| I have friends who feel a very strong need to stay abreast of all the horrific things being done by the Trump administration. All the attacks on civil rights and civil liberties. All the assaults on higher education and scientific research. The shameful support for Israel’s slaughter in Gaza. The trampling of truth and the exaltation of lies about the 2020 election. The weaponization of the Justice Department. The petty pursuit of political enemies. The enthusiastic demonization of migrants. All of it. They devour the news. And they share it. “Can you believe this?” they ask, breathlessly, several times a day. | | Well, in fact, yes, I can. | | I understand the desire to know what is happening around us. As a rule, Americans are woefully uninformed about current events, so it is a good thing when people educate themselves. And I understand the desire to share it with like-minded souls. It is an attempt to create community, to find allies in a fractured world. That too is a good thing, and even if it were not, it is human nature to create groups, so it’s going to happen whether I like it or not. | | But I do not share this desire to follow the particulars of the administration and feel very little need to discuss them. That is why I have written so little about this or that outrage over the past six months. Partly, this is a defense mechanism. Like many people, I find it easy to become overwhelmed by the magnitude of the devastation wrought by the administration, and despair is not a productive emotion. I see no reason to cultivate it. Yet that accounts for only a very small part of my attitude, and in this essay, I want to try to explain the difference between an explanation and its mere expression; between the manifestation of the thing, and the thing itself. | | While I spend very little time thinking and talking about each new umbrage, I spend hours every day trying to understand and articulate a narrative that makes sense of our moment. For all that has been written and said about the rise of Trump and Trumpism, I have not found a narrative that satisfactorily accounts for what we see around us and find the labels that titillate so much of the left—think, “fascism”—to shed much more heat than light. | | Part of the problem is that Trump is not the same as Trumpism. Trumpism, for instance, does not share Trump’s greed and narcissism. In a world of Venn diagrams, Trump and Trumpism overlap a great deal, but they are not identical. Likewise, the challenge of articulating a meta-narrative is made much more difficult by the fact that so many things are happening at once. Mass global migration takes place at the same moment that globalization has irreversibly knee-capped the sort of American industry that dominated the world economy in the mid-20th century. While both of these unfold, the rise of neoliberal governance quite deliberately emasculated organized labor as a political and economic force in this country. | | Meanwhile, the U.S. economy has split into a low-paying service economy that relies overwhelmingly on Black and Brown migrant labor and a high-paying knowledge economy that relies heavily on advanced education and training, and which, in combination, puts even more distance between our present and the romanticized wonders of the post-WWII decades, when blue collar labor was king and father knew best. The rise of the coasts and blue cities at the expense of the red countryside intensifies the 0ther great political inequity of the Founding era (after the instantiation of slavery)—an inequity that creates a Senate where Wyoming and South Dakota have the same political clout as California and Texas. | | At the same time, opposition in the 1960s and 70s to pornography and Roe v. Wade broke down the historic barriers between Catholicism and Protestantism and fueled the rise of a muscular, evangelical, conservative Christianity that, though small in absolute numbers, now exercises an outsized influence in American law and politics. | | All of these factors (and probably others that I have left out), acting in combination with each other and alone, put pressure on the hegemony of whiteness in this country. Not just political and economic pressure, which is intense, but cultural pressure, which is inexorable, creating a toxic nostalgia for a mythologized yesteryear, when whiteness ruled supreme and the United States was not poised to become a majority minority country. As whiteness declines across so many axes at the same time, it becomes frightened, angry and brittle, taking its motto from Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage rage against the dying of the light.” And rage it does, which helps account for the stunning cruelty of our times, and which invariably targets the most vulnerable among us, so long as they are not white. | | And finally, as we attempt to articulate this narrative, we must also recognize that some aspects of modern life are not at all new. Americans have always worshipped wealth, for instance, and have a bizarre willingness to believe that, merely because someone has become fabulously wealthy, they must have something valuable to say about public policy. I don’t understand this deification, and don’t see why we should listen to Elon Musk when he prattles on about the national debt any more than we would listen to Taylor Swift if she lectured us about fiber in our diet. Likewise, there is a slice of the American population that has always been drawn to the Strong Man, the dynamic demagogue who promises singlehandedly to wrestle order from chaos. Our meta-narrative has to account for these enduring aspects of the American character and distinguish them from the behavior that is uniquely part of the current moment. | | And of course, we have to craft this narrative as it is still taking shape, which is like trying to paint a moving train. | | As you can imagine, it is no small task to articulate a narrative that embraces all of this, and that accounts for our moment without becoming so broad as to be non-falsifiable. I certainly haven’t been able to craft it yet, nor have I seen it elsewhere. This difficulty helps explain why it hasn’t been done, and why journalists (and nearly everyone else) devote so much energy to decrying the day-to-day. But despite the difficulty, I am confident the day-to-day is not the thing we need to explain, which is why I will probably continue to ignore it, and why I will continue to try to articulate the thing itself. |
| In the spirit of thoughtful conversation, if you have any reactions to this or any of my essays, feel free to share them with me at [email protected]. |
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