What Next?

Synopsis: Biden won.  This changes nothing. 

It appears Joe Biden has won the presidency.

I wish I could be more satisfied with the outcome.  The past four years have been demoralizing for anyone who aspires to living in a just and equitable society.  But that doesn’t mean a new administration is going to undo the social damage wrought by its predecessor.  The past few days have not been reassuring.

People on both sides suffer from cognitive dissonance.  Predictably, the “base” is crying that the election was “stolen,” that ballots voted for the President were destroyed or misplaced through the malfeasance of “crooked” poll workers, and so forth.  Their opponents can’t believe that the President wasn’t defeated by a wider margin.  A news article quotes a Planned Parenthood official as registering shock that Biden didn’t win by a landslide, an outcome she found “hurtful.”

These examples show that we live within our own self-constructed ideological bubbles, abetted by the multiplicity of media outlets we curate so that we’re always told what we want to hear.  This tendency predates cable news, the internet, and social media, though.  An apocryphal story made the rounds after Richard Nixon’s 49-state sweep in 1972 in which film critic Pauline Kael said she couldn’t believe Nixon won because no one she knew voted for him.

Presidential elections are as much about political theater as they are about choosing a chief executive.  They are occasions in which our beliefs and prejudices acquire a performative aspect reflected in the presumed attributes of our favored candidate.  But the 2016 election didn’t have an “off” switch.  This year’s probably won’t, either.  The pervasive anger amongst us that had bubbled just beneath the surface of our national life festered over and won’t be easily contained simply because we’ve replaced the individual at the center of the phenomenon.

Journalists and social scientists struggle to comprehend what animates the President’s most fervent supporters.  I don’t have that problem.  My life has been torn between two conflicting identities, one of which I chose and one that I was born into.   I grew up in a rural, white, working class milieu.  My formative years were steeped in the beliefs and attitudes championed by the base.  The minority of the white working class interested in politics shifted to the Republican Party in 1970s and 80s, even though its policy preferences were manifestly against their interests.  Donald Trump’s populism electrified those who had been seething in silence for decades as social and economic change left them in the dust.  It tapped into their collective id and forced it to the top.  Trump’s defeat will not tamp it down.

People on the left are inclined to use the epithet “fascist” indiscriminately.  Godwin’s Law often haunts the rhetoric.  However, the heightened saliency of populist sentiment since Barack Obama’s election does have fascistic overtones.  Fascism has many definitions, but I will use the characteristics described by Umberto Eco as my analytical model for Trumpian populism.  Eco fused the various strands of fascism into a unified concept he labeled Ur-Fascism.

The first trait Eco identifies is the cult of tradition which holds that tradition (the “way it’s always been done”) is all that’s needed and nothing new needs to be tried.  It’s manifested in an uncritical adherence to fundamentalist Christianity and an evocation of a quasi-mythical past when America was “great.”  The latter conjures up images of a postwar era in which white males dominated the social, political, and economic discourse, and women and minorities knew their place.  A desire for tradition by implication rejects a multicultural society.

The second is a rejection of modernism in the form of Enlightenment era rationalism.  It is the misapprehension that science and religion, which attempt to answer different questions, are diametrical opposites.  An open rejection of science around critical issues ranging from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as a symptom, along with denial or a belief in magical thinking pertaining to how they might be addressed.

The third is the cult of action for action’s sake.  Action without recourse to critical thinking is valorized, and is a facet of anti-intellectualism and the rejection of science.

The fourth is the belief that disagreement is treason.  Everyone must believe and act in lockstep, and dissent is not allowed.  Both Trump and his supporters have used the word treason to describe opposition to the President and his administration.

The fifth is fear of difference.  Where to start? 

