Symptom Trump
September 27, 2016
By all accounts, including
accounts by Republican observers, last night’s first presidential debate of
this year’s presidential campaign was a disaster for Republican nominee Donald
Trump. Some have called it the worst debate performance ever by a major party
nominee for the nation’s highest office. To be honest about it, I could stand
to watch only a few minutes of the debate. Mostly that was because I can’t
stand to listen to Trump. He is a lying, self-aggrandizing, unprincipled
megalomaniac who stands for nothing but his own ego. He is easily the least
qualified presidential nominee of a major American political party ever. Not
only does he have no experience that might qualify him for the presidency, he
lacks even the most basic understanding of both national politics and
international relationships. He wholly lacks the temperament that any president
must have. He is so easily offended by the slightest criticism that the idea
that he would have his hand on the trigger of America’s nuclear arsenal is
enough to make any rational person lose sleep. Donald Trump is so unqualified to
be president that there is no doubt that a healthy nation with a healthy
political system would never produce the likes of him as a major party
candidate for president.
Yet our American society and
political system have produced him as a major party candidate for president,
and that sad reality raises one enormous question: Why? Why has our country
raised this unqualified and probably unstable man to the status of Republican
nominee for president? The only possible answer certainly is not that he has
the makings of a good president. He doesn’t. The only possible answer is that
Donald Trump is a symptom of an underlying disorder in American national life.
What is essentially a social and cultural illness has spewed up this disaster
of a candidate. Nausea is not a disease. Nausea is a symptom of a disease.
Donald Trump is not the disease afflicting our nation. He is a symptom of that
disease. No other sort of analysis even begins to explain this otherwise
inexplicable candidacy.
So what is the disease of which
Donald Trump is a symptom? It is the failure of a small but still significant
part of the American population to accept and adjust in a constructive way to
fundamental changes that are taking place in our country. The simple truth is
that the United States of America is not what it once was. It will continue to
become even less what it once was. For most of our history undereducated white
men were in many ways a privileged class among us. They could lead decent lives
without much education and without much awareness of the realities of the world
around them. They could make a good living at blue collar jobs that paid enough
so that these men could live and raise a family in relative comfort. No one
challenged their fundamental assumptions about the world. They were poorly
educated, and no one said they needed more education. They were misogynist, and
no one challenged their misogyny. They were racists, and no one challenged
their racism. They were homophobic, and no one challenged their homophobia. They
were xenophobic, and no one challenged their xenophobia. They were
militaristic. That is, they believed that their world was kept free and safe
through the power of the American military, and no one challenged their
militarism. They were the norm by which American society and American culture
were judged. The political candidates they favored were elected to public
office more often than not. Their America was a white, male-dominated nation,
and these blue collar white men reaped the benefits of being white and male.
All of that is changing. Indeed,
it has changed even if many Americans refuse to acknowledge the extent to which
it has changed. It has changed in so many ways that it is difficult even to
list them all. Black Americans no longer accept being second class citizens.
Women demand equality in public life and in the workplace. The Supreme Court of
the United States has ruled that the US Constitution guarantees the right to
marry to same gender couples. Millions of people from other countries, mostly
but not exclusively from Mexico and Central America, come to our country
illegally. They live here, work here, raise families here, and contribute in
mostly positive ways to our national life; but they didn’t come here through
legal channels. The safety of all Americans is threatened at least to some
degree by dangers the American military cannot defeat. Indeed, the more we try
to use the military to defeat them the stronger they become.
The world of our undereducated
white men has come undone, and they can’t deal with it. They long for things to
be as they were before, or at least as how they imagine things were before.
They long for jobs that no longer exist and will not exist in the future. They
long for the cultural privilege they once enjoyed that no longer exists to the
extent it once did and will not exist at all in the future. They long for a
hero who will restore what they have lost. They long for a strongman who will
make things right as they think of right. They don’t want to adapt to the new,
emerging America. They want the America of their fondest memories, and they
want a president who will give it to them. Their failure to deal in a healthy
way with the emerging realities of the world is an illness. It is a social
illness that looks like a mental illness. Our nation’s failure to help them
deal in a healthy way with the emerging world is an illness too, a social
illness that looks like a mental illness. These twin failures are an illness
because they represent an unhealthy way of dealing with reality, with a reality
that is changing rapidly and forever.
