News and social media sites are packed with analyses of Donald Trump’s intentions and strategies. But it seems fair to find most of them overwrought. Trump, quite plausibly, wakes up in the morning and starts acting on sentiments that hit him in the moment. Who has wronged him, who can he dominate in some contest, what might burnish his public profile, what or who does he find distasteful, what feels good in the doing of any of the above, or maybe what’s just stupid as he sees it.
So we might get Liberation Day, with tariffs all around and invitations to other nations to cut deals that he will win. Tariffs can be imposed without Congress, he feels comfortable cutting money, and he has all the cards. It might be a call to investigate or otherwise attack someone who’s wronged him, Barack Obama one day, Rosie O’Donnell the next. Maybe a university or newspaper or country has taken a condescending tone toward him. Or pennies might need to be abolished or Coca Cola might need to be made with cane sugar or sports franchises in Washington or Cleveland should change their names.
Knee jerk reactions in the media, mainstream and social, are predictable. His targets line up with populist resentment of establishment figures, and the policies and perceived attitudes that they impose and assume. His supporters, for the most part, are happy to see elites’ comeuppance, their imposed rules and norms overturned, and maybe enjoy a feeling of “at last …” Outcomes of policies and actions – government layoffs, mass arrests of aliens, allies’ and adversaries’ reactions abroad – have always been the stuff of elite yammering. Now, in their once-knowingly intoned pronouncements, they are shaken up. So much the better.
Trump’s opponents generally decry him for himself, and denounce his latest action urgently and openly. Most then cite the damages he wreaks in terms of a particular work or expertise or interest that pertains to them in their particular domains. The cosmopolitan says he ruins our credibility abroad, social worker notes the brutal arrests of people trying to support their families, the advocate sees how he taunts and harms women and minorities. By the way, all might note, he can’t do some of those – they’re unconstitutional, or transgress the rule of law. He’s undemocratic, and so the people, or at least the not-quite-half who voted against him, need to get rid of him. It’s not just Trump’s fault, but also MAGA’s, the Republicans’, the ignorant undecided voters’ who swung his way, and the spineless appeasing moderate Democrats’.
The two generic sentiments are true mirror images of each other, though none who hold them will admit it. American politics has been cultivating this dysfunctional non-discourse for decades. The ‘other side’ has been growing less informed, more intransigent, more manipulating and dissembling, and more evil, every election cycle. “Our side’ has been more and more urgently needed, and pushed to our extremes by this danger. So now it only took one indecorous, or uncouth, according to taste, character to blow away any pretenses of civil discourse over the enmities that fester in the two sides’ trenches.
And we are talking about emotions here. Any reasoned argument is only mouthed to serve partisan sentiment. Facts and principles have become props, fodder to “out-virtue signal” the other side. Yes, one side has built up institutions and endowments to fund their causes for a longer time, and yes, that side is more educated in the aggregate, and yes again, its members have reason to support the causes they espouse. But many of them also make their livings and stake their personal self image in those causes, as they work for tangible gains to those interests. Virtue has mixed with vesting, even as professional pursuits push them to grow their domain, their reach, and their achievements.
And the other side, decrying those excesses and that vesting, has done the same thing, with newer foundations and those mirror-image target audiences.
So Donald Trump has happily made himself the issue, but not really. We put him there, by casting our elections as bipolar emotional exercises, prizing partisan rhetoric (with focus group-tested nuances for moderation or ardor), reducing our common national principles to throwaway lines, and turning voting choice into urgent forestalling of the other side’s awfulness or, for those who fail to grasp that urgency, a coin flip colored by vapid (again focus group-tested) ad campaigns. He hasn’t brought his own ideas into the discussion (neither has anyone else …), but he embodies the voice finally saying out loud what “I” have longed for, or dreaded. We use him to carry the evil or the payback, that we fear or revel in. We all do, which makes him our living Rorschach-blot. By the way, he loves it.
We all know this. The question becomes, as our politics precludes coherent government and national self-portrayal, what to do next. Any ideas of rebuilding any virtues that had been in practice before, or of turning new trends we favor into lasting new practices, are self-serving, still-partisan, polarizing, illusions. The only answer to “what’s next?” is to start from our bedrock, together. This nation was conceived in a principle, of rights and of government to secure them. Only in committed comity – not unity that would require all to agree with “me” but comity that affirms what we actually hold in common beneath all the noise – will we do this. We plan to commemorate our founding next year. Will we take its premises seriously?
Common Conviction 