Why Trump Wants Us Angry and Afraid
“Totalitarianism begins in contempt for what you have. The second step is the notion: “Things must change—no matter how. Anything is better than what we have.” Totalitarian rulers organize this kind of mass sentiment, and by organizing it articulate it, and by articulating it make the people somehow love it.” (Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism)
President Trump’s inaugural address painted the United States as a failed state. Besieged by terrorists and immigrants, covered with rusting factories, ravaged by carnage in our cities, we teeter on the brink of collapse.
Of the many astonishing things that Trump has managed to convince us of, this is perhaps the most astonishing. How is it that in the wealthiest country in the history of mankind, where unemployment is below 5%, the stock market is booming, the deficit is shrinking, and interest rates are low; in the most powerful country in the history of mankind, with bases around the globe, at peace (other than minor far away conflicts) and under no significant threats that come close to those faced in the Cold War or previous world wars–that we elected a President on the strength of this apocalyptic message?
The United States has many challenges, some of them quite serious—rising inequality, climate change, racial injustice, job loss from automation, creeping oligarchy, terrorism, an aggressive and risk-taking Russia—but none of them are crises (well, maybe climate change) and none of them insoluble. In any case, other than a crudely-hyped terrorism, none of these were the focus of Trump’s campaign.
This sense of impending doom is understandable in the poor white working class that was Trump’s special target and might plausibly be receptive to a message of decline. But it is equally prevalent among intellectual supporters, who seem to see Trump as the last chance for America to escape collapse.
Mark Bauerlein, for instance, the editor of First Things and an English professor at Emory University, thinks that American society will disintegrate without the drastic corrective represented by Trump, who he describes as a Hegelian ‘World Historical Individual’ who represents the spirit of the age (no, I am not making this up). http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/10/12/13244444/trump-conservative-figure-defense-pc What is the existential threat that Trump will save us from? Is it nuclear proliferation or climate change or a shrinking middle class? No, it is Political Correctness. Bauerlein writes: “The problem is this: Our society has sunk so far into sensitivity and guilt that it has relinquished the liberalism that both liberals and conservatives espouse. I mean the liberalism that gives people a bit of room to think what they want to think; that doesn’t automatically define one’s character by one’s politics or religion; that accepts human frailty and forgives people for brief lapses into racism, sexism, and any other prejudice.” This is like standing on the deck of the sinking Titanic and worrying whether the band is out of tune.
The anonymous Publius Decius Mus (recently revealed to be Michael Anton, a former Bush speechwriter and contributor to the Weekly Standard) who wrote the much-discussed article “The Flight 93 Election” in the September issue of the Claremont Review–which argued that voting for Trump has the same life or death status for the country as storming the cockpit of a hijacked airliner—makes political correctness central to his critique of modern society. http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/the-flight-93-election/ Even more than Bauerlein he takes an apocalyptic view in which only the providential arrival of Trump might save us. Claremont regular and professor John Marini argues in a turgid article from July that Trump is here to rescue us from rule by professionals and elites who embrace an identity politics that has destroyed old-fashioned American virtue. Charles Kesler, another Claremont Straussian, wrote in May in the Claremont Review: “But his [Trump’s] savvy opposition to P.C. implies something like this defense of America, because there is nothing political correctness stands for so much as the denigration of America, its history and principles. P.C. liberalism doesn’t stop there; its hostility extends to the theological, philosophical, literary, and scientific heritage of the West.” And so forth and so on.
The Trumpist intellectuals are especially incendiary and hysterical about the implications of diversity. Publius, in explaining why immigration is The Issue Of Our Time, says “This [open immigration] is insane. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die. Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.” Bauerlein is a bit less histrionic but strongly supports a southern wall because it sends a signal that we value our ‘home,’ that America has some kind of boundary. (These fears of immigration are ironic for those who argue the biggest threat to society comes from intellectual elites—surely it is new immigrants raised in other traditions and in love with old-fashioned values of work, family, faith, and community that tend to reinvigorate the country.)
Now, there is plenty not to like about the more extreme manifestations of identity issues on college campuses and elsewhere. As someone who went to St. John’s College and takes very seriously the Western tradition, I deplore the kind of political correctness that encourages students to throw over past thinkers because they are white or male or hold views out of step with contemporary sensibilities. We would be better off with less posturing and less hypersensitivity. But the level of hysteria leveled against ‘political correctness’ by Trump and his intellectual supporters is so excessive that we are forced to conclude that the real reason to whip up fear and anger lies elsewhere.
