This is the front window of a discount tourist shop down at the Jersey Shore. The shop sells T-shirts and tchotchkes at well-below-market prices, and the prices reflect the quality and the throwaway nature of much of its merchandize. For a long time, it served as a useful counter to its more expensive competitors, and many who made their way onto Long Beach Island left with $3 tank tops and $20 sweatshirts from its racks.
Buy my books.
The shop, however, also sells something else: a brand of politics that might seem an easy target for humor, one that feels cartoonish in its overt hate and its penchant for cruelty. This kind of politics wants to “own the libs.” It revels in violence and gun imagery and takes as its patron saint the 45th president of the United States. Donald Trump is its avatar, both the product of its rage and an emblem that allows its paranoid adherents to feel as though they are not alone. They fly Trump flags and erect massive Trump signs, as if he were a savior, a Mussolini-esque strongman who would return the nation to its former White glory. Yes, White glory, because — despite the existence of some people of color among Trump supporters — Trumpism is about race and ethnicity, about a mythical past that looks suspiciously like Leave It to Beaver and the Andy Griffith Show. A past that, for a good number of people, did not exist.
Trump, of course, is not Mussolini, nor are his supporters equivalent to the squadrismo or Blackshirts. But his Republican Party is actively seeking to undermine the increasingly rickety structures we have used to govern ourselves for two and a half centuries.
As David Leonhardt pointed out in The New York Times over the weekend, we are witnessing a collision of structural issues that date back to the founding and a new, more overt attack on majority politics, a collision that puts our democracy in peril.
The American system, as Leonhardt writes, has always contained