This illness explains the candidacy
of Donald Trump. He panders to the prejudices of undereducated white men
against women, Blacks, gays, and foreigners. He tells these men that he can “make
America great again,” by which he means to say, and his audience hears him
saying, that he can return America to the way things used to be or at least
that so many of them imagine things used to be. A small but significant part of
our people sees Donald Trump as the hero they have longed for. They make him
the hero they have longed for despite the manifold ways in which he does not
fit that role. He’s not one of them. He’s relatively well-educated, having
obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from the prestigious Wharton School of
the University of Pennsylvania. He’s rich. He’s famous. In many ways he
represents the east coast elite that most of his supporters generally despise.
Yet none of that matters to those supporters. Neither does his manifest lack of
the character and experience that qualify one to be president. What matters is
that he panders to their illness. He panders to the illness of American
society. He play acts the role of the hero his followers long for. They project
their yearning for a different America onto him. He cannot possibly deliver
what they hear him promising, but that truth doesn’t matter either. What
matters is that a disordered part of American society has found a man who they
convince themselves is the hero of their dreams.
I continue to believe that
Donald Trump will never be President of the United States. The polls so far
indicate that he won’t be, and the prospect of his being elected to that office
is too horrible to contemplate. Yet assuming that he loses this election, a
stark reality will remain with us. The social illness that spawned his
candidacy will still be here. The people who supported him will still be here.
The realities that produced them and their hero will still be here. When Trump
loses this election to Secretary Clinton we will be faced with some very
serious issues. What, for example, will the supporters of the defeated Trump
do? They aren’t going to go away. They won’t accept Clinton as president. She
doesn’t pander to them nearly as much as he does, and she’s a woman, something
Trump’s supporters can’t countenance any more than they could countenance
President Obama as a Black president. Some will turn to violence. They will
join so-called militias and white supremacist groups. We are going to have to
deal with that reality after the election even more than we have had to deal
with it before the election. Some will stay in the political process, working
to elect reactionary candidates at all levels of government. Some will drop
out. It’s the ones who will turn to violence who are the big problem, and we
must be prepared to counter them.
Beyond that, the realities of
which the Trump candidacy is a symptom will remain. Our world will continue to
change as it has been changing for roughly the last fifty years or more. The
world Trump’s supporters want to re-create will never return, if indeed it was
ever here in the first place. It is easy for many of us to dismiss Trump’s
supporters as unworthy of our attention, so benighted are they about the
realities of the contemporary world. Yet those supporters are real men (and
some women). They are real Americans. They are our fellow citizens. They are
our brothers and sisters, and it would be wrong for us simply to ignore them,
simply to write them off. As misguided as their political efforts to address
their problems have been, they have legitimate concerns and needs. They will
continue to cling to unrealistic and impossible solutions like Donald Trump
unless our nation can address those concerns and needs in meaningful ways.
I claim no particular insight
into what those ways must be. I know only that when a society has an illness it
needs a cure. It needs a cure that is realistic and workable. It needs a cure
that seeks not to reverse trends of the world that cannot be reversed but to
address them in ways that make a difference for the people adversely affected
by them. Perhaps the most important thing we can do is seek to create jobs for
which these people can be retrained, jobs that pay a living wage and provide
emotional satisfaction to those who do them. Economic insecurity (or the fear
of it) explains much of the Trump phenomenon. One way to create those jobs is
to invest in the massive rebuilding of our nation’s infrastructure that we need
and in new technologies that can create good jobs, environmental technologies,
for example, that can lead to manufacturing jobs producing the instruments of
clean energy. We can deal with the illness that produced Donald Trump not by
pandering to it the way Trump does but by treating it with sound measures that
will at least begin to cure it.
