Last Best Hope by George Packer

Author:George Packer [Packer, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub

What started with Palin was consummated with Trump. American politics has always been dominated by white people, but for Trump’s core supporters race became a matter of self-conscious identity. More Americans voted for Trump than just white people, and not all white people wanted membership, but white identity politics became the base of Trump’s support. As with all identity politics, it drew on a sense of grievance and inequality. It was moved not by universal principles or concrete policies, but by the group’s fear of the other and desire for power over its enemies. Those enemies were not just nonwhites, but anti-Trump Americans in general. Eventually white identity politics became Trump identity politics.

The issues Trump had campaigned on waxed and waned during his presidency. What remained was the dark energy he unleashed, binding him like a tribal leader to his people. Nothing was left of the optimistic pieties of Free America. Trump’s people still talked about freedom, but they meant blood and soil. Their nationalism was like the ethno-nationalisms on the rise in Europe and around the world. Trump abused every American institution—the FBI, the CIA, the armed forces, the courts, the press, the Constitution itself—and his people cheered. Nothing, least of all making America great again, excited them like owning the libs. Nothing persuaded them like Trump’s 30,000 lies.

How did practical, hands-on, self-reliant Americans, still balancing family budgets and following complex repair manuals, slip into such cognitive decline when it came to politics? Blaming ignorance or stupidity would be a mistake. You have to summon an act of will, a desperate energy and imagination, to replace truth with the authority of a con man like Trump. The mob that stormed the Capitol was the lonely modern masses described by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism. They are cut off from their fellow citizens and from reality itself, some sworn to a hateful ideology, some longing for an identity that can deliver them from the unbearable condition of “their essential homelessness.” They found an identity in their leader. They surrendered the ability to think for themselves, and with it the capacity for self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realdonaldtrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the truer.

More than anything, Trump was a demagogue—a thoroughly American type, familiar to us from novels like All the King’s Men and movies like Citizen Kane. “Trump is a creature native to our own style of government and therefore much more difficult to protect ourselves against,” the Yale political theorist Bryan Garsten wrote. “He is a demagogue, a popular leader who feeds on the hatred of elites that grows naturally in democratic soil.” A demagogue can become a tyrant, but it’s the people who put him there—the people who want to be fed fantasies and lies, the people who set themselves apart from and above their compatriots. So the question is not who Trump was, but who we are.

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