We’re Already Forgetting the Trump Era. His Supporters Won’t Forget Us.
1. Trying to remember the dreamWhen we wake up on a certain
morning, and we know that we just had a long, strange, complicated dream, and
we want to remember it, we try to grab onto a few specific elements that
somehow float up towards us. For me, looking back with very little hindsight at
the swirling weirdness of four years under the leadership of Donald Trump, one
of the odd elements that floats to the surface of my mind is a particular group
of people who might seem to have very little to do with Trump. It was a group
made up of men who wore dress shirts and sports jackets and women who wore neatly
pressed suits with lively, colorful blouses. At least according to prevailing
standards in the United States, they were all “well educated.” They’d attended
universities, and some even took great pride in the institutions they’d
attended and contributed money to them every year. Some of the group worked in law,
academia, finance, television, or journalism, and lived in New York City. Others,
who worked in government or politics, lived in Washington, D.C. The
extemporaneous sentences spoken by these women and men usually followed the
rules of grammar to be found in standard grammar manuals, and their general
demeanor tended to be quiet, reserved, and circumspect. The members of this
group were skilled in the arts of self-restraint. Some, in fact, were virtuosos
of self-restraint. Whether they were angry, hungry, hurt, or lustful, they knew
how to conceal their feelings and control their behavior. They spoke and acted
when they chose to speak and act, not at the urging of their first impulses. Their
faces at one time had always been “white,” but recently certain Jews and even
certain people of color, if they wore the right clothes and assumed the right accents,
gestures, habits, and affect, had been allowed to join the group. There’d been
a time when the influence of this group had been far, far greater, but it still
could reasonably be called “The American Elite.”You can usually tell after 20 or 30
seconds of conversation whether someone meets enough of the criteria to belong
to this group or not. I belong to it, although I’ve tried to escape (I don’t
even wear a jacket any more). And if you’re reading these sentences, you can
probably tell if you’re a member of the group or not, or maybe you feel you’re
a sort of “junior member,” or maybe you feel you’re a hard-to-decide case.Most people who are members of this
American elite grew up in families that had some money, but you can certainly
be a member of the group without having a great deal of it, and there are
definitely people who have quite a lot of money who would not be considered to
belong. Many wealthy members of the elite voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and
2020, and during his presidency, because he served the interests of the wealthy,
he served the interests of the wealthy members of the elite, but as I’m defining
it, and as most members of the group would define it, and as Donald Trump would
define it, Donald Trump has never been a member of the elite.It’s hardly surprising that a lot
of people with money were fans of Donald Trump. What was and remains extremely
surprising is that such a large number of people who had very little money and
who were even quite desperate about money formed an attachment to Trump that
was deeper, stronger, and more passionate than the attachment that any group of
comparable size had formed toward any American leader since the end of World
War II. Whether they were unassuming clerks selling greeting cards in
stationary stores or angry unemployed factory workers, these “not well educated”
people loved Donald Trump.Trump won the votes of the majority
of Americans called “white.” Some were grimly determined white supremacists. Others
worked perfectly happily alongside people of color every day and believed
themselves to be free from prejudice. But Trump was quick to notice that when
he spoke to crowds of his fans, if he made a few sneaky, unexpected, “transgressive”
snide remarks about people of color—Black politicians or Black athletes or Black
protesters, immigrants from Latin America, Muslims from Asia—or when he engaged
in angry diatribes against them, he got a really good response from his
audience. He shared with his followers, and encouraged in them, the alchemical
ability to turn grievance into blame, and people of color were often the
objects of that blame.But I would suggest that right
alongside their hostility to groups of non-white people, Trump and his
followers also had in common a particular loathing for that jacket- and suit-wearing
American elite. And of course in a way it seems implausible and even
fantastical to say that this rather decadent man, Donald Trump, who had never
known economic hardship, who had indeed lived most of his life in an atmosphere
of almost preposterously exaggerated luxury, had anything at all in common with
the worried, anxious individuals who filled the stadiums to listen to him speak
in city after city. The stadiums were filled with people whose fortunes were
seriously declining, people who over the years and decades had consistently
been losing things they’d once had, including their hopes for the future of
their children. And yet, for their own reasons, these people had come to share
with Trump a belief that well-educated people were covering up the brutal fact
that the world was run for their benefit. It was easy for Trump’s followers to
believe, for example, the story told by Trump that the 2020 election had been
