Chapter 12

Hope

In the spring of 2017, I received an email from a reader of the Atlantic. It read, in relevant part:

I have made a point to make a concrete (if small) act of civic engagement every weekday. These acts have included contacting my school board regarding digital media literacy, calling my national and state legislators about important issues, and embarking on a program of self-education. I have read about the history, politics, and the philosophical ideals of our republic. To date I have read (albeit at a slow pace) Paine’s Common Sense, Slack’s Liberty’s First Crisis, and I am in the middle of reading John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty.” I would have taken none of those actions prior to this last election.

These are dark days for the United States, yet they are pierced by shafts of light. A new spirit of citizen responsibility is waking in the land. Americans are turning off cable networks that lie to them to consume instead more and better news.¹ Instead of theatrical street protests, concerned citizens have turned to productive political action: phone calls to congressional offices, registration to vote.

Most of this book has dealt with the harm done by the presidency of Donald Trump and by those who enabled it. Yet good can come of bad. From raging fires rise young forests. From former errors can be gained new wisdom. What can we gain from Trump? What unexpected gifts may yet be seized from this bad moment in American politics?

The first gift to gain from the Trump moment is the gift of wider vision.

Cynically yes, but effectively too, Donald Trump seized more accurately than any candidate in 2016 on issues neglected by more conventional politicians: the ravages of drug addiction, the costs of immigration, the cultural and economic decline of the industrial working class.

As America evolves toward a more unequal, more plutocratic society, its politicians—and certainly its federal politicians—inhabit the world of a remote upper class. Even when they start poor, as Bill Clinton did, they do not stay that way.

Despite his flamboyant claims to wealth, Donald Trump succeeded in speaking to and for huge sections of the American electorate that other politicians spoke only about. He identified forgotten and angry parts of America. His hurts, his grievances, his resentments, enabled him to channel theirs. It was fraud, but it was not all fraud.

The dangers posed by Trump exposed the dangers posed by his supporters. Working-class America has not seemed dangerous for a long time. But back when it did seem dangerous, that danger persuaded the privileged—or enough of them—that concessions must be made.

We urge control and supervision by the nation as an antidote to the movement for state socialism. Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism.²

So urged Theodore Roosevelt more than a century ago. His urgings would not become realities, however, until the Depression and the Cold War forced reforms to avert the menace of communism at home and overseas. It was in very large part fear of communism that induced businesses to provide pensions and health care benefits to employees . . . that inspired the federal government to invest in great public universities . . . and that compelled the United States to uproot racial segregation. President John F. Kennedy argued that case explicitly in a televised address in 1963: “Today, we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only.”³

Fears of revolutionary socialism have faded. For more than a quarter century, we have lived in a world where economic and cultural elites have felt secure from challenge as seldom before. Unsurprisingly, those elites have over that same time become far less inclined to share their prosperity with the rest of their society. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will,” as Frederick Douglass famously said. Along with all his boasting and bullying, his crassness and cruelty, his ignorance and his indolence, his tantrums and his treasons, Donald Trump also carried with him the text of a demand that—this time—could not be shrugged off by society’s leaders and owners.

A second gift from Trump’s inadvertent hand is the rediscovery of the preciousness of truth. “Post-truth is pre-fascism,” wrote Yale historian Timothy Snyder in a viral Facebook post just days after Donald Trump won a majority in the Electoral College, “and to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”⁴ Profound words, and true. But it was not only Donald Trump who had left truth behind, who scorned the very concept of truth. Trump entered a culture prepared for him; he filled a cavity excavated by the work of thousands of toiling academics and intellectuals. An example of their handiwork:

The idea that there is a single truth–“the Truth”–is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment, which was a movement that also described Black and Brown people as both subhuman and impervious to pain. This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.⁵

That is an extract from an open letter drafted by students at Pomona College to justify the use of force and threat of violence to prevent a campus talk by a scholar they disliked. The most radical thing about that statement was precisely how conventional its contents were.

