“How many times do we need to be told that Donald Trump is a jerk?” This throwaway line appears in Beyond the Boom , a 1990 collection of brilliant essays on American life and culture by a gaggle of young and robust ideological voices of the New Right in the post-Ronald Reagan years.
The point of this citation is to remember that as early as 1990, Mr. Trump had already been recognised as an American cultural joke. Yet, close to three decades later, he marketed himself as a major political phenomenon and eventually came to occupy the White House (without ever having held any public office).
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Nothing new in Trumpism
Now that he stands ejected from the Oval Office we need to remind ourselves that there was nothing innovative about Mr. Trump’s success, and there was nothing new about whatever he was supposed to represent. The strength of so-called Trumpism can easily be located in the sum total of American civilisational weaknesses.
Eminent American historians and sociologists have, indeed, long delineated these weaknesses. In his masterly essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics , Professor Richard Hofstadter had meditated, as early as 1963, on the United States’ unresolved “cultural struggles” — first, over, immigrations and later on the race question. Populism has always got traction, as it got manifested in different forms — racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and paranoia about the outsider and his or her contamination. Isolationism (of the kind implicit in the ‘America First’ slogan) had had its appeal (President Woodrow Wilson was not allowed to take the U.S. into the League of Nations); jingoism has always been music to many American ears. These historical traits are woven into the American social fabric.
Yet, sensible, sensitive and caring politics, anchored around President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, beat back the preachers of narrowness and bigotry. But the ugliness, racism and violence remain unvanquished and dormant, waiting for a new prophet and his call to arms. After the Second World War, the call came in 1964 when Senator Barry Goldwater won the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Though he went on to lose the race for presidency by the biggest margin till date, Goldwater did revive the conservative platform, cobbled from old racist prejudices and xenophobic passions. Senator Goldwater’s massive defeat would eventually pave the way for a conservative resurgence that finally culminated in Ronald Reagan’s eight presidential years.
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Ironically, it was during the Reagan-Bush years that the most intense and most bitter ideological battles took place — not between the liberal, progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans, but within the Republican Party, between the ‘Mods’ and the ‘Cons’. The story of this struggle, repeated in state after state, is brilliantly told in What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Consevatives won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank. Kansas, a state with progressive traditions, was to get sucked into right-wing anger and angst of the 1990s over the Clintons, their liberal agenda and their presumed moral lapses.
The most burning anxiety
Even as Reagan helped Americans overcome the post-Vietnam defeatism and they came to savour a new wave of prosperity, the untamed fears about immigrants and the Blacks resurfaced. Tom Wolfe’s novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities , brings out the visceral fears that gnawed ‘white America’ in the 1980s. In an introduction to a later edition of the book, Wolfe put his finger on the most burning anxiety: “New York and practically every other large city in the United States are undergoing a profound change. The fourth great wave of immigrants — this one from Asia, North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean — is now pouring in. Within ten years political power in most major American cities will have passed to the non-white majorities.”
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For the right wing that prophecy came to pass soon. In 2008 the unthinkable happened: a Black man became the president of the U.S. Within days of the Obama presidency the old-fashioned racist forces regrouped themselves under the banner of the so-called Tea Party Revolt. As Professors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson tell us in their scholarly study, The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism , that ‘movement’ was used to infuse grassroots energy into the Republican Party and to transform it into a fighting instrument of “extreme conservative ideology.”
The party needed a new mascot, someone vacuous, amoral, and totally banal, to spearhead the campaign to “take America back.” Mr. Trump was smart enough to make himself agreeable to the individuals and interests behind the Tea Party. Except for a gift for personal disagreeableness, there was nothing new to the so-called ‘Trumpism’. Mr. Trump suited all because he had no core.
All that Mr. Trump imbibed was just what lies beneath the surface of American society — distrust of science, biblical morality, racial enmities, an itch for global evangelicalism. Simply put, Trumpism existed before Trump and there is a name for it — racism, unvarnished and unapologetic.
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A lesson from Trump’s defeat
That Mr. Trump could do so well in the 2020 presidential contest seems to have mesmerised many in India, and there is a rush to discern something enduring, something even morally salvageable in this ‘Trumpism’. Part of this infatuation is, of course, to find global justification for our own lurch towards ugliness of muscular majoritarianism. Just as Rush Limbaugh, that right-wing megaphone, would harangue and thrash the moderate Republicans for their taste for “European-style coffee and whole-grain breads and high-end chocolates,” our very own desi imitators mock and ridicule “the Khan Market gang” for its preference for public decencies and personal civility.
We in India also need to take particular note that the ‘strongman’ notion stands rejected. Joe Biden never positioned himself as the sole bulwark against the ‘enemy’. In contrast to Mr. Trump’s rough and tough preening, Mr. Biden reassured the Americans — and the world — that for him power and authority are to be exercised as a collective trust, and not as a quest for personal glory.
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There is, though, for us in India a lesson in Mr. Trump’s defeat: ugliness of the right-wing can be rolled back. Just as the majority of the Americans are not given to bigotry, the majority of our citizens do not subscribe to communal and divisive hatred. The task of politics, in America as well as in India, is to tame the society’s ugly proclivities. Good politics taps the moderate impulses of the centrist majority. The bigot may have the energy and the vehemence, but smart, sensitive and sincere politics will triumph in the end. And, above all, Mr. Trump’s defeat has restored faith in democracy’s cleansing capacity, to make us better than we are. Today in America, tomorrow in India.
Harish Khare is a senior journalist based in Delhi