stolen, had been “rigged,” even though Trump never presented any coherent
theory about how that could have been accomplished. It was easy for his
followers to believe that the election had been rigged because, as far as they
could see, the whole country was rigged, their own lives had been rigged.And Trump was astoundingly
inventive in thinking up trick after trick to play on the gullible elite, all
for the pleasure of his loyal followers, who were always in on the joke. In
fact this conspiracy or tricks and pranks between Trump and his audience
explains many of the seemingly “inexplicable” decisions that Donald Trump made
during the course of his presidency, so that whenever one of the distinguished
elite members of the mainstream press or the political class declared that this
or that action or statement of the president was so disgusting that it was sure
to mark the beginning of Donald Trump’s downfall, one always knew that it was a
very good day for the Trump team. The elite commentators failed to realize,
time after time, that the disgusting thing they denounced was in fact an arrow
aimed very precisely not at its ostensible target but actually at them, and if
they cried out in pain, that was, for Trump and those who loved him, like a
wonderful cascade of coins falling into their laps from a slot machine.To put it differently, the elite
had wounded their dignity, had hurt their feelings. For Trump, it was purely
personal. He knew these people. He’d gone to school with them. He’d gone to
parties with them, night after night. And he loathed them because they looked
down on him. They thought he was stupid. They thought he was crude. They thought
he didn’t know how to speak. They thought he was dishonest, and he didn’t
follow the rules. They thought he was undisciplined, loud, boastful, and
overweight.His not-well-educated followers probably
didn’t know any members of the elite, had never met any members of the elite. They
knew what they’d seen of them on their computer screens and their television
screens. But strangely, just as there is an economic web that links together
every person in a given country, from the poorest to the richest, there is also
an invisible web of emotion that enables a struggling truck driver in Idaho to
resent a Syrian immigrant in Michigan whom he’s never met and to feel shamed
and diminished by a prosperous corporate executive in New York City whom he’s
never met. And so millions of followers of Donald Trump could feel humiliated
by the imagined contempt that they felt flowing down in their direction through
this invisible web from the same well educated people that Trump had sat with
at dinner parties a thousand times.Trump of course knew that the elite
were wrong about him. He knew that rather than being stupid he was in fact
quite clever, and even though he couldn’t speak gracefully, he knew that he
could speak with the powerful musicality of a comedian and the vernacular
eloquence of a preacher. And he knew that those who looked down on him were
phonies, that what they said when they spoke was invariably no more than a
carefully crafted, manipulative construction, whereas what he said came right
from his gut. Trump’s followers, perhaps, had less self-confidence, which was
one reason Trump’s egomania seemed attractive to them. Of course there’d been a time, and
it was really only a few decades ago, when the old elite was hardly resented or
loathed by anyone, when the virtues they claimed to represent—the virtues of
being cool-headed, sensible, and judicious—seemed to be accepted by the
overwhelming majority of the nation’s citizens. In fact, during that more
tranquil time, a person could not be president of the country—a person could
not even read the headlines on the nightly news—if they seemed to lack those
virtues. Night after night the bland, genial newscasters would read the news in
their agreeable baritone voices, and everyone in the country seemed to be
sitting on their sofas and nodding their heads. But for those experiencing a
spirit-crushing fear of the future, a panic about the obsolescence of their skills,
the old sofa no longer provides the old feeling of comfort.When people feel themselves
sinking, when they feel themselves to be trapped, boxed in, and impotent, and
they’re searching for a fantasy figure or surrogate with whom to identify,
someone who will express their frustrations, they don’t turn to the virtuosos
of self-restraint. When unhappy schoolchildren are trapped in a classroom with
a teacher they can’t stand, they don’t delight in the behavior of the student
who gets the highest marks, the one the teacher likes best, the Barack Obama of
the class. They delight instead in the antics of the bad kid in the class, the
one who dares to defy the teacher, the one who knows exactly how to drive the
teacher crazy. They themselves may or may not have the necessary nerve—they may
or may not have the necessary imagination—to figure out a way to escape from
their misery, but they glory in the exploits of the kid who somehow knows how
to disrupt the whole class. And that bad kid was Donald Trump.Trump, as guru, tried to teach his
disciples to center their lives around an utterly passive resentment. And
certainly that life of resentment could be mildly satisfying for a while, but
it didn’t solve his followers’ real problems. They would have been much happier
if instead of wallowing in their anger they could have gone out and done something
interesting. Indeed, the fact that tens of millions of Americans revered Donald
Trump was an undeniable proof that something had gone seriously wrong for them,