When the phrase “post-truth” began to circulate in the 1980s, it originated as something close to a compliment. The idea that things were “true” or “false” was outmoded, even reactionary! Michel Foucault and other advanced thinkers had shown that liberation would follow only once we accepted that “truth” served merely as a euphemism for self-serving ideologies devised by holders of power.⁶ All we can know for certain, insisted this glamorous new system of thought, are “narratives”: yours, mine—and no way of judging between them, except on the basis of race/class/gender.

But if there is no truth, there can be no lying. And suddenly Americans are appreciating that “lying” is a concept very badly needed by democratic politics. Americans are discovering that it’s important also to distinguish between the normal tools of the politician’s trade—evasion, equivocation, the timely change of subject—and the inversion of reality that is routinely heard from Donald Trump.

A leader who lies constantly can distort a nation’s perception of reality. “You are annihilated, exhausted, you can’t control yourself or remember what you said two minutes before. You feel that all is lost,” as one man who had been subject to Mao Zedong’s “reeducation” campaign in China put it to the psychiatrist Robert Lifton. “You accept anything he says.”⁷

Trump’s incessant lying has indeed warped the minds of his core supporters. As noted earlier, more than half of Republicans have accepted Trump’s false claim to have won the popular vote;⁸ only 9 percent of Republicans acknowledge that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.⁹

Yet 60 percent of Americans—and the number is steadily rising—reject Trump’s lies about his connections to Russia.¹⁰ Even as Trump marches his ever-dwindling band of supporters toward ever more threadbare untruths, a growing majority of Americans crave truth, seek truth, and vindicate truth. They cherish truth as something real in itself, not a construct of power, not a “narrative” that varies according to the hyphens in one’s personal identity. “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.” So said the great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz in his 1980 Nobel Prize lecture.¹¹ Long before Trump and his deceitful crew appeared on the scene, a conspiracy against the ideal of truth had gained the upper hand among those entrusted with the education of the young and the sustaining of high culture. If revulsion against Trump’s lies should at last discredit and overthrow that conspiracy, what a fine second gift that would be.

A nation that teaches its children to abhor bullying discovered it had installed the noisiest bully in the country in the highest office in the land. Trump surrounded himself with a staff cringing and obsequious to him—and overbearing toward everybody else. As the country got to know this gang, Americans unwrapped a third gift of Trump: a renewal of their disgust for those who join power to cruelty.

On the morning of July 26, 2017, President Trump awoke to uncongenial news. The FBI had raided the Virginia home of Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort. Trump reacted to this indignity as bullies typically do: by lashing out at someone more vulnerable. At 8:56 a.m., the president tweeted this attention-grabbing message: “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow . . .” He paused there for eight minutes, leaving the world to wonder what might follow such a dramatic opening. At 9:04, he posted part two: “. . . Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming . . .” etc.

Americans quickly learned that, as usual, the president was speaking impulsively. There had been no consultation; in fact, the military was taken completely by surprise. The last-minute Obama policy opening the military to transgender soldiers had been postponed by the incoming administration in January; there was no particular reason to take any action at all on July 26. One aide suggested the motive was political. “This forces Democrats in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin to take complete ownership of this issue,” the aide said to Jonathan Swan of Axios. But that was transparently an after-the-fact rationalization rather than an actual motive. The move was not cleared in advance with Republican members in Congress, a number of whom quickly opposed it, so Democrats were not forced to “take complete ownership.” The most plausible explanation of events was that Trump tweeted simply to enjoy the momentary pleasure of power over others, without any plan or even intention to translate his imperious words into policy.

But here’s the gift: Americans almost instantly recognized Trump’s cynical bullying for what it was—and overwhelmingly condemned it. A week after Trump’s order, polls found that 68 percent of Americans supported open service by transgender military personnel; only 27 percent agreed with the president’s ban.¹² What’s remarkable about this turn is that Americans by large majorities reject the main claim that transgender people make about themselves, that they authentically belong to a sex different from that into which they were born at birth.¹³ Once Donald Trump started tweeting, those prior positions ceased to matter. Whatever their other opinions, if any, about what it meant to call oneself transgender, a large majority of Americans agreed that it should not mean a kicking from a holder of power to salve his hurt ego.

