Trumpocracy

by David Frum

  “Seventy-five percent of Americans nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in their retirement accounts,” reported Teresa Ghilarducci of the New York Times.27 They would need their federal retirement benefits much more than they had anticipated back when they were younger and more liberal. The slogan “Keep the Government’s Hands Off My Medicare” was easily mocked, but it actually stated a perfectly plausible position: Who else but the government could lay hands on your Medicare? Among Americans aged fifty to sixty-four, agreement with the sentiment “government has become too involved in health care” rose sixteen points between 2009 and 2013. (Among Americans over sixty-five, by contrast, agreement with that sentiment rose only eight points over the same period.)28 These Americans were not ignorantly denying that the government paid for Medicare. They were indignantly objecting lest government pay for anything else. As when they had resisted the draft in the 1960s, so now when they refused changes to Medicare, the politics of the baby boom generation were the politics of generational self-defense.

  In a close and careful 2011 study of the politics of the Tea Party, three Harvard scholars, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, remarked, “Tea Partiers judge entitlement programs not in terms of abstract free-market orthodoxy, but according to the perceived deservingness of recipients.”29 Tea Partiers differentiated between those who worked (or who had worked) and those who sought something for nothing—in other words, between people as they imagined themselves and the people they imagined competing against them.

  The Tea Party was often described as a libertarian movement, opposed to big spending and big deficits. And certainly those were themes often sounded by Republican candidates in the 2010 primaries and elections. But that’s not what Tea Party voters and rally attenders cared about. Here’s a piece of oratory from the TV star made by the Tea Party movement, Glenn Beck, then on Fox News:

  Do you watch the direction that America is being taken in and feel powerless to stop it? Do you believe that your voice isn’t loud enough to be heard above the noise anymore? Do you read the headlines everyday and feel an empty pit in your stomach . . . as if you’re completely alone? If so, then you’ve fallen for the Wizard of Oz lie. While the voices you hear in the distance may sound intimidating, as if they surround us from all sides—the reality is very different. Once you pull the curtain away you realize that there are only a few people pressing the buttons, and their voices are weak. The truth is that they don’t surround us at all. We surround them.30

  We versus them. Not state versus society. Certainly not revenues versus expenditures. We versus them.

  In a multiethnic society, economic redistribution inescapably implies ethnic redistribution. I wrote those words after the 2012 election, and they apply even more forcefully after 2016.31 Of the US residents who lacked health insurance prior to the 2008 financial crisis, 27 percent were foreign born.32 As the Obama administration squeezed Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act, it’s not surprising that many white boomers perceived Obamacare as a transfer of health care resources from “us” to “them”—by a president who identified with “them” and not with “us.”

  The social scientist Robert Putnam observed with dismay in 2007 that “new evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”33 Projects of social and economic reform crash into the reality that human beings most willingly cooperate when they feel common identity. In a society undergoing rapid demographic change, loyalties narrow.

  Republican politicians since the 1980s had spoken a language of “hope” and “opportunity.” They repeated the performance in 2015. “We will lift our sights again, make opportunity common again, get events in the world moving our way again,” declared Jeb Bush in his presidential announcement address.34 “I want to talk to you this morning about reigniting the promise of America,” said Ted Cruz in his, and Marco Rubio likewise hailed “our nation’s identity as a land of opportunity.”35

  “Believe in America!” “A new American century!” What are they talking about? wondered voters battered and bruised by the previous American century. Donald Trump, the oldest candidate on the Republican stage, was also the first to discern that the political language of the 1980s had lost its power. The most common age for white Americans in 2015 was fifty-five.36 These older white voters were more eager to protect what they had than to hustle for more. They wanted less change, not more. They cared about security, not opportunity. Protection of the status quo was what candidate Trump offered.

  Donald Trump created in effect a three-party system in the United States, by building a new Trump party in between the Democratic and Republican parties. In the decisive state of Pennsylvania, for example, Trump and the successful Republican candidate for US Senate, Pat Toomey, won almost exactly equal numbers of votes: 2.97 million for Trump; 2.95 million for Toomey. But Trump and Toomey won their votes in very different places. In Pennsylvania’s four richest counties—Chester, Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware—Toomey received altogether 177,000 more votes than Trump. In all the rest of the state, Toomey ran well behind Trump.

