Published: The Good Men Project (October 1, 2015)
While promoting The Hunger Games: Mockinjay – Part 2, Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth both expressed justifiable disdain at the prospect of Donald Trump winning next year’s presidential election. “If Donald Trump becomes president, that will be the end of the world,” the Academy Award-winning actress reportedly said. “I’ll back you up on that,” her co-star agreed.
Lawrence and Hemsworth aren’t alone in foreseeing apocalyptic (or at least dystopian) outcomes in the event of a Trump presidency. Conor Lynch of Salon wrote an op-ed in July arguing that Trump is a literal fascist, while Adam Tod Brown of the comedy website Cracked published a piece comparing Trump’s potential rise to that of Adolf Hitler himself. Perhaps the best explanation for why so many people are genuinely frightened by the Trump campaign can be found from Jeffrey A. Tucker’s editorial in Newsweek:
“What’s distinct about Trumpism, and the tradition of thought it represents, is that it is not leftist in its cultural and political outlook (see how he is praised for rejecting ‘political correctness’), and yet it is still totalitarian in the sense that it seeks total control of society and economy and demands no limits on state power.”
In other words, Trump is perceived as dangerous because he presents himself as a one-man government. If elected, he assures his supporters, America will be run under the same iron fist associated with Trump’s business empire. This is troubling enough in its own right, but it’s worsened when you consider that Trump has rooted his political appeal in racial divisiveness. Even his aborted stab at a presidential campaign four years ago focused on a racially tinged issue (the birther conspiracy theories); now Trump is at the front of the polls largely because of the popularity of his xenophobic and misogynistic rhetoric.
This brings us to the two problems with believing that Trump’s election would be, figuratively or literally, the “end of the world.”
1. It implicitly assumes that Trump is ushering in a new period of racially-charged politics rather than merely continuing one that preceded his rise.
Since I’ve already written about the vile nature of Trump’s racist and sexist comments, I won’t reiterate those observations here. That said, it’s important to remember that Trump is hardly the first presidential candidate to openly play on racist sentiments. Indeed, he isn’t even the first recent presidential candidate to do this. When Barry Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 – thereby transforming the GOP into the staunchly conservative party it’s known as today – he did so by explicitly playing on white backlash against the legislative successes of the civil rights movement. Less than two decades later, Ronald Reagan was elected thanks to a race-baiting strategy that one of his key operatives summed up as follows:
“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’ — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, ‘We want to cut taxes and we want to cut this,’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘Nigger, nigger.’ So anyway you look at it, race is coming on the back burner.”
Trump may be using different issues than Reagan – illegal immigration instead of welfare reform, diatribes against political correctness instead of opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment – but the thrust of his strategy is the same. Like Reagan, Trump is playing on covert racist and sexist sentiment among his predominantly white, male followers in the hope that he can ride that to the White House. This is certainly despicable, but hardly new to the American political scene.
2. It ignores the fact that presidential elections are based on appeals to personal charisma.
If there is one trait shared by both liberals and conservatives, it’s their tendency to support presidential candidates under the mistaken belief that they will be able to single-handedly fix America. South Park did a fantastic job of mocking this after Barack Obama was first elected in 2008, drawing attention to both the absurd hosannas of his followers and the equally ridiculous terror of his detractors. Although there is still a considerable amount of hyperbole attached to Obama’s presidency today, the reality is that most of our lives have not radically transformed since his inauguration; you can plausibly argue that his administration has made things better or worse, but the easiest way to peg yourself as an out-of-touch zealot is to claim that America has become either a veritable utopia or an unrecognizable dictatorship since he took power. In the end, Obama has proved himself to be a politician, just like his predecessors… and, it’s worth noting, virtually every one of those presidents was also accused of having authoritarian aspirations. If you’re under the age of 35, simply reflect on what was said about Bill Clinton and George W. Bush when they were in office.
Unfortunately, Americans tend to have short memories when it comes to our political history. As a result, it’s easy to not only forget that the same charges made against Trump have been made against countless politicians before him, but also that Americans expect their favored candidates to promise sweeping changes, just as they dread the possibility that their opponents might use the same hypothetical power for opposite ends. Even the candidates who promise to reduce the size of government are still implying that the president alone has sufficient power to slash-and-burn social, economic, and foreign policy programs that have been built up for decades and would likely require just as much time to dismantle. No side is truly innocent of playing to this assumption; Trump is merely distinguished, at present, for being particularly effective at it.
What can we conclude from all of this?
The point here is not that we shouldn’t be worried about Trump’s candidacy. By staking his claim to power on some of the basest bigotries that pervade our culture today, Trump’s campaign is a deeply disturbing phenomenon. At the very least, it reveals that America has a long way to go before it can consider itself free from the diseases of racial and gender-based prejudice; at worst, it indicates that, despite electing our first African-American president less than a decade ago, we are still capable of electing a president based primarily on his appeals to the oppressive hierarchies of the past.
All of this is true… and yet none of this makes Trump a fascist. That is the point.