“Americans hate a bully.” We tell ourselves this, but in 2015 and 2016 we had reason to doubt the self-assurance. For eighteen months on the campaign trail, Trump modeled behaviors that would seem in any other context about as repugnant as could be—and yet despite it all he was ushered to the most honored place in American society. From that place, however, he has jolted Americans to recover their best character. Americans do hate a bully.

In the early shock of the Trump presidency, some bookish people circulated a vision of the future published by the philosopher Richard Rorty in 1998.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . .

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion.¹⁴

Chilling! Only . . . this is precisely what did not happen. Gains were not wiped out. Contempt did not return to fashion. To the contrary, it’s remarkable how the ascendancy of Trump coincided with the wreck of the careers of America’s most notorious and flagrant abusers of women: Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein, and their lesser emulators.

“The president’s primary problem as a leader,” Peggy Noonan stingingly remarked,

is not that he is impetuous, brash or naive. It’s not that he is inexperienced, crude, an outsider. It is that he is weak and sniveling. It is that he undermines himself almost daily by ignoring traditional norms and forms of American masculinity. He’s not strong and self-controlled, not cool and tough, not low-key and determined; he’s whiny, weepy and self-pitying. He throws himself, sobbing, on the body politic. He’s a drama queen.¹⁵

Trump reminded Americans of the old schoolyard lesson: the bully is a coward. Another gift.

Trump has recalled Americans of the Left to an appreciation of the vital role of national security agencies. It seems an eon ago that Edward Snowden was hailed as a hero. The outcome of the 2016 election reminded Americans of the Left that in this age of asymmetric warfare, national security threats often take covert and clandestine forms, and so therefore must national defense. The integrity of American voting systems is an even more vital part of the nation’s indispensable national infrastructure than power grids or gas pipelines. Since 9/11, the nation has spent tens of billions to harden those—while leaving exposed to subversion and corruption the master system that governs them all.

One hears as well justified self-criticism from veterans of the Obama team. “I feel like we sort of choked,” the Washington Post quoted a former senior official involved in the Obama administration’s deliberations on Russia. “It is the hardest thing about my entire time in government to defend.”¹⁶ The Obama administration can cite explanations, including the resistance of the Republican congressional leadership, and the even more aggressive defiance of Republican state party leaders. Like many of us, they underestimated Trump’s political chances. Why risk a political convulsion to protect the country against a sure loser? But there are no “sure losers” in presidential politics, only probable losers—and the improbable sometimes happens.

In 2012, President Obama and many Democrats mocked Mitt Romney for sounding a prescient alarm about Russian aggression under Vladimir Putin. “The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back,” Obama chided in the presidential candidates’ foreign policy debate. But Romney was right and Obama wrong, as many in Obama’s own party now concede.¹⁷ Left-of-center Americans have now also awoken to the havoc Vladimir Putin is wreaking on the international system and the danger he poses to their country and its democratic institutions. A harder, tougher, and less illusioned American Left: a strange gift from Donald Trump, but real.

Gifts have arrived too for the political Right. The Republican Party had dead-ended itself in the Obama years, which is precisely why it lay vulnerable to a manifest charlatan like Donald Trump. Many—perhaps most—conservatives will follow Trump down the MAGA path to whichever doom it leads. But the principled and creative have resisted—and after many years of frozen orthodoxy, now at last an opportunity for reform and renewal may open.

For conservatives, recovery from Trump will not be a fast or easy process. The Trump experience will likely bequeath a severely damaged Republican Party. At the Cleveland convention in June 2016, I struck up a conversation with a delegate wearing a queasy expression on his face. He ran a trade association in a purple state, had been a Romney supporter in 2012, had voted anybody-but-Trump in his state’s primary in 2016.

