At yesterday's press briefing on the Covid-19 vaccine, Donald Trump made comments that revealed core tenets of his political program rarely so transparently on display:
“Whether it’s a legislator or legislatures, or whether it’s a justice of the Supreme Court or a number of justices of the Supreme Court -- let’s see if they have the courage to do what everybody in this country knows is right.”
Gone was any pretense that the vote tally itself must be corrected or that legalities must be observed. Trump is now openly inviting organs of government to exercise fiat powers in overturning the election and maintaining him in power. Nothing about this is extremely shocking or new in the context of Trump's record.
But the assertion that "everybody in this country knows [it] is right" to set aside the election lets slip a core tenet of Trumpism. Trump's message is not that the will of the people should be ignored. It is that half of Americans are not people at all, and thus may be generally discounted in all respects.
Any protest that this is an "unfair reading" of Trump's words is tiresome. The implicit dismissal of tens of millions of people who celebrated the news of Joe Biden's election as "nobody" aligns perfectly with the policy and messaging of the Trump White House since day one. Stranding refugees in airports. Ripping children from parents. Dismissing the sick and dying in "Democrat-run" cities and states. If Trumpism is about anything, it is dedicated to the proposition that certain individuals are entitled to the dignity and rights of "people," others are not.
This is fascism in a nutshell. "Sovereignty" is not equally distributed throughout the human community, but resides only in those who meet some test of national "purity." Liberal institutions like universal suffrage, birthright citizenship, or equal justice under law may be jettisoned because they allow the nation to be polluted by "the wrong sort."
The most distressing aspect of our Trumpist moment is the degree to which the fascist dimensions of his message are self-consciously embraced by many millions of his followers. Trump has been very clear about his contempt for the principles of democracy and his malicious hostility toward the majority of Americans who oppose him. Many of his voters (one third? half?) understood full well that in voting for Trump, they were endorsing his promise to continue his assault on "them (people of color, immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, 'liberal elites,' etc.)" and in doing so to game the system to the point of breaking. A vote for Trump was a vote for fascist oligarchy, and many voters got on board that train with eyes wide open.
Why are so many Americans ready to trade democracy for fascism? Some part of Trump's base have become radically disenchanted with the prevailing system through economic despair. Communities in Appalachia and the industrial Midwest that suffered disproportionately through the Great Recession and saw meager benefits during a slow recovery, where life expectancy rates dropped and opioid addiction was on the rise, have provided fertile ground for Trump's message. Many of these individuals had never voted before signing up with Trump, and since they felt poorly served by democracy they were ready for whatever Trump offered as an alternative.
But though that segment of Trump's base has garnered much attention (exemplified by the popularity of books like Hillbilly Elegy), it has always constituted a small minority within his larger coalition. About half of Trump's support comes from the religious far right, which would like to see the constitution abrogated in favor of a political order rooted in perceived biblical imperatives. This would begin with bans on abortion, contraception, and same sex marriage, but might extend into realms like prayer in school and legal sanctions against certain forms of religious practice (for example, that of Islam).
Trump's secular support derives largely from voters motivated by race to one degree or another, ranging from those who respond to dog whistles about "anchor babies" and "welfare queens" up to militant white supremacists. Across the spectrum of these groups, panic over changing demography (exacerbated by the two-term presidency of Barack Obama) has galvanized support for the disenfranchisement of large segments of the population. The other important secular component of Trump's coalition could be described as "corporatist plutocrats": wealthy members of the donor class who would like to see minority rule institutionalized by way of solidifying the position of the .01%.
Though these groups are all very different in nature and motivation, Trump has enjoyed a powerful mystique in their eyes because he perfectly epitomizes their common orientation. The thread that binds these communities together is grievance: all of them are impelled by a passionate anger at the status quo. Trump's voters are thus enchanted by the sheer dynamism and profound authenticity of his own sense of grievance. For almost five decades his defining posture as a public figure has been to broadcast how poorly he is appreciated by the world at large, and how much better things would be if he were taken more seriously.
Since Trump himself is not an ideologue and has shown no patience for the genuine work of political organization, the Trumpist movement has emerged from the interaction of his supporters' inchoate passions and aspirations with Trump's own idiosyncratic style of leadership. His followers supplied the targets (Muslims, "Mexican rapists," Hillary Clinton, AOC, etc.), he supplied a frenetic style of "theater only" reality-TV politics. It has been a kind of fascism through spontaneous generation.
However haphazardly it emerged, now that Trumpist fascism is here, it is likely to stay. Will the forces that produced Trump grind on inexorably toward the dissolution of the American experiment in democracy? This last question is impossible to answer with any blithe confidence. Tens of millions voted to end our democracy, one cannot assume that they will relinquish that aspiration easily.
Will they continue to follow Donald Trump? That is not likely. The success that he enjoyed as a candidate is not going to be easily replicated. He is, at basis, a man of very limited talents and almost no imagination. His mystique is rooted in his ability to entertain, but his repetitive and predictably vulgar belligerence has only failed to grow insufferably dull because of his status as President (the Chief Executive really tweeted THAT!). Stripped of the office, he will quickly become boring and pathetic.
Other politicians will try to claim his mantle and stitch his coalition back together. This will not be easy. Few public figures can replicate Trump's assets: massive wealth, an aggrieved sense of exclusion from "elite society," and a made-for-TV persona. The figures bandied about as Trump's heirs (Tucker Carlson, for example) are pale imitations at best. Moreover, even someone with assets approaching Trump's will find his coalition difficult to reassemble. Trump's religious and secular supporters may have traveled as far down the same road as they are likely to go. Though they agree on how wise it was to appoint so many conservative judges, now that the task is accomplished they may fall out over questions such as whether condoms should be outlawed.
But none of these contingencies can be relied on to safeguard democracy. Now that the fascist genie has been let out of the bottle, this trend is likely to shape our politics for decades to come. Much will depend on external conditions. If the economy improves and an ecological crisis can be averted, the passions fueling an appetite for fascism may cool. If the future sees growing wealth inequality, deepening and expanding economic despair, and ecological degradation, a more competent demagogue may succeed where Trump failed.
All of this should serve as a call to action, not malaise. We do not have to sit by and fret as democracy crumbles. Ben Franklin famously warned us that we will have our Republic as long as we can keep it, and we know what we must do to achieve that. We must engage as citizens to make government work again, so that the endemic problems which are causing disenchantment and grievance are redressed. We must hold our leaders accountable to a more conscientious and less debased form of politics, not an insipid call to "civility," but to genuine civic virtue. We must demand that all our leaders, of all parties, respect the dignity and rights of all Americans. We do not have to agree with or fully cooperate with one-another, but we do have to respect one-another as fellow citizens and share power with one-another in accordance with the founding principles of our Constitution. If we can breath new life and vitality into these norms, fascism may not go away entirely, but it will stand no chance of prevailing.
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