next step in this progression.
For all the Hitler comparisons, Trump is really more reminiscent of Mao: Besides seething resentment and authoritarianism, Mao’s most notable personality trait was a constant need to throw everything around him into chaos. Having fractured the Republican Party into its constituent parts and driven a wedge between them, Trump, with his unerring sense for disruption, now has embraced the opposition.
Here’s a prediction: Trump will endorse some form of single-payer health care plan. That’s actually consistent with everything he said before becoming president, including during the GOP debates, and it would wipe Obamacare off the books by achieving something even Obama himself could not. But it would rupture the Democrats as badly as he has already his own party. The base and the “presidential” wing back Sanders’ Medicare-for-All plan; the congressional leadership and “centrists” are deathly afraid of it. This will end in a scrambling into four “mini-parties” rather than the two parties we had at the beginning of the Trump era. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t put them all back together again.
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