“So what will you do now?”

“I suppose I’ll have to vote for him: he’s the nominee.”

“And your wife?”

“Oh no, she won’t.”

“Your kids?”

“They’ve re-registered as Democrats.”

Trump has repelled a generation of young people from conservatism and Republicanism. He has imprinted upon his party his own prejudices, corruption, and ignorance. Republican candidates will pay a price for that legacy for years and decades ahead. But if nothing else, there is no denying now the outdatedness of the dogmas that gripped the Republican Party over the past decade. The old ways have conclusively failed, been repudiated even by their own previous supporters. New answers must be devised, and may finally gain a hearing. Some fantasize that the two-party system is to blame for the ills of US politics, that the answer is for moderates and independents to join together for a sensible politics of the center. Trump demonstrated that the independents are not moderates, and that the center is not always so sensible. What’s most needed is not to insert moderation in some no-man’s-land between the parties, but to restore moderation to the parties, and especially to the self-radicalized Republican Party. It may seem a long shot, but, to borrow a line from the movie Argo, “this is the best bad plan we have.”

Sullied as it is by Trump, the Republican Party will outlast him. It must be redeemed and repurposed. If and as conservatives accept that reality, they can again offer useful public service, after the bitter waste that was Trumpocracy.

Trump has given gifts to the world outside the United States as well.

Donald Trump entered electoral politics in 2015 as just one among the many authoritarian populists bidding for power in the aftermath of the global economic crisis. There seemed to be fellow Trumps on the march everywhere across the Western developed world. That march has not halted. Marine Le Pen lost the French presidency in 2017, but with double the share of the vote received by her father in 2002. The German center held, but the parties of the extremes are rising as social democracy fades. From England to Austria to Catalonia, nationalism and statism are rising. Yet Trump has at least checked the forward momentum of Europe’s nationalist authoritarians. His behaviors have brought enough discredit upon his style of politics to buy time for conservative liberals and liberal conservatives to regroup, rethink, renew, and revive.

“Have you ever considered that the purpose of your life may be to serve as a warning to others?” That sardonic message appears on a poster satirizing the inspirational messages offered by coaches and guidance counselors. The Trump administration may exist to fulfill just such a destiny: to remind other peoples in other countries that while constitutional government may sometimes look like an endless and pointless squabble, the promises of superior results from supposed strongmen are always self-serving lies. The American president who most despised European democracy may end by perversely and unintentionally preserving and enhancing it. You’re welcome.

But of all the gifts of Trump, the best is that which heads this chapter: the surge in civic spirit that has moved Americans since the ominous night of November 8, 2016. It is as if millions of people awoke the next morning to the realization, “I must become a better citizen.”

I’ve quoted many surveys and polls in this book, but here is the one that alarmed me the most when it was published and alarms me the most still. It is a cross-national study conducted by Roberto Foa and Yascha Mounk, and published in the Journal of Democracy in July 2016.

Citizens in a number of supposedly consolidated democracies in North America and Western Europe have not only grown more critical of their political leaders. Rather, they have also become more cynical about the value of democracy as a political system, less hopeful that anything they do might influence public policy, and more willing to express support for authoritarian alternatives. The crisis of democratic legitimacy extends across a much wider set of indicators than previously appreciated.

How much importance do citizens of developed countries ascribe to living in a democracy? Among older generations, the devotion to democracy is about as fervent and widespread as one might expect: In the United States, for example, people born during the interwar period consider democratic governance an almost sacred value. When asked to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how “essential” it is for them “to live in a democracy,” 72 percent of those born before World War II check “10,” the highest value. So do 55 percent of the same cohort in the Netherlands. But . . . the millennial generation (those born since 1980) has grown much more indifferent. Only one in three Dutch millennials accords maximal importance to living in a democracy; in the United States, that number is slightly lower, around 30 percent.¹⁸

The new disenchantment with democracy is most often expressed by the more affluent. About one-third of Americans in the top three income deciles said it would be “good” or “very good” to be governed by a “strong leader” who “doesn’t have to bother with elections.” The younger the age cohort, Foa and Mounk observe, the wider this “democracy gap” between the more and less affluent.