  One poll found that nearly half of all white working-class voters agreed with the statement, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.”37 As America has become more diverse, tribalism has intensified. The Left’s hopes for a social democratic politics founded on class without regard to race look only slightly less moribund than the think-tank conservatism of low taxes and open borders.

  Perhaps the very darkness of the Trump experience can summon the nation to its senses and jolt Americans to a new politics of commonality, a new politics in which the Trump experience is remembered as the end of something bad, and not the beginning of something worse. Trump appealed to what was mean and cruel and shameful. The power of that appeal should never be underestimated. But once its power fades, even those who have succumbed will feel regret.

  Those who have expressed regret will need some kind of exit from Trumpocracy, some reintegration into a politics again founded on decency. The best justice is reconciliation, urged Desmond Tutu as he chaired South Africa’s inquiry into its past. That was also the teaching of America’s greatest president too in the country’s most searing agony of trial. If Lincoln could say it then, we can in this so much less harrowing passage surely repeat:

  Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.38

  Chapter 12

  Hope

  In the spring of 2017, I received an email from a reader of the Atlantic. It read, in relevant part:

  I have made a point to make a concrete (if small) act of civic engagement every weekday. These acts have included contacting my school board regarding digital media literacy, calling my national and state legislators about important issues, and embarking on a program of self-education. I have read about the history, politics, and the philosophical ideals of our republic. To date I have read (albeit at a slow pace) Paine’s Common Sense, Slack’s Liberty’s First Crisis, and I am in the middle of reading John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty.” I would have taken none of those actions prior to this last election.

  These are dark days for the United States, yet they are pierced by shafts of light. A new spirit of citizen responsibility is waking in the land. Americans are turning off cable networks that lie to them to consume instead more and better news.1 Instead of theatrical street protests, concerned citizens have turned to productive political action: phone calls to congressional offices, registration to vote.

  Most of this book has dealt with the harm done by the presidency of Donald Trump and by those who enabled it. Yet good can com
e of bad. From raging fires rise young forests. From former errors can be gained new wisdom. What can we gain from Trump? What unexpected gifts may yet be seized from this bad moment in American politics?

  The first gift to gain from the Trump moment is the gift of wider vision.

  Cynically yes, but effectively too, Donald Trump seized more accurately than any candidate in 2016 on issues neglected by more conventional politicians: the ravages of drug addiction, the costs of immigration, the cultural and economic decline of the industrial working class.

  As America evolves toward a more unequal, more plutocratic society, its politicians—and certainly its federal politicians—inhabit the world of a remote upper class. Even when they start poor, as Bill Clinton did, they do not stay that way.

  Despite his flamboyant claims to wealth, Donald Trump succeeded in speaking to and for huge sections of the American electorate that other politicians spoke only about. He identified forgotten and angry parts of America. His hurts, his grievances, his resentments, enabled him to channel theirs. It was fraud, but it was not all fraud.

  The dangers posed by Trump exposed the dangers posed by his supporters. Working-class America has not seemed dangerous for a long time. But back when it did seem dangerous, that danger persuaded the privileged—or enough of them—that concessions must be made.

  We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.2

  So urged Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago. His urgings would not become realities, however, until the Depression and the Cold War forced reforms to avert the menace of communism at home and overseas. It was in very large part fear of communism that induced businesses to provide pensions and health care benefits to employees . . . that inspired the federal government to invest in great public universities . . . and that compelled the United States to uproot racial segregation. President John F. Kennedy argued that case explicitly in a televised address in 1963: “Today, we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only.”3

  Fears of revolutionary socialism have faded. For more than a quarter century, we have lived in a world where economic and cultural elites have felt secure from challenge as seldom before. Unsurprisingly, those elites have over that same time become far less inclined to share their prosperity with the rest of their society. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will,” as Frederick Douglass famously said. Along with all his boasting and bullying, his crassness and cruelty, his ignorance and his indolence, his tantrums and his treasons, Donald Trump also carried with him the text of a demand that—this time—could not be shrugged off by society’s leaders and owners.

  A second gift from Trump’s inadvertent hand is the rediscovery of the preciousness of truth. “Post-truth is pre-fascism,” wrote Yale historian Timothy Snyder in a viral Facebook post just days after Donald Trump won a majority in the Electoral College, “and to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”4 Profound words, and true. But it was not only Donald Trump who had left truth behind, who scorned the very concept of truth. Trump entered a culture prepared for him; he filled a cavity excavated by the work of thousands of toiling academics and intellectuals. An example of their handiwork:

  The idea that there is a single truth–“the Truth”–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.5

  That is an extract from an open letter drafted by students at Pomona College to justify the use of force and threat of violence to prevent a campus talk by a scholar they disliked. The most radical thing about that statement was precisely how conventional its contents were.

