I hesitated to write the inaugural blog post for this site about Donald Trump. So much ink has been spilt and breath wasted covering a man whose most notable achievement as a presidential candidate is being so outlandishly unqualified that his very nomination should be considered an affront to any rational and even moderately informed citizen. However, while much effort has been exerted trying to come to terms with what makes a Trump voter, perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the circumstances in our society that have given rise to this cartoonish buffoon of a candidate.
I won’t go into detail about all the ways in which Trump is an awful candidate and how truly frightening the proposition of a Trump presidency is. One need only listen to the man speak, keeping in mind of course that his propensity for lying is unmatched by almost any standard political or otherwise. Even his business bona fides, the thing that supposedly makes him seem more reasonable as a candidate, are dubious at best. Note for instance that he and his companies have been involved a stunning 3,500 lawsuits, hardly the sign of an upstanding businessman. Then there is his famous temperament and ridiculously thin skin, so thin in fact that when slighted he has taken it upon himself to mock a disabled reporter, attack the parents of a fallen Army Captain, encourage violence against protesters at his rallies, and the list goes on really (258 people, places or things insulted on twitter alone). It is an improbable task to recount all of the misogynistic, xenophobic, racist, ignorant, hyperbolic nonsense that he spews across various mediums like some kind of garbage volcano, and anyone who defends his behavior or posits with any degree of seriousness that Trump is a credible candidate should seriously consider their motivations for doing so and ask themselves why they think a narcissistic realty television star is the best person to lead the most powerful nation on Earth.
All that being said there are some very legitimate and disturbing cultural and political trends that have given rise to the Trumpster. The first and perhaps most important of these being the fracturing of the Republican party. Our political machine has evolved over time into the current system which is dominated by two parties, even though such a system was never explicitly endorsed by the Constitution. This lack of options has meant that both parties have had to build coalitions around diverse populations often held together by relatively few commonalities. The problem with the Republican coalition is that the ever since Nixon’s Southern Strategy the party has been largely propped up by two very different and seemingly disparate groups, the moral conservatives and the free market capitalists.
There are of course other factions within the Republican party, but the upheaval of the civil rights movement in the 60’s created an opportunity for the Republicans to play on the anxiety of the white working class and foster an attitude of opposition to the alien other, represented by minorities and liberal activists who were working to change the status quo. The status quo to that point had been largely dominated of course by white men, and the sudden dissolution of barriers that had been suppressing minorities and women for over a century threatened to undermine traditional societal roles.
Trump’s straight talking style is little more than a modern day dog whistle designed to inflame the passions of those who still fear change due to the rapidly shifting social landscape. Technology is pushing culture forward at a faster and faster pace, in large part because it has connected the world and provided a level of access to information that is unprecedented in human history. The inevitable result of this information exchange is that more people than ever are being exposed to ideas other than those they were provided by their parents and traditional authority figures in their community, and it has laid bare the many inconsistencies inherent in the stories told to us by our most sacred institutions such as religion, government, and ancestral wisdom.
I’ll leave the ethical debate regarding such information exchange for another post, there is after all a shocking and ever growing amount of miss-information in addition to some purposely malicious information being spread, but there is little doubt the acceleration of progressive attitudes in our country has been fueled by exposure to intellectual variety, and even more importantly the people who represent said intellectual variety. The speed with which the LGBTQ community has managed to win not only legal recognition, but social acceptance, is almost bewildering when compared to women’s suffrage or the African-American struggle for equality. As the number of actors, athletes, politicians and professionals coming out of the closet increased dramatically in recent decades it emboldened every-day people to do the same, and it became increasingly difficult to demonize homosexuality when hetero people realized that they already knew gay people and that there was not anything inherently evil or wrong with them; they’re just people trying to live their lives like everyone else. That is not to say that it’s over and we’re living in a post-discriminatory world, and that’s the point. Even though change is happening faster now than ever before there is still a strong moral tradition perpetuated by conservatism that is under threat by the deadliest of intellectual dangers, irrelevance.