It should be stressed that the democratic fade-out is not exclusively a right-of-center phenomenon. A 2015 Pew survey of attitudes toward free speech found that Democrats were twice as likely as Republicans to agree that the government should have the power to suppress speech offensive to minority groups: 35 percent to 18 percent.¹⁹ These repressive attitudes also prevailed most strongly among the young: 40 percent of millennials would empower the state to suppress speech offensive to minority groups, as opposed to 25 percent of the middle aged, and only 12 percent of those born before World War II.

Belief in democracy waxes and wanes. Alexander Keyssar’s history of American voting rights quotes an unsigned contribution to the Atlantic Monthly in 1879:

Thirty or forty years ago it was considered the rankest heresy to doubt that a government based on universal suffrage was the wisest and best that could be devised. . . . Such is not now the case. Expressions of doubt and distrust in regard to universal suffrage are heard constantly in conversation, and in all parts of the country.²⁰

Such doubts would shadow Americans for half a century, until the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s confronted them with the real-world alternative to democracy: not the patrician elitism of the superior magazines, but the violent brutalities of fascism, communism, and Nazism. The Americans who absorbed that lesson, often in blood and suffering and grief, held it fast through their lives.

But Nazism is now only an epithet and communism not even that. Liberal democracy imposes limits and requires compromises. To people raised in wealthy societies, accustomed to having their wishes not only exactly met but delivered to their door, liberal democracy must seem grudging and unsatisfactory. You don’t get exactly what you want! You often must settle for something you dislike, in order to avert something you would dislike more.

It seems unromantic—until you encounter the alternative. “Unhappy is the land that breeds no heroes,” remarks a character in Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo. “No,” replies the title character. “Unhappy is the land that needs heroes.” If you seek revolution, go seek it in business, in technology, in the arts. The steadiness and predictability of well-functioning liberal democracy enables innovation in every other area of life.

The candidate who won the most support from young voters in 2016, Bernie Sanders, noisily promised to upend that status quo:

With your support and the support of millions of people throughout this country, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially, and environmentally.²¹

Sanders promised a politics of ever-accelerating change, of boundless goals, a politics that offered answers to the existential questions. In a constitutional democracy, these questions should fall to each of us to resolve individually, outside of politics, not collectively and by means of politics. People who have never suffered the tyranny and terror of utopian politics may hearken to radical and revolutionary slogans. We see them in black masks, professing to be “antifascist” even as they emulate the street violence of Blackshirts and Brownshirts against the targets of their own totalitarian ideology. The Trump presidency may administer a much-needed booster shot to enhance the anti-authoritarian immunities of a younger generation apparently lacking in them.

Democratic Party gains in 2018 would surely do something to check President Trump. Merely partisan fluctuations will not, however, suffice to restore American institutions or halt the drift away from rule-of-law democracy. To achieve those ends, we must aspire to a deeper citizenship and wider loyalties. A few days before the 2016 election, I posted an essay at the Atlantic to explain my intention to do something I once never could have imagined: cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton for president. Except I was not voting for her. I was voting for the American system. I was voting for the rules, the norms, the Constitution that I expected her to respect even as she implemented policies with which I disagreed—unlike Donald Trump, who would subvert those standards even in those cases where he did things I might approve. I wrote then:

I will vote for the candidate who rejects my preferences and offends my opinions. (In fact, I already have voted for her.) Previous generations accepted infinitely heavier sacrifices and more dangerous duties to defend democracy. I’ll miss the tax cut I’d get from united Republican government. But there will be other elections, other chances to vote for what I regard as more sensible policies. My party will recover to counter her agenda in Congress, moderate her nominations to the courts, and defeat her bid for re-election in 2020. I look forward to supporting Republican recovery and renewal.