  When the phrase “post-truth” began to circulate in the 1980s, it originated as something close to a compliment. The idea that things were “true” or “false” was outmoded, even reactionary! Michel Foucault and other advanced thinkers had shown that liberation would follow only once we accepted that “truth” served merely as a euphemism for self-serving ideologies devised by holders of power.6 All we can know for certain, insisted this glamorous new system of thought, are “narratives”: yours, mine—and no way of judging between them, except on the basis of race/class/gender.

  But if there is no truth, there can be no lying. And suddenly Americans are appreciating that “lying” is a concept very badly needed by democratic politics. Americans are discovering that it’s important also to distinguish between the normal tools of the politician’s trade—evasion, equivocation, the timely change of subject—and the inversion of reality that is routinely heard from Donald Trump.

  A leader who lies constantly can distort a nation’s perception of reality. “You are annihilated, exhausted, you can’t control yourself or remember what you said two minutes before. You feel that all is lost,” as one man who had been subject to Mao Zedong’s “reeducation” campaign in China put it to the psychiatrist Robert Lifton. “You accept anything he says.”7

  Trump’s incessant lying has indeed warped the minds of his core supporters. As noted earlier, more than half of Republicans have accepted Trump’s false claim to have won the popular vote;8 only 9 percent of Republicans acknowledge that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.9

  Yet 60 percent of Americans—and the number is steadily rising—reject Trump’s lies about his connections to Russia.10 Even as Trump marches his ever-dwindling band of supporters toward ever more threadbare untruths, a growing majority of Americans crave truth, seek truth, and vindicate truth. They cherish truth as something real in itself, not a construct of power, not a “narrative” that varies according to the hyphens in one’s personal identity. “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” So said the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in his 1980 Nobel Prize lecture.11 Long before Trump and his deceitful crew appeared on the scene, a conspiracy against the ideal of truth had gained the upper hand among those entrusted with the education of the young and the sustaining of high culture. If revulsion against Trump’s lies should at last discredit and overthrow that conspiracy, what a fine second gift that would be.

  A nation that teaches its children to abhor bullying discovered it had installed the noisiest bully in the country in the highest office in the land. Trump surrounded himself with a staff cringing and obsequious to him—and overbearing toward everybody else. As the country got to know this gang, Americans unwrapped a third gift of Trump: a renewal of their disgust for those who join power to cruelty.

  On the morning of July 26, 2017, President Trump awoke to uncongenial news. The FBI had raided the Virginia home of Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Trump reacted to this indignity as bullies typically do: by lashing out at someone more vulnerable. At 8:56 a.m., the president tweeted this attention-grabbing message: “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow . . .” He paused there for eight minutes, leaving the world to wonder what might follow such a dramatic opening. At 9:04, he posted part two: “. . . Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming . . .” etc.

  Americans quickly learned that, as usual, the president was speaking impulsively. There had been no consultation; in fact, the milita
ry was taken completely by surprise. The last-minute Obama policy opening the military to transgender soldiers had been postponed by the incoming administration in January; there was no particular reason to take any action at all on July 26. One aide suggested the motive was political. “This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to take complete ownership of this issue,” the aide said to Jonathan Swan of Axios. But that was transparently an after-the-fact rationalization rather than an actual motive. The move was not cleared in advance with Republican members in Congress, a number of whom quickly opposed it, so Democrats were not forced to “take complete ownership.” The most plausible explanation of events was that Trump tweeted simply to enjoy the momentary pleasure of power over others, without any plan or even intention to translate his imperious words into policy.

  But here’s the gift: Americans almost instantly recognized Trump’s cynical bullying for what it was—and overwhelmingly condemned it. A week after Trump’s order, polls found that 68 percent of Americans supported open service by transgender military personnel; only 27 percent agreed with the president’s ban.12 What’s remarkable about this turn is that Americans by large majorities reject the main claim that transgender people make about themselves, that they authentically belong to a sex different from that into which they were born at birth.13 Once Donald Trump started tweeting, those prior positions ceased to matter. Whatever their other opinions, if any, about what it meant to call oneself transgender, a large majority of Americans agreed that it should not mean a kicking from a holder of power to salve his hurt ego.