Is there any reason to feel optimistic about the public world? From local tabloid news that highlights a deadly fire in Harlem and murder on a subway in the Bronx to Putin’s sabre-rattling nuclear threats and the rise of dictatorships in Latin and Central America, the world seems to have gotten even darker. There is no point cataloguing all the examples of political repression, human debasement, and rank hypocrisy, but one can feel how it permeates much of what we read and even experience.
Clearly, when one thinks of the American ethos in its more shameful manifestations — its corruption, ravenousness, and the continuing threat to democracy — Trump’s bloated image comes first and most ominously to mind. Still, Trump needs the support of a large portion of the public to pose such a threat. And that is whom he has gathered around him: evangelical Christians, racists, and voters anxious about crime and the threat of illegal immigration, among others. We know that Trump is skilled at packaging their fears; he has a demagogue’s gift for arousing all the demons that people carry and offering himself as a savior, promoting simplistic, counterfactual litanies. (Trump is in the tradition of Hitler’s Goebbels, who supposedly said: “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.”)
However, there are other possible explanations. Tom Nichols, an instructor at Harvard Extension School and the U.S. Naval War College, recently wrote “Our Own Worst Enemy.” He sees Trump’s support deriving from a growing nihilism and narcissism of the American public. He writes:
We’ve become very self-centered. And we think that every inconvenience is a failure of democracy. We think that even the major things in our lives are a failure of democracy — if you lose your job, if a factory closes, if your health goes bad, somehow, everything has failed you.
I am sure many people’s voting preferences in the past were often motivated by shifts in gas and food prices and business and job failures, rather than by a commitment to preserving civil and human rights and protecting the welfare of low-income and marginal Americans. For these voters, democracy and human suffering be damned, just keep gas cheap and allow my business to make a profit.
Still, something has clearly changed. There were once Republican voters who could support rare moderate liberal Senators like Jacob Javits and Clifford Case, or more often centrist conservatives like John McCain and George H. W. Bush, but in the main they have vanished. Trump lemmings and votaries, Christian nationalists, and racists make up a large proportion of his voters, and elected amoral opportunists like J.D. Vance and Elise Stefanik are prime GOP voices. Some of the other Republican congressional members may privately mutter some muted criticism of Trump but are too fearful about their careers being shattered to break with him.
I wish I had a simple explanation for what has happened. But though the GOP was clearly moving to the right before Trump, it wasn’t a party that praised Russia and Putin or had little use for NATO. Reagan, who was an ideological conservative and was committed to small government, tax cuts, and reducing regulations on business, still believed that U.S. elections were fair and was an enemy of the then Soviet Union.
But Trump’s commitments aren’t to conservatism. They are solely involved in serving his ego and his need for applause and power. He has no use for democracy, and that is what makes him the most dangerous of American political figures. And the people who follow and vote for him are committed to their resentments, prejudices, and the narrowest notion of self-interest. I hope I am proven wrong, but I sense even darker times ahead.