There is no way to know for sure if Trump and Bannon and their ilk are really so gloomy about America. But it is quite clear why they have made this their main message: because, as Hannah Arendt points out, maximizing fear and anger is a tried and true way to seize power. When people are convinced that they face urgent and massive threats, they are willing to bend norms and laws and throw themselves at the feet of a savior: “Only I can fix it.” Bannon once described himself as a Leninist, seeking to overthrow the established order. Lenin rode hatred of capitalists into absolute power. The Bauerleins and Marinis who see themselves as making a last stand for Western Civilization are eager to legitimize the new Leninists. They may not love Trump, but the enemy of my enemy is a friend, and they hope he will topple their hated PC foes who occupy the commanding heights in the academy.
This is playing with fire. The kind of reactionary politics encapsulated in the slogan “Make America Great Again,” as Mark Lilla reminds us in The Shipwrecked Mind, can be particularly extreme and violent. For progressives history is moving, albeit slowly, in the right direction. But for hardcore reactionaries we are always at the edge of the cliff, it is always one minute to midnight, the sky is always falling. This election or this vote in Congress are The Last Chance to prevent disaster. Listen to Publius go on about how today’s conservatism doesn’t go far enough: “To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.” To declare that liberalism is ‘incompatible with human nature’ is to say that anything is excusable to defeat it.
In his first inaugural address in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt told us that “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.” He meant that we must not be paralyzed by fear, and we must not act out of fear. In 1932 the country was facing the Great Depression, a real crisis, unlike Trump’s fake apocalypse. Other countries devastated by economic catastrophe were abandoning democracy for dictatorship. This didn’t happen in America, but it might have. Roosevelt chose not to stoke our fears but to encourage optimism, remind us of our underlying strengths, and promise energy and action aimed at real, not false dangers.
Why did Roosevelt succeed and bring the country together, while Obama’s response to the Great Recession—similar in many ways to Roosevelt’s–further divided us? I am not entirely sure, but three things strike me. First, our politics has been characterized for many decades by an escalating conservative message of anger and resentment, aimed at government and fueled by wealthy interests seeking lower taxes. This laid the ground for conservative leaders to successfully characterize the Obama administration’s necessary and reasonable efforts to deal with the recession as a plot to expand government.
Second, the Depression hit everyone more or less equally. The rich, the poor, the middle class—all declined, all took dramatic losses. But in the recent recession the poor and middle class were hammered, while the rich by and large went their merry way. We were manifestly not in it together. And Obama foolishly chose not to make those who caused the disaster pay a serious price. The have-nots noticed, and blamed government for not standing up for their interests.
Third, Roosevelt did not face Fox News. Since its inception in 1996, Fox has had a business model of exaggerating the dangers facing the US and blaming most of them on liberals. Fox has almost singlehandedly legitimized a brand of paranoia and partisanship that reached new heights during the presidential campaign. Contemporary internet trolls have followed the Fox lead of making money via extremism and conspiracy theories. Roosevelt used radio masterfully to get out his message. Obama’s voice was often distorted and drowned-out.
We are at a very dangerous point. Just as al-Qaeda and ISIS hope to provoke the United States into an excessive response that mobilizes the Muslim world, so Trump and Bannon want their tweets and directives to make the liberal opposition so angry it over-reacts. In their eyes every coastal city demonstration, every New York Times op-ed, is a victory. It confirms their message that the elites are the enemy. Like right-wing nationalists of the past they yearn to demonstrate strength. They may hope for an excuse to impose emergency measures, which will lead to a police state or civil war. Michael Anton—Publius Decius Mus (a Roman general who dedicated himself to the gods before charging suicidally into the enemy)—now works in the White House.
Yet not reacting is not an option. The opposition needs to walk a fine line mixing determination with discipline, non-violence, and an inclusive message. The opposite of fear is truth. We are far from perfect but we are not weak, not declining, not taken advantage of by other countries, not impoverished, not hopelessly decadent. We are unimaginably strong. We need to know this and be confident.