Symptom Trump

Symptom Trump

Ever since the 2016 presidential election I have been asking myself: How could it have happened? How could this country have made the utterly unqualified, incompetent, American fascist Donald Trump president? On its face it doesn’t make a lick of sense. Sure. We’ve elected bad presidents before. We elected George W. Bush twice, and he was simply awful. We elected Ronald Reagan twice, and he was just as bad. We don’t have a great track record when it comes to electing presidents. But Donald Trump? Really? They don’t get worse than that. True, he didn’t win a majority of the popular vote; but our presidential elections don’t depend on the popular vote. They depend on the electoral college vote, and Trump isn’t the first candidate to win the electoral college with a minority of the popular vote. Enough Americans voted for him in enough states that he won the electoral college, and that’s what made him president. How could it happen? There’s got to be an explanation somewhere. Bizarre, dangerous electoral results like this one don’t come out of nowhere. So where did this one come from? I have been wrestling with that question since Trump’s unexpected victory in November, 2016. I want here to work through what I think is a possible explanation of Trump’s disastrous victory.

The explanation begins with the realization that the United States of America is an empire. European settlement of North America was an act of people from European empires—Spanish, French, British, and others. So we European Americans got our start here as a manifestation of empire. The nations of the Americas, including the United States, were once colonies of empires. Our European American ancestors may have rebelled against their colonial status, but they never rebelled against the concept empire. Instead they adopted it, or at least we white people of the United States did. The American nation spread across the North American continent through a series of imperial acquisitions. We bought the Louisiana territory from the French empire. We conquered much of the west through wars against Mexico. Those were imperial wars of expansion. We competed with the British Empire for control of the northwest and nearly went to war with it over the slogan “54'40" or fight.” We bought Alaska from the Russian Empire. The American empire took land that belonged to someone else, namely, the Native Americans. Taking other people’s land is a hallmark of empire. Then we expanded our empire beyond the limits of the North American continent. We colonized Hawaii and other Pacific islands. We took control of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. The basic nature of the United States has been imperial from its very beginning.

After World War II we became not just an empire but the dominant world empire. We engaged in a protracted struggle with another major world empire, the Soviet Union, for control of the whole world. We call that struggle the Cold War, but it wasn’t always cold. We fought the Soviets or their surrogates militarily in Korea and Vietnam. We very nearly got into a nuclear war with them in October, 1962, over the Soviet empire’s desire to strengthen its position in Cuba and threaten our empire with their nuclear missiles. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and we became essentially the only world empire. Yes, there were other powerful countries, China chief among them. Yet none of them had the worldwide political and economic power that the United States had. We had fought our major imperial rival and had won. We were on top of the world, or so we thought.

We were the dominant world empire, but here’s the thing about empires. They always collapse and fall. Every empire there has ever been has done it. Some have been conquered by other empires. Think of the Aztecs and the Incas conquered by the Spanish for example, or the Persians conquered by Alexander the Great. Some fell because they they were attacked from without and decayed from within. Rome is the best example here. Some declined because their overseas colonies wised up and demanded and fought for independence. Here think of Great Britain as a good example. Empires decline and fall in various ways, but they all decline and fall.

When they do, bad things often happen within them as people fight back against decline and fall. Rome was attacked from without by the Huns and others, but it also decayed from within. The government lost control of the provinces. What had been the most powerful military in the world was no longer able to fight off supposedly less civilized peoples from the north and elsewhere. As Rome was attacked Christianity abandoned Jesus’ commitment to nonviolence, thereby betraying him and one of his central teachings. Empires always think they will last forever. Hitler called the Third Reich (which means the Third Empire) the “thousand year Reich.” There has never been anything remotely like an empire that lasted a thousand years. Rome lasted maybe six hundred, which is a very long time for an empire to survive. Most last a matter of a few centuries or less. Some, like Hitler’s, last only a few years. Empires decline and fall in many different ways, but they all decline and fall.

The American empire has clearly entered its declining phase. We arrogate to ourselves the role of policeman to the world, but we are a hopelessly ineffective policeman. We choose which bad guys we’re going to go after. Most recently we’ve chosen Iraq, Afghanistan, and various expressions of Islamist terrorism. We’ve been fighting in Afghanistan for over fifteen years with no end in sight. Our invasion of Iraq, which clearly violated international law, produced only chaos and destruction and led directly to the rise of ISIS. We’ve been able to do nothing to stop the horrendous civil war in Syria. If anything our halfhearted military efforts there only make things worse. We and other nations have perhaps stopped Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, but we sure haven’t been able to stop North Korea from getting them. We did nothing to stop genocide in Cambodia or Rwanda, I suppose because we didn’t see our imperial status challenged by the regimes that conducted it in those countries. We project our imperial military power all over the world, and it truly is impressive military power; but history mostly proves its limitations. When we apply it things generally turn our badly.

