TrumpISM: the festivus of politics
What do all these people have in common?
Trumpism is just what we call it now. But it has always existed. It is the counter to progressivism that every society, every community holds innately.
Every community has things that makes it a community - things that are essential to people living together in peace. These things have to be fundamental and unchangeable or the behaviour of the community members will threaten the very existence of community and sets us back on the path to anarchy, independance and isolation. And as sure as there are these essentials, every community has things that are tangentially associated with those fundamentals that people who are not well-sleeved, people who are not well-educated know to be familiar and conflate with what should be and what is unchangeable. Things that they know well are mistaken for things that shouldn't change.
Trumpism is the current name that we give to those who make this mistake, this reactive resistance to the natural diffusion of human influence. If it should be singled out from any other conservative strain of thought in any community of humans anywhere it should only be singled out for its inherent self-contradiction. Because America is a place of laws and of votes and of politics and the reality of a democracy, like it or not, is to meet at some eventual set point, a midway between minds. Some people derisively call this 'compromise' as if to take consideration of someone else's position is the last thing a human should ever do.
I suppose these people are the same ones that could never 'understand' their kids, or make a marriage 'work'.
Compromise to the point where you can't tell where your views end and another person's views begin is the endstate of politics and democracy. These small wins today are meaningless - they won't change where the road is headed. If anything they just make the inevitable a little harder to get to - a little messier to get to. Demands for someone to think and act as you - which is the priority for all extremists - is always going to be increasingly marginalized in a democracy. Increasingly cornered and hemmed in until the appeal to violence is all that's left.
But Trumpism is very squeamish about taking that last step. That's the other thing about a democracy, especially one like America - the people on the other side often look like them. Sometimes the people on the other side are your own family members. Government of the people, by the people and for the people invariably increases the chances that making an enemy of the government is making an enemy of yourself.
Maybe they don't think it through consciously. You have to figure that the appeal to the rule of law that they've grown up with their whole lives is a hard last shackle to shake. But one thing that they all have in common is clear: privilege. They have something to lose - something they consciously or subconsciously acknowledge that they have that 1) someone else wants and 2) fairness/justice/law/politics/democracy will eventually take from them and share with someone else. They live in fear of having what they have taken away, fear what that world looks like, and that fear drives the fight. The adage goes "When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression". What 'equality' means in that saying is up for debate, but there can be no debate that equality will be vigourously resisted by those who 1) are currently 'more equal' than others and 2) (and make no mistake, this is the subconscious part) not entirely sure they earned it entirely on their own.
Because let's face it - the people who have what they've got entirely by their own merit - who really worked harder and smarter than the next person...those people don't particularly fear the merits of a truly just world. It's like the difference between rich people and people who make lots of money. Rich people do everything in their power to avoid paying taxes - they see rejection of taxation as a moral imperative. People who make money at a fast rate couldn't care less about the actual tax rate. It's just a detail to them in the system of things they do to maximize returns. Their relation with taxation is secondary to their understanding of how to make money. But a person who is rich without understanding how the money is made would obviously see taxation as simply money going out the door...a threat to the privilege they enjoy that they have no capacity to replicate or recreate if it went away.
The people who have what they've got entirely by their own merit couldn't care less what gets taken from them in the shuffle because hard work and smarts travel. There will always be a place (and a market) for people who take responsiblity for things and keep the world running through care, commitment, understanding and engagement. It's the people who found their way to the top, looked left and right, and weren't entirely sure that they were better than their peers who didn't get as high as them who'll hear the word "equality" and break out into a sweat. It's the people who got to the top through lies, theft and fraud that are the ones who keep looking over their back. "Equality" to them sounds like going down without any path back up. It can only be oppression if they can't fathom a way back to their current standing or quality of life in a 'fair' world. And the only way they could be unable to fathom a way back would be if they were the person with such a paucity of imagination or decency that they shouldn't be on top of anything in the first place.
Every single person who supported Trump supported this appeal to the status quo in some way. Progressives look at the monumental amount of votes Trump got and conclude that half the country are racist buffoons. When in reality, half the country has a material interest in keeping things as uneven, partial, and self-centered as they have traditionally been. And this manifests in issues of taxation, gun control, border control, finance, environment all centered on one overarching issue: security. Securing what people have against what they know others deserve a share of.
Sure they go about it in the dumbest way possible. Enriching yourself at the cost of the environment is delusional...your right to own the biggest, most powerful gun merely gives that right to endanger you and your family to someone else as well. Making it harder to sue a corporation endangers everyone in society; allowing money in politics and making it harder for certain people to vote will make the country as a whole less representational and more likely to explode into sectarian violence. It only takes a couple of seconds of actual thought to realize what things people do that make living in a community more difficult and what measures would make it more easy - what things are done only for the expediency of today vs. what is done to buttress and reinforce society tomorrow. But the capacity to see these things exist on a spectrum and everyone lower on this spectrum see Trump as the loudest voice of dissent in a world trending logically and inexorably towards...something different than what has gone before.
Humanity was only going to go through so many cycles of one-man rule, toppled by another's one-man rule, toppled by another's one-man rule before some sort of representative politically driven system of administration, policy and authority came to the fore. It was inevitably going to trend away from that as the people become more literate and less patient with the arbitrary dictates of the fascist and the reactionary appeal to tradition that is the source of power of a monarch. Given enough time and growing progress/understanding, power in a community is like a drop of dye in water: diffusing away until it is held as evenly distributed as possible. That is the entropy that is built into nature and into social groups - it only takes one bad ruler out of three to be bad enough for people with half a brain to want something different than one man rule. It could happen a hundred years from now or a thousand, but the trend line is clear. There will never again be a day where power and demographics work in such a way where fascism will be a sustainable system. Too many people who knew otherwise would have to die.
The Trump supporter, like the figurehead of their 'movement' (if you can call something that is destined to go nowhere a movement) is too preoccupied with their own small view of the world to appreciate any of this. They are the left-overs of the political and social spectrum - destined to be marginalized in a world that is in everyway encouraging them to engage and move forward at the simple cost of recognizing everyone's stake in the world and everyone's right to be here. Because the one concession they ask for and expect is the one concession that a conciliatory world can't give - the right to not have to compromise. The right to not have to sacrifice. The right to have it all...
There are all the different ways to celebrate humanity - just like there are many ways to celebrate the 'holiday' season. And invariably there was going to be those on the outside of those celebrations, looking in with derision. They aren't figures that warrant pathos - they are an inevitable by-product of a world ever more loudly and defiantly inching towards a true brotherhood of man. They defiantly stuck their flag in the ground and declared themselves for Festivus. A movement for the rest of them.
Thing is - Festivus only exists in relation to what it isn't. It only exists because it isn't any of those other holidays. A political position of 'inequality' isn't really a position at all, it is just an appeal to authoritarianism which, for reasons that most people can grasp, is a non-starter.
But there are people who can't grasp this. And these people needed a Trump so we could single them out and start the hard work of explaining to them why what they are asking for can't work.
posted by Kamil at
January 19, 2021
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