This is an excerpt from our post-election symposium, “On the Return of Trump.”
It is a sad feature of the ego that it will always seek pleasure in the wrong places. Now and again, voters will crave the approval and the leniency of the thing which despises them, and that is how a felonious bigot gets to be president. To millions of decent people who might judge better when it comes to their children, Trump’s menace is not a bar to his attraction but is rather a part of it, and so, for reasons too deep for tears, his manifold hatreds have proved more inviting than repugnant to a proportion of the electorate. It is an aspect of Trump’s cruel magic that he so readily invites the communion of people who find they can express in company what they might otherwise resist. As George Orwell showed, groupthink may be developed in a darkroom of propaganda. For us, it now shows in the lower depths of the Internet as well as on talk radio shows and a hundred perfidious podcasts, where the sleep of reason becomes a populist mania, and hostility a kind of sport.
This has been his achievement, to bring such loathing to the open spaces of America, where certain voters can feel remote, can feel worthless, looking for someone to blame and someone to save them. That is how a sociopath gets to be president. He rises like a Leviathan out of people’s worst feelings. And that is how true oppression works, by harnessing the unconscious disgust and prejudice of the vulnerable, marrying it to the ambitions of the mighty, who are ready to say, “Come and be part of our solution.”
The antiapartheid activist Steve Biko once said that “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.” That is how a sexual predator gets to be president. He gets there by being a wizard of paranoia and brutality, while the voters, so many of them shunted away from their brains, their hearts, and their courage, follow the road that leads to his phony eminence, begging for inclusion. He has the fame. He has the money. He has the answers, right?
What the election shows is that more than enough Americans feel sufficiently disappointed with their circumstances to join their voices to a fascist band. It will end horribly. A man who should be in jail is positioned again as the most powerful person on earth, accompanied by a vice-president who once compared his boss to Hitler. When I witnessed Trump mount the convention platform in July, reeking of malice and manifestly disturbed, I hoped that a population of free voters couldn’t possibly reelect him. But that’s the point. A very great number of them are not in the best sense free. They are imprisoned in his mirage. That is how a racist gets to be president. Not by being liked by those he hates, but by being the source of a power they feel desperate to share in. They want ownership. And Donald Trump is president because he temporarily owns their minds.
