This is an excerpt from our post-election symposium, “On the Return of Trump.”
Donald Trump has spent nearly a decade discombobulating people who are paid to think about politics. His appeal has been consistently underestimated. It has also been, just as consistently, overcomplicated. The substance of his style is simple: a gleeful hostility toward the institutions that have traditionally organized American life. He positions himself not merely as an outsider but as a destroyer: someone who delights in the demolition of norms and normalcy. “This is not normal” was a protest slogan from his first term; for Trump and his admirers, that’s exactly the point.
His disorderliness is part of what makes him so entertaining. He is the consummate heel, a performer who owes much to the beloved antiheroes of professional wrestling. But beneath the buffoonery is something deathly serious. Large numbers of Americans have come to believe that their body politic is severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy.
Democrats have long understood this aspect of Trumpism. Their response has been to rally to the defense of institutions. The modern Democratic Party is, above all, the guardian of norms and normalcy. This does not mean it is entirely incapable of creativity: the Biden administration’s domestic progressivism easily exceeded that of any presidency since Lyndon Johnson’s. But this agenda was embedded within a restorationist project. The aspiration of Bidenomics was to legitimize American governance. Some things would be changed for others to remain the same.
There are material factors at work here. The Democratic base is increasingly populated by affluent professionals, and they tend to be institutionalists. For them, the basic pillars of their country’s political economy are worth protecting. Yet the coalition also includes many working-class voters who are less sanguine about the status quo, and whose allegiance must be secured through progressive reforms. Thus the political complexion of the party at present: meliorist, even at times ambitiously so, but never antisystemic.
The inconvenience is that we live in antisystemic times. Trump intuited this, and now he has used it to install himself in the White House twice. Each election is different, of course, and exit polls show that anger over inflation was the single biggest factor in Trump’s recent victory. What animated this anger was not just the struggle to afford groceries and other necessities, however, but the spectacle of Democratic politicians and affiliated experts telling people that, contrary to the evidence of their own experience, the economy was in excellent health.
This is precisely the sort of dissonance that breeds the legitimacy crisis on which Trumpism thrives. Gaza may have been a less decisive campaign issue, but it offers a more extreme example of the same dynamic. The Biden administration is fond of talking about something called the “rules-based international order,” even as it provisions Israel with whatever it needs to genocidally slaughter the Palestinian people. One of Trump’s favorite themes is the mendacity and moral depravity of the ruling class. In the killing fields of Gaza, one could hardly find clearer proof.
Trump will not improve the lives of Palestinians, nor those of most Americans. Neither will he wholly transfigure the structures of government. He is, in practice, selective in his anti-institutionalism: he may devote his next term to dismantling the administrative state, but antidemocratic institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court serve him and his allies quite well.
For those who oppose him, the task of the next four years—and indeed the next several decades—is to think in terms not of restoration but of transformation. Trumpism cannot be defeated through moral appeals, a return to normal, or any combination of policies and messaging. It is a civilizational phenomenon, one that draws its energy from an atmosphere of civilizational emergency, in much the same way that classical fascism, its closest historical analogue, did in the previous century. An empire in decline is a dangerous animal.
To meet the exigencies of the era requires envisioning and enacting a different kind of country, with a different kind of relationship to the rest of the world. There are precedents to consult—Reconstruction, the Popular Front, and the civil rights movement come to mind—but the making of a free society is first and chiefly an act of imagination, a matter of discovering what new shapes might be made from the materials at hand, and then being foolish enough to place one’s faith in them.