For decades’ conservative lawmakers, themselves a privileged faction of the Republican party, controlled the direction of their coalition by preaching solidarity on cultural issues. Of course while they did attempt to legislate the morality of their largest constituent group, conservative Christians, they also much less dramatically worked toward creating a savage capitalist environment in which the wealthiest were able to consolidate their grip on the economy. It has always made a sort of cynical sense for those with wealth to support Republican ideals of limited regulation paired with weak labor and consumer laws. Yet for the outsized influence they wielded over the course of the last forty some odd years the affluent are still a minority within the party, and now the economic policies they endorsed and nurtured are coming home to roost.
This is not to say that Republicans are wholly responsible for the growing economic inequality and accompanying sense of despair felt by those on the bottom of our increasingly stratified society. Democrats too have played their part in supporting economic ideals that reward the wealthy with more wealth while simultaneously pretending the system they were advocating is a meritocracy. In fact the rules laid down by legislators have since our country’s inception been tilted in favor of the have’s. The larger issue currently facing us is that those rules, due to the legacy of greedy politicians over generations, have become so unbalanced that those who were born into or by virtue of circumstance break into the upper echelons of wealth accumulation are in little danger of ever being displaced, and the majority of those born into less favorable circumstances lack access to even to the necessary tools that would allow them to rise above their current social position.
This brings us to the crux of the schism in the Republican party, and on a larger scale the rise of the Trump phenomenon. While Democrats also appeal to cultural issues the difference between their platform and that of the Republicans is that the current Democratic identity (and dare I say fundamentally the American identity) is based on diversity, whereas the Republican identity is based on hegemony. Republicans are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly religious, specifically some form of Christian (I am including Mormons under the umbrella of Christians, again an argument for another post). This combination of racial and religious affiliation is perceived by those inside its sphere of influence as being the true character of America. Of course it isn’t a very distant leap from the intellectual proposition of something being true to something being right. Yet the group that feels as though they represent the true and right character of America, and whose ideals all ethnic, religious and ideological minorities should therefore willingly subject themselves to, have had to endure defeat after resounding defeat in the so called culture wars in recent years.
It’s almost old hat now to point out that many members of the conservative base routinely vote against their own interests because of ideological affiliation, but when the Republican leadership became so grossly ineffectual following the election of President Obama (ahem, an African-American), and were unable to deliver even minor cultural regression back toward the conservative mean, the ideologues inevitably turned on their aristocratic leaders. In short they lost faith in their party’s ability to represent their interests (even though their leaders never really had many of their best interests in mind to begin with), and consequently a group already largely distrustful of government (another ideological assertion encouraged by their political leaders, ah irony) cast aside all of their traditional candidates in favor of the bombastic outsider.
In addition to all of this there is our cultural fascination and worship of wealth. This is not a development that can be laid at the feet of either party because there are certainly larger cultural issues at play, but our political class and Republicans in particular are all too quick to praise those with exceptional wealth and hold them up as ideal citizens. Take the phrase job creators that gets tossed around so enthusiastically by conservative lawmakers. Certainly people and groups that desire to start new businesses are an important part of our society, but to define them as creators, a word with strong religious connotations, puts them in an exalted social class that all the lowly workers should pay tribute to. The underlying assertion of course is that the owners and the executives are inherently more worthy and therefore entitled to a ridiculously lopsided share of our country’s wealth, never mind that those organizations could not exist without all the employees who in a very literal sense are the business. Donald Trump is keenly aware of this cultural leaning, and has frequently brandished his business success as a qualification for the presidency.
The assertion that a successful business person would make a good head of state makes little logical sense, after all a business is not very similar to a government in structure, function or purpose, but the worship of wealth in our culture leads those who serve at its alter to the proposition that success is success regardless of experience or acumen. This is why people who support Trump can say with a straight face that he would make a good political leader even though he has zero experience in public service or policy making. The man can’t even articulate a coherent policy position or demonstrate a modest understanding of global affairs. He’s a political moron, but he does two things very well.
The first thing Trump does well is stoke people’s fears. Even though statistically violent crime has fallen dramatically over the past twenty years and a person in the United States is more likely to be crushed by furniture than killed by a terrorist attack, listening to Trump talk one would think that simply stepping outside was a sure path to being murdered by an immigrant or a jihadist. Fear of violence is only the slimy veneer on the real argument he is making though. The heart of the fear he pedals lies in convincing people that it is the outsiders who represent all the things wrong with our country, and who subsequently can be blamed for all the ills that people dissatisfied with their lives suffer from. He beats the steady drum of fear like a slave driver on the prow of a ship, urging all the disgruntled members of society to embrace him as their savior against the dark tides that supposedly threaten to swallow our country whole and abolish all freedom.
The second thing Trump does masterfully is promote himself. It is not unreasonable to think that many Trump supporters want to be Trump, the self-made man (never mind that million-dollar loan and then some received from his father) and captain of industry (and don’t worry about those businesses he bankrupted or the contractors he stiffed). Just as he is aware of the climate of fear that has been building in our nation so too does he tap into our worship of wealth and success. In addition to being a strongman who will protect the people from all those dangerous foreigners and minorities he is also a paragon of capitalism. The core of his message in this regard is that he is so successful that his policies would necessarily help everyone else achieve his same level of success. Putting aside for a moment that this is an improbability bordering on the impossible, it has the distinct ring of another conservative economic myth, namely trickle-down economics. Put a master of business in the driver’s seat so the argument goes, and he will use his mastery to uplift the rest of the huddled masses. A sadder joke I’ve yet to hear.
So we now find ourselves with a huge portion of the electorate gripping tightly to a poison coin, on one side fear, and on the other greed. They need Trump to make them feel safe, to tell them that he is going to take America back from the liberals and the minorities that are re-shaping the idea of what it means to be American and crush all our enemies under his loafers through sheer strength of will. They need him to promise them the prosperity that has defined the American dream, to tell them that if he is elected we’re going to win so much that we’ll get tired of winning, whatever that means. Trump is, in short, a con artist. He will say anything, no matter how untrue or absurd, if he believes it will elicit the desired actionable response from the people whose admiration he so desperately craves.
We have allowed an authoritarian clown to throw his hat in the ring for the most important job in our country, and maybe even the world. Make no mistake, there is a very real chance that we will elect Donald Trump as president, and if we do there will be very real consequences not only for the United States but the global community. We have a responsibility to make sure that a man such as he is never allowed into the highest office, and come November I hope that enough rational and thoughtful people turn out to save our country from one of the worst decisions we could ever hope to make.
I won’t go into detail about all the ways in which Trump is an awful candidate and how truly frightening the proposition of a Trump presidency is. One need only listen to the man speak, keeping in mind of course that his propensity for lying is unmatched by almost any standard political or otherwise. Even his business bona fides, the thing that supposedly makes him seem more reasonable as a candidate, are dubious at best. Note for instance that he and his companies have been involved a stunning 3,500 lawsuits, hardly the sign of an upstanding businessman. Then there is his famous temperament and ridiculously thin skin, so thin in fact that when slighted he has taken it upon himself to mock a disabled reporter, attack the parents of a fallen Army Captain, encourage violence against protesters at his rallies, and the list goes on really (258 people, places or things insulted on twitter alone). It is an improbable task to recount all of the misogynistic, xenophobic, racist, ignorant, hyperbolic nonsense that he spews across various mediums like some kind of garbage volcano, and anyone who defends his behavior or posits with any degree of seriousness that Trump is a credible candidate should seriously consider their motivations for doing so and ask themselves why they think a narcissistic realty television star is the best person to lead the most powerful nation on Earth.
All that being said there are some very legitimate and disturbing cultural and political trends that have given rise to the Trumpster. The first and perhaps most important of these being the fracturing of the Republican party. Our political machine has evolved over time into the current system which is dominated by two parties, even though such a system was never explicitly endorsed by the Constitution. This lack of options has meant that both parties have had to build coalitions around diverse populations often held together by relatively few commonalities. The problem with the Republican coalition is that the ever since Nixon’s Southern Strategy the party has been largely propped up by two very different and seemingly disparate groups, the moral conservatives and the free market capitalists.
There are of course other factions within the Republican party, but the upheaval of the civil rights movement in the 60’s created an opportunity for the Republicans to play on the anxiety of the white working class and foster an attitude of opposition to the alien other, represented by minorities and liberal activists who were working to change the status quo. The status quo to that point had been largely dominated of course by white men, and the sudden dissolution of barriers that had been suppressing minorities and women for over a century threatened to undermine traditional societal roles.
Trump’s straight talking style is little more than a modern day dog whistle designed to inflame the passions of those who still fear change due to the rapidly shifting social landscape. Technology is pushing culture forward at a faster and faster pace, in large part because it has connected the world and provided a level of access to information that is unprecedented in human history. The inevitable result of this information exchange is that more people than ever are being exposed to ideas other than those they were provided by their parents and traditional authority figures in their community, and it has laid bare the many inconsistencies inherent in the stories told to us by our most sacred institutions such as religion, government, and ancestral wisdom.
I’ll leave the ethical debate regarding such information exchange for another post, there is after all a shocking and ever growing amount of miss-information in addition to some purposely malicious information being spread, but there is little doubt the acceleration of progressive attitudes in our country has been fueled by exposure to intellectual variety, and even more importantly the people who represent said intellectual variety. The speed with which the LGBTQ community has managed to win not only legal recognition, but social acceptance, is almost bewildering when compared to women’s suffrage or the African-American struggle for equality. As the number of actors, athletes, politicians and professionals coming out of the closet increased dramatically in recent decades it emboldened every-day people to do the same, and it became increasingly difficult to demonize homosexuality when hetero people realized that they already knew gay people and that there was not anything inherently evil or wrong with them; they’re just people trying to live their lives like everyone else. That is not to say that it’s over and we’re living in a post-discriminatory world, and that’s the point. Even though change is happening faster now than ever before there is still a strong moral tradition perpetuated by conservatism that is under threat by the deadliest of intellectual dangers, irrelevance.
For decades’ conservative lawmakers, themselves a privileged faction of the Republican party, controlled the direction of their coalition by preaching solidarity on cultural issues. Of course while they did attempt to legislate the morality of their largest constituent group, conservative Christians, they also much less dramatically worked toward creating a savage capitalist environment in which the wealthiest were able to consolidate their grip on the economy. It has always made a sort of cynical sense for those with wealth to support Republican ideals of limited regulation paired with weak labor and consumer laws. Yet for the outsized influence they wielded over the course of the last forty some odd years the affluent are still a minority within the party, and now the economic policies they endorsed and nurtured are coming home to roost.
This is not to say that Republicans are wholly responsible for the growing economic inequality and accompanying sense of despair felt by those on the bottom of our increasingly stratified society. Democrats too have played their part in supporting economic ideals that reward the wealthy with more wealth while simultaneously pretending the system they were advocating is a meritocracy. In fact the rules laid down by legislators have since our country’s inception been tilted in favor of the have’s. The larger issue currently facing us is that those rules, due to the legacy of greedy politicians over generations, have become so unbalanced that those who were born into or by virtue of circumstance break into the upper echelons of wealth accumulation are in little danger of ever being displaced, and the majority of those born into less favorable circumstances lack access to even to the necessary tools that would allow them to rise above their current social position.
This brings us to the crux of the schism in the Republican party, and on a larger scale the rise of the Trump phenomenon. While Democrats also appeal to cultural issues the difference between their platform and that of the Republicans is that the current Democratic identity (and dare I say fundamentally the American identity) is based on diversity, whereas the Republican identity is based on hegemony. Republicans are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly religious, specifically some form of Christian (I am including Mormons under the umbrella of Christians, again an argument for another post). This combination of racial and religious affiliation is perceived by those inside its sphere of influence as being the true character of America. Of course it isn’t a very distant leap from the intellectual proposition of something being true to something being right. Yet the group that feels as though they represent the true and right character of America, and whose ideals all ethnic, religious and ideological minorities should therefore willingly subject themselves to, have had to endure defeat after resounding defeat in the so called culture wars in recent years.
It’s almost old hat now to point out that many members of the conservative base routinely vote against their own interests because of ideological affiliation, but when the Republican leadership became so grossly ineffectual following the election of President Obama (ahem, an African-American), and were unable to deliver even minor cultural regression back toward the conservative mean, the ideologues inevitably turned on their aristocratic leaders. In short they lost faith in their party’s ability to represent their interests (even though their leaders never really had many of their best interests in mind to begin with), and consequently a group already largely distrustful of government (another ideological assertion encouraged by their political leaders, ah irony) cast aside all of their traditional candidates in favor of the bombastic outsider.
