Democrats are engaged in a dangerous gambit. nnUnified on the basic goal for 2020 of removing Donald Trump from the presidency, their efforts are hampered ultimately by their depiction of Trump as an all-obscuring bogeyman, as the disease itself, as the infection that must be neutralized for the nation to return back to normal.
This is a miscalculation, ignoring several realities that have come to consume our politics. Excising Trump, as a short-term goal, is absolutely necessary. But he is not the disease; he is a symptom of the rot that is hollowing out our core. Framing this election solely as a referendum on Trump and Trumpism ignores these realities and democratic failures that led to his election in the first place.
Much ink has been spilled to explain how this fake-tanned grandee managed to parlay his dubious fame into four years in the White House, so I won’t rehash it. Suffice to say a variety of factors — from racial animus and class resentment that played out as pure racism, to Republican efforts to suppress black and Latinx votes, to the flawed campaign and exceptional amount of baggage carried by Hillary Clinton — contributed to the 2016 outcome.
What has not been discussed nearly enough, however, is how the Reagan-Clinton-Bush years damaged what little faith Americans retained in Washington at the same time that an aging white majority began to see itself as the victims of change, causing them to seek out a dangerous strain of political nostalgia and making them vulnerable to Trump’s sales pitch: a promised return to a mythical past.
Make America Great Again is a slogan designed to fan the flames of white resentment. Trump, like Reagan before him, pointed to a supposed past greatness and a narrow vision of American exceptionalism that hinges on reifying the shrinking white majority. It’s a kind of magical thinking that the philosopher Jason Stanley outlines in his book How Fascism Works.
“The goal is to make (the majority group) feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation,” he told Vox in December.
For Trump, the enemy is both the immigrant and the Muslim, especially those who are black and brown. It’s also socialists, Democrats, women, and the press. The enemy, ultimately, is truth — and, with the help of Fox News and an aggressive right-wing media apparatus, Trump has been able to transform this yearning for an imaginary past and this scapegoating into a mythology that turns his supporters into true believers.
As Stanley pointed out in his Vox interview, “fascist politics” is designed to “get people to disassociate from reality.”
“You get them to sign on to this fantasy version of reality, usually a nationalist narrative about the decline of the country and the need for a strong leader to return it to greatness, and from then on their anchor isn’t the world around them — it’s the leader,” he said.
I don’t know that we can go so far to call Trump a fascist, but he does appear to be part of a larger right-wing movement with fascist tendencies. And Democrats are right to make his removal the chief goal of their campaign.
And yet, the Democrats are engaging in their own brand of magical thinking, in their own efforts at mythology. We can see it most clearly in the support for former Vice President Joe Biden and the particular message of his campaign.
Biden offers Democrats their own kind of MAGA, one that sets Jan. 20, 2017, as a hard line separating an Edenic Democratic past from a contemporary period of utter catastrophe. This ignores the reality of the Obama years, which included a record number of deportations, political gridlock, an expanded use of drones throughout South Asia, and a rise in right-wing terror that has only gotten worse under Trump.
Some of this was a result of Obama’s policies, though much of it came as a reaction to Obama himself — to his race, and to the refusal by many on the right to accept that someone that looked like Obama not only could be president, but that he could be a citizen at all.
While Obama was a fairly mainstream politician, his campaign plugged in to an aspirational streak in our politics that coincided with a deep desire to move on from the failures of the Bush years and the failures of the elites. Obama was a fresh face, young, had been against the Iraq War and appeared not to be a creature of Washington. In some ways, he was the reverse image of Trump.
And he remains beloved among Democrats — deservedly, I’d say, even if I disagreed with many of the things he did — and represents something they have lost. Biden is running on this backward-looking attitude, one that has glossed the lens and relies on its own kind of magical thinking.
The reality, though, is we can’t go back to Obama. We can’t go back to the past at all and, while we have to get Trump out of office, we also need to understand what led to his election. We need to answer the calls for major reform and systemic change, particularly as it relates to an economy that has left too many behind.
Hank Kalet is a journalist and poet in New Jersey. Email hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter @kaletjournalism; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; support his work at Patreon.com/Newspoet41.
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2019
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