Symptom Trump

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.