In addition to all of this there is our cultural fascination and worship of wealth. This is not a development that can be laid at the feet of either party because there are certainly larger cultural issues at play, but our political class and Republicans in particular are all too quick to praise those with exceptional wealth and hold them up as ideal citizens. Take the phrase job creators that gets tossed around so enthusiastically by conservative lawmakers. Certainly people and groups that desire to start new businesses are an important part of our society, but to define them as creators, a word with strong religious connotations, puts them in an exalted social class that all the lowly workers should pay tribute to. The underlying assertion of course is that the owners and the executives are inherently more worthy and therefore entitled to a ridiculously lopsided share of our country’s wealth, never mind that those organizations could not exist without all the employees who in a very literal sense are the business. Donald Trump is keenly aware of this cultural leaning, and has frequently brandished his business success as a qualification for the presidency.
The assertion that a successful business person would make a good head of state makes little logical sense, after all a business is not very similar to a government in structure, function or purpose, but the worship of wealth in our culture leads those who serve at its alter to the proposition that success is success regardless of experience or acumen. This is why people who support Trump can say with a straight face that he would make a good political leader even though he has zero experience in public service or policy making. The man can’t even articulate a coherent policy position or demonstrate a modest understanding of global affairs. He’s a political moron, but he does two things very well.
The first thing Trump does well is stoke people’s fears. Even though statistically violent crime has fallen dramatically over the past twenty years and a person in the United States is more likely to be crushed by furniture than killed by a terrorist attack, listening to Trump talk one would think that simply stepping outside was a sure path to being murdered by an immigrant or a jihadist. Fear of violence is only the slimy veneer on the real argument he is making though. The heart of the fear he pedals lies in convincing people that it is the outsiders who represent all the things wrong with our country, and who subsequently can be blamed for all the ills that people dissatisfied with their lives suffer from. He beats the steady drum of fear like a slave driver on the prow of a ship, urging all the disgruntled members of society to embrace him as their savior against the dark tides that supposedly threaten to swallow our country whole and abolish all freedom.
The second thing Trump does masterfully is promote himself. It is not unreasonable to think that many Trump supporters want to be Trump, the self-made man (never mind that million-dollar loan and then some received from his father) and captain of industry (and don’t worry about those businesses he bankrupted or the contractors he stiffed). Just as he is aware of the climate of fear that has been building in our nation so too does he tap into our worship of wealth and success. In addition to being a strongman who will protect the people from all those dangerous foreigners and minorities he is also a paragon of capitalism. The core of his message in this regard is that he is so successful that his policies would necessarily help everyone else achieve his same level of success. Putting aside for a moment that this is an improbability bordering on the impossible, it has the distinct ring of another conservative economic myth, namely trickle-down economics. Put a master of business in the driver’s seat so the argument goes, and he will use his mastery to uplift the rest of the huddled masses. A sadder joke I’ve yet to hear.
So we now find ourselves with a huge portion of the electorate gripping tightly to a poison coin, on one side fear, and on the other greed. They need Trump to make them feel safe, to tell them that he is going to take America back from the liberals and the minorities that are re-shaping the idea of what it means to be American and crush all our enemies under his loafers through sheer strength of will. They need him to promise them the prosperity that has defined the American dream, to tell them that if he is elected we’re going to win so much that we’ll get tired of winning, whatever that means. Trump is, in short, a con artist. He will say anything, no matter how untrue or absurd, if he believes it will elicit the desired actionable response from the people whose admiration he so desperately craves.
We have allowed an authoritarian clown to throw his hat in the ring for the most important job in our country, and maybe even the world. Make no mistake, there is a very real chance that we will elect Donald Trump as president, and if we do there will be very real consequences not only for the United States but the global community. We have a responsibility to make sure that a man such as he is never allowed into the highest office, and come November I hope that enough rational and thoughtful people turn out to save our country from one of the worst decisions we could ever hope to make.
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