The sixth is an appeal to middle class frustration.  This is characteristic among the suburban rather than the redneck contingent within the base, though it’s just as applicable to blue collar anxieties.  Automation, globalization, and industrialization in the developing world has rendered traditionally well-paid, low-skilled work obsolete.  Right to work laws, anti-union policies, and the gutting of defined benefit pensions championed by the same Republican politicians they enthusiastically support have further eroded their economic security.  This realization has yet to penetrate, so their frustration will continue to be aimed at the usual suspects (minorities, “illegals,” and the like).

The seventh is obsession with a plot, or an entrenched belief that there is a vast conspiracy against them.  This is pretty much QAnon’s whole schtick, though it’s generalizable to the alt-right as a whole.  You have to marvel at the sort of imagination that could concoct and believe the premise that there is a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles in the Democratic Party leadership who engage in the sex-trafficking of children, and that only Donald J. Trump can put an end to the horror.  There a long, sorry tradition of conspiracy theories in American culture, but the ones being spread by the alt-right are in a singular category.

Number eight is a self-contradictory view of the enemy.  Our opponents are strong so we must fight them, but we will prevail because they are so weak.  (Repeat this a few times, and it will make sense.)   The base is told that liberals and progressives are weak, and yet they are insidiously powerful.  (Refer to the previous paragraph.)

Contempt for the weak is the tenth characteristic.  Closely related are the eleventh and twelfth, which are heroism and machismo.  There is a streak of male supremacy within the base that they conflate with Americanism.  Their ideal is a white, hetero cis-male who is ready and willing to mete violence against those they perceive as inferior.   Gun culture is intimately interwoven with each of these notions.  The presence of armed, camo clad men at urban protests and rural disaster zones presuming to assert authority they do not legally possess reflects a contempt for the values of civil society and for those who don’t have the balls to flout them.  It goes without saying that women and the non-gender conforming cannot embody these values and must be marginalized.

The thirteenth characteristic is selective populism.  Populism should arise spontaneously, from the bottom up.  Paradoxically, a strong leader is needed to articulate and implement the collective will.  Democratic institutions which obstruct the leader’s will also oppose the true sentiments of the people and are therefore illegitimate.   From the promise to “drain the swamp” to the demonization of congressional leaders opposing him, Trump and his base have evinced this occurrence in a manner without precedent.

The final trait is a proto-Orwellian newspeak.  Reduce ideas to catchphrases.  Reduce nuanced issues to dichotomies.  Shape the discourse through narrowing the political vocabulary.

My analysis so far begs the question of why a formal party organization has not emerged on its own to advance the alt-right movement to power, rather than using the Republican Party as its vehicle.  The answer is twofold.  A key reason which worked against the radical change sought by the base are the checks and balances provided in the Constitution.  Personality was a contributing factor; Donald Trump was indifferent to the intricacies of administration and was perhaps a bit lazy to boot.    

The other reason that the Republican Party itself hasn’t adopted an overtly fascistic platform or that a fascistic third party hasn’t arisen is rooted in the nature of political parties in the U.S.  Our two major parties are coalitions of interests whose constituent components may not have a 100% commonality of interests but rather follow mutually acceptable policy preferences born of compromise.  Strongly ideological parties such as those in European parliamentary systems have never succeeded here.

Those facts are cold comfort and do not undo the polarization of the past four years.  A Biden-Harris administration is not likely to bring the country together, and the fact that the Vice President elect is a woman of color will provoke the alt-right to further rhetorical excess against women and minorities.  A new administration won’t solve systemic racial inequality or the police brutality problem, so the protests will go on with the greater potential for confrontations with armed “patriot” vigilantes. 

And there is still the possibility of Trump refusing to accept the election results and barricading himself in the White House after he’s lost all of his legal challenges while his supporters take to the streets.  A coup is a remote prospect, but Trump can still cause quite a ruckus on the way out.  It doesn’t matter anyway.  Even if he goes quietly, the damage is done.  His presidency may have been a failure, but Donald J. Trump has put his permanent stamp on American political culture.  Whatever comes is next will not be sweetness and light.

 

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar