And so we enter a new era, likely to last several decades at least.
I spent Nov. 6 walking a cobbled beach through the fog, a fifteen-mile spit of land between sea and lagoon. For seven hours. The last thing I wanted to do was make words.
Now a few days have passed, and words have come. They will be familiar to many of you. The ideas they convey are related to each other, but don’t quite slot sequentially one into the next, the way essays are supposed to flow. So if it sounds disjointed, I beg your pardon.
Driven to extremes:
My book Thieves of State makes one essential point: that citizens whose legitimate grievances find no recourse—or even a hearing—will resort to extremes. Example after example came to light in my research, scattered across the world and down through history.
The form the excesses may take varies, from terrorist insurrection to mass protests. Often the extremism comes garbed as a militant ideological or identitarian movement—an outward appearance that masks the underlying logic. In Afghanistan, for example, support for the Taliban began rising around 2007 in a population that had thoroughly repudiated them five years before. The root of the softening lay not in some inexorable Afghan religious fundamentalism or disgust with Western culture per se; it lay in indignation at the corruption of the government the West had placed in charge, and its contempt for the people it purportedly served. An outwardly puritanical religious group cynically captured that indignation and converted it into an irreducible identitarian dichotomy: true Muslims against infidels.
I think that’s a fair facsimile of what has happened to us.
In 2016, Democrats refused to entertain the possibility that the people who elected Donald J. Trump might have any legitimate grievances. The great great great grandchildren of those who opened the American frontier; who swung adzes to square the timbers for the roofs over their heads; who, on behalf of the rest of the nation, bloodied their souls in a genocide against Native Americans, then were driven off the land they had stolen and sweat on and loved into share-cropping or the steel mills and rail-yards that made men puny; who joined forces with European immigrants in the fight for dignified wages and working conditions against Pinkerton agents and a government peopled by business magnates; who, having finally gained some standing beginning in the 1930s, lost their briefly dignified jobs a scant few decades later to a globalization dreamed up by the same urban banking class that had dispossessed them, then were made to feel backward and worthless and cowardly for contesting that orthodoxy…those citizens were not, in the mainstream Democratic view, affected by intergenerational trauma. As whites, the suggestion was, they were actually privileged.
And this from the party that claimed to represent them.
To this day, “diversity” still refers to race and gender only; class does not factor in.
To this day, most Democrats habitually characterize this largely rural and Rust Belt population using the language of contempt. Analyses of what ails small-town America dissolve into a string of what can only be called insults: they’re resistant to progress, destabilized in the face of inevitable change; they’re stupid, ill-educated, and ungenerous.
Shame—here’s another Afghanistan lesson—is flame to the fuse of indignation. So is betrayal.
I am emphatically not trying to negate other people’s intergenerational trauma: the Native Americans whose sacred land, relatives, creatures and ancestral wisdom these settlers plundered and slaughtered and tried to eradicate, or the descendants of Africans torn from their roots, denied their very personhood if their bodies survived.
I’m saying all three traumas are real, and to erase one in favor of another is wrong.
What has deeply distressed me since 2016 is discovering the extent to which Democrats lack democratic instincts. After the 2016 warning shot, I was unable to generate any interest within the Washington anti-corruption and good-governance community in venturing out to sit with people who supported Trump or abstained from voting and ask them what they thought. About public corruption, for example. There was interest only in telling them. In improving “our message.” In polling—not with the objective of learning anything from these people, but of discovering words that might land with them. Like some abracadabra.
My heart sank at the 2020 nomination of Joe Biden. It represented the indulgence of a heartfelt, but utterly counterfactual, desire: “Can’t we just turn the clocks back to 2015, and all this goes away?”
Then the party did it again.
People with democratic instincts would not have anointed Kamala Harris within hours of Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race. They would have used the opportunity to invite participation. They would have relished the prospect of an open convention, of engaging a brief but spirited debate over what America could look like.
But the Democratic Party seems far more interested in garnering money than the unvarnished views of its supporters—let alone the 40 or so percent of Americans who choose not to vote.
So a significant majority of Americans feels unheard, ignored, and disrespected by the political mainstream. And they have for at least thirty years. Though many Trump voters told pollsters the economy weighed in their choice, that answer may mask the underlying logic. In fact, the opposite may be true. As Masha Gessen explained on the excellent podcast On the Media Friday, Trump voters demonstrated that they cared so desperately about being heard that they were willing to sacrifice their economic interests to that overriding imperative. November 5 was a ballot box insurrection.
Paradigm shift.
In his seminal work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. the brilliant historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn lays out the concept of the “paradigm shift.” He describes the conditions that prevail within scientific communities when the set of ideas that had structured their whole way of thinking and all their activities starts to break down—when it no longer corresponds to observed reality. “At that point [they are] divided into competing camps or parties, one seeking to defend the old institutional constellation, the others seeking to institute some new one. And, once that polarization has occurred, political recourse fails.”
Notice Kuhn’s emphasis on the possibility of more than one competing alternative in the fray.
In 2016, two powerful potential new paradigms emerged on the political stage to contest the reigning (largely bipartisan) orthodoxy. The one on the right, for lack of a better word, was embodied by Trump. The one emerging on the left was embodied by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. It centered the economic and political disenfranchisement of American citizens, and championed the prospect of a more egalitarian disposition.
But the Democratic Party recoiled at the very prospect. Through belittlement and political maneuvers, it took that alternative paradigm—the one that truly reflected democratic values—off the table. Trump’s was the only option left. His is the one that has prevailed.
Calamities
Writing On Corruption in America, I discovered that the period from about 1870 through 1935, with its systemic corruption and robber barons stoking and benefiting from it, looked disturbingly like the period from about 1980 to the present. Wondering what had bumped the industrialized world out of that political economy back then, in hopes for lessons to apply to the present, I came to a sickening conclusion. Though public protests were far more courageous and sophisticated than today’s, the only thing that really brought that system down was massive, widespread, repeated calamity. Calamity on the order of two world wars, including two genocides, use of the nuclear bomb and mass starvation in Europe, plus a global pandemic and a devastating economic meltdown. Nothing short of upheavals on that scale, I began to fear, will knock us off the current trajectory.
Currents of history
Here’s another way of conveying this basic conclusion.
Realizing that every industrialized nation in that 19th-20th century period adopted some version of the same rigged economic and political system—regardless not just of political party in power, but political system— I was seized by the sense that history is fundamentally moved by some deep underground current. It reminded me of continental drift. In the face of all the furious activity taking place on the surface and all apparent logic, this current seems to be taking the world inexorably in the direction of kleptocratic authoritarianism.
That configuration is precisely what will bring mass calamities on—as it did last time around. This election was the starting gun.
For those of you reading this essay who voted for Trump, I believe you are in synch with this current. I believe you wanted calamity to befall the existing system, and in many ways, I don’t blame you. You may not, however, imagine the dimensions it can take.
Now what?
Some friends, in fear for their futures, have floated the prospect of leaving the country or moving to a Blue state. I urged at least some calm. With a few exceptions, I don’t think the new administration is coming for ordinary non-conformists who haven’t actively challenged its members—not yet.
They are coming for our government.
Again, I refer to the Masha Gessen interview. Based on recent experiences from Putin’s Russia and Orban’s Hungary, the first order of business will be to lay hands on all the institutions and procedures needed to ensure an indefinite grip on power. Don’t be lulled by the presumption that we are still in the sway of the familiar American pendulum-swing. For, it is far easier to use democratic institutions to install an autocracy than to use autocratic institutions to recover a democracy. This country may be in for several decades of what Trump and the political thinkers who are rallied around him have in store for us.
Opposition to that model of government, therefore, needs a very long game. It needs to focus on the underlying culture that animates our nation—in particular on challenging the primacy of money, perpetual growth, and the domination of one group or species within the natural order. It needs to patiently lay the groundwork for future action. Most crucially, however, it needs an alternative paradigm. It needs an infusion of imagination, to do better and more beautifully than the limping approximation of democracy that prevailed in 2015. We need to embrace the creative opportunity that lies curled tight like an oak-seed within this reversal.