the opportunity to do something interesting had been denied to them, and they
were depressed, they were not in a good frame of mind. Those of us who were in
a better frame of mind should not have been congratulating ourselves on our
superiority to those who were depressed. We were not superior, we were simply
luckier. We were less depressed because we’d had better luck. The machinery of
society had operated to our benefit, and we’d been able to do more interesting
things. But a lot of us enjoyed feeling contempt for Trump’s followers, just as
they enjoyed feeling contempt for us.The amazing political paradox that
the United States faces at the moment is that an enormous number of people of
color, many of whom are objectively poorer and much worse off than most of
Trump’s supporters, have joined up with the minority of whites who dislike Trump
to form a slim majority of Americans who apparently believe in the current
American political system, but at the same time there now exists a staggering
number of white people in the country—should we make a guess based on current
polls and say 50 million out of Trump’s 74 million voters?—who are
shockingly alienated from the whole American game, utterly indifferent to the
prevailing political set-up, with its elections, its Constitution, and its
three branches of government, and absolutely delighted to follow a “leader” who
attractively performs the part of a rebel but who also may happen to be
mentally ill.2. Already forgettingTrump couldn’t have been farther
from attempting to alter the status quo, the ferocious economic inequality from
which most of his followers suffered. In fact his policies exacerbated that
inequality. What he did alter was something less tangible. Operating at the
precise moment when a staggering number of people were becoming addicted to
receiving, through social media, information sent by giant organizations that
nonetheless appeared in the form of apparently private, personal messages,
Trump made this mass addiction even more volatile by helping to make
superstition and irrationality much more acceptable. He helped to popularize an
approach to life that over the centuries has always proved useful to people who
are insane. This approach to life advises each of us to select some simple
explanation for the miserable workings of the world from a small menu of explanations—and
then to refuse, adamantly, to listen to anyone who threatens our explanation. In
the European Middle Ages, people favored theories of reality that clustered
around Satan, demons, and other figures drawn from religion. And in the modern
era, Jews, Communists, foreigners, and Democrats are among the figures of
choice. Because he was the president, and because he was a Republican, Trump
made insanity almost respectable. The truth is that I’m already
forgetting Donald Trump. I’m already forgetting those weird four years, and I’m
already forgetting all those people who were followers of Trump. I’m forgetting
the people—let’s say the 50 million people—who loathe the “well-educated.” I’m
reading in my preferred news sources about President Biden, his policies, the
new people in Congress, whatever. I think that in the back of our minds,
as we slowly forget about those 50 million people, a lot of us are thinking,
vaguely, “But these unfortunate people have been bombarded by lies and
falsehoods. They really ought to read The
New York Times and absorb some accurate information. That would begin to
solve the problem.” But that is not something that can ever really happen on planet
Earth, for the very simple reason that the minute these particular not-well-educated
people would look at The New York Times
they would find themselves staring at articles about clothes that they could
never afford to wear in their entire lives and food that they could never
afford to eat in their entire lives, and they would see pictures of people
dressed in those clothes and eating that food sitting with children dressed in
those clothes and eating that food, and that’s the part of the paper that would
totally transfix them. And that’s the part of the paper that I don’t want them
ever to read, because I know very well that the more they know about me, the more
they’ll hate me.It’s economic inequality that has
split us into groups that confront each other just short of war. It’s economic
inequality that has split us into the well-educated and the not well-educated. Of
course we’d rather not ever think again about these people who don’t like us. Probably
the new president and most of the people in the new administration would rather
not think about them either. We don’t mind thinking about those among Trump’s
followers who’ve committed particularly extraordinary crimes. But we don’t want
to think about those tens of millions of his followers who’ve committed no
crimes. In response to our fear of the most desperately oppressed members of
our society, those who aren’t “white,” we’ve come up with various clever
techniques to deal with our terror—laws and prisons—and we’ve sought out
individuals inclined to brutality and trained them to be brutal policemen. Maybe
our reliance on brutality will diminish, or maybe not. But in response to the
slightly less desperate tens of millions of white people who followed and loved
Donald Trump, we’re entirely at a loss. And yet the unfortunate truth is that
this is what we’re up against: Our common future, the future of everyone in the
society, depends on which way these particular tens of millions of people will
turn, what they become, what will happen with them. Like it or not, this is the
group that will determine our fate.
Read More