This November, however, I am voting not to advance my wish-list on taxes, entitlements, regulation, and judicial appointments. I am voting to defend Americans’ profoundest shared commitment: a commitment to norms and rules that today protect my rights under a president I don’t favor, and that will tomorrow do the same service for you.²²

And now over to you, reader. I have written much about the corruption the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump have wrought on Americans as a people. Resistance begins by refusing to let him corrupt you personally. At the 2017 Politicon conference in Pasadena, California, I was accosted by an attendee who objected to my comments in a panel discussion. My interlocutor said something like, We can’t stop Donald Trump by going soft. If we want to stop him, we have to imitate him. I answered, “But if you imitate him, you won’t stop him. You’ll only replace him.”

As President Trump is cruel, vengeful, egoistic, ignorant, lazy, avaricious, and treacherous, so we must be kind, forgiving, responsible, informed, hardworking, generous, and patriotic. As Trump’s enablers are careless, cynical, shortsighted, morally obtuse, and rancorous, so Trump’s opponents must be thoughtful, idealistic, wise, morally sensitive, and conciliatory. “They go low, we go high,” a wise woman said.

Those citizens who fantasize about defying tyranny from within fortified compounds have never understood how liberty is actually threatened in a modern bureaucratic state: not by diktat and violence, but by the slow, demoralizing process of corruption and deceit. And the way that liberty must be defended is not with amateur firearms, but with an unwearying insistence on the honesty, integrity, and professionalism of American institutions and those who lead them. We are living through the most dangerous challenge to the free government of the United States that anyone alive has encountered. What happens next is up to you. Don’t be afraid. This moment of danger can also be your finest hour as a citizen and an American.

Acknowledgments

The first word must go to my brilliant and generous-spirited colleagues at the Atlantic, and especially to Yoni Appelbaum, David Bradley, Jeffrey Goldberg, Don Peck, and Scott Stossell. It was in the Atlantic’s pages and on its site that the ideas developed here were first advanced—and by the rigorous editing of Yoni and Don that those ideas were challenged and sharpened. Parts of this book have previously appeared in the Atlantic, and in those cases, they are reproduced here with permission.

I offer my deep gratitude to those who read and commented on earlier versions of this book, especially Senator Linda Frum and Noah Kristula-Green. Thanks to my volunteer proofreaders, Tom Dolan and Yvonne Worthington. I am grateful especially to Windsor Mann, who meticulously fact-checked, corrected, and brought order to my footnotes.

Thanks to my editor at HarperCollins, Eric Nelson, and to my agent at WME, Jay Mandel. They dragged this book into being when I nervously wondered whether—given the pace of events of 2015–2017—it might not be wiser to comment on events via Twitter and Snapchat rather than irreversible print. Thanks, too, to Eric Meyers and the superb production team at HarperCollins.

As with so many of its fellows, this book of mine was very largely written on the shores of Lake Ontario, on land formerly belonging to my in-laws Peter and Yvonne Worthington, now passed to my wife, Danielle, and me. Almost every day in our little village of Wellington and the nearby towns of Hillier, Bloomfield, or Picton, somebody offered a word of interest and encouragement in my work. These casual encounters brightened many days when I was depressed by the grim topics dealt with here. I extend a very personal thank-you to my neighbors and friends of Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Not only I, but everyone who cares about American democracy, owe a vast moral debt to my colleagues across the vast array of titles and platforms we call the American media. No single person could possibly plumb the foulnesses of the Trump presidency. I have gratefully relied on the discoveries and analyses of others. I have done my best to give credit not only in footnotes but in the text of this book to the people who have made of the Trump years—if nothing else—a golden age of courageous and honest reporting.

Ever and always, closest and dearest, my wife, Danielle Crittenden Frum, brought to these pages her keen editorial eye, her clear memory for detail, her biting sense of absurdity, and her noble heart that detests a bully and hates a lie. This is the ninth book through which she has helped me. All are finer and wiser for her guidance—as is their author.