Then there’s our position as the dominant economic power in the world. It isn’t at all clear that we still are that. China either has assumed that position or very probably soon will. We export most of our manufacturing to low wage countries. Our economy has become one based only on consumerism. Traditionally at least that’s a weak reed against which to prop a nation’s economy. We don’t so much create value as we move it around. The titans of Wall Street have replaced the titans of industry as the leading figures of our economy, and all they do is make money off other people’s money. We still claim to be the richest nation in the world, and maybe we are. Still, we have an enormous amount of poverty for such a rich country; and we seem unwilling or unable to do anything about it. Our health care system is a disaster, leaving millions of people unable to access it or having to access it as charity cases that the rest of us pay for. The moneyed interest have such a stranglehold on it that the obvious solution, a single payer universal system like those in every other developed country, doesn’t stand a chance of enactment. Racism remains a central characteristic of American culture. It is expressed more as institutional racism than in expressly racist laws, but institutional racism is if anything even more insidious. We imprison far more people per capita than other developed nations, and a disproportionate number of the people we imprison are Black. We enact tax laws that so obviously have the effect of redistributing income upward that we can only assume that redistributing income upward is the intention of the politicians who enact those laws. The gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us is enormous, and it gets worse every day.

Of course every country has its problems. The significant thing about the US today isn’t so much that we have problems as it is that we are unwilling to address them in ways that would actually solve them. Doing that might cost the super-rich donors to the political parties some money. Heaven forbid! So the politicians do nothing. Economies prosper when enough people have enough money to spend, but our economy and our law are funneling money away from people who need it and would spend it to people who don’t need it and will just horde it. All empires function primarily to benefit the rich and powerful, but they are likely to do that more and more when they enter an unhealthy decline. The American empire has clearly entered an unhealthy decline.

Donald Trump is a symptom of that unhealthy decline. He represents all the worse angels of our nature. He is racist. He is sexist. He is personally immoral and expects everyone else to be immoral too. He thinks his fame and wealth give him license to attack and abuse other people, especially women. He is a jingoist, caring nothing for countries other than the US and, frankly, not really caring for the US in any meaningful way. He says “America first.” He clearly means “me first.” He admires authoritarian regimes more than democratic ones and panders to the fear of many Americans who think authoritarianism will solve their problems, which it won’t. He makes promises that he obviously can’t fulfill. Mexico will pay for the wall. I’ll bring back coal mining jobs. I’ll make America “great” again, by which he seems mostly to mean I’ll make America white again. He threatens nuclear war with impunity, apparently having no idea of the horror that any nuclear war would be. The United States has enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth several times over, and he thinks we need more. He is a religious bigot, thinking that all Muslims are a threat to American security. He thinks white supremacists are decent people. He wants to reintroduce discrimination against transgender people in the military and would probably like to keep gay people out too. He is xenophobic, thinking that people not from the US are less than people from the US, or at least less than native born white people in the US. He has no empathy. He has no sympathy for anyone outside his immediate family, and he probably doesn’t have much for them. He is heartless, careless, classless, and a terrible role model for Americans and others around the world. Fear and money put him in the Oval Office, thereby presenting this country and the world with the potential for unmitigated disaster.

And in all of those ways he is a symptom not a cause. He is a symptom of the unease, the anxiety, even the fear of a people that is losing its dominant place in the world and can think of no constructive way to deal with that loss. Fear produces backlash. Fear makes people yearn to go back to how they think things used to be, never mind that they never really used to be that way. Fear and the anger it produces brings out the worst in people. Fearful, angry nations resort to the worst angels of their nature. A good example is Weimar Germany. Germany lost World War I, and the victorious allies imposed a harsh, punitive peace treaty on it. Things in Germany went from bad to worse. The Germans reacted by resorting to the worst angels of their national character—authoritarianism, militarism, and antisemitism. They made the German fascist Adolf Hitler Chancellor and proceeded to inflict untold horror on virtually all of Europe. Hitler was a symptom of everything that was wrong in Weimar Germany, and he was a reaction to it. He was a symptom of Germany’s humiliation after World War I and the economic catastrophe that followed it. From being, or at least seeing itself to be, the most civilized, developed, and powerful country in Europe Germany, lost everything that constituted its self-image. Hitler was the result.

Donald Trump is a symptom of similar dynamics going on the US today. Sure, what’s going on in the US today isn’t nearly as bad as what went on in Weimar Germany, and Donald Trump, bad as he is, is no Hitler. Still, just as Germany lost its position of dominance in Europe after World War I, the US is losing its position of dominance after the Cold War. A great many Americans are reacting to that loss in a way similar to if less extreme than the way a great many Germans reacted one hundred years ago. Donald Trump is of course important in his own right. He is an unstable and incompetent man with his hand on the nuclear trigger. More significantly Trump is a symptom of the underlying dynamics of American society. Until we face those dynamics honestly (and few if any prominent American politicians are willing to do that) we run the risk of reelecting Trump in 2020 and electing others like him, or maybe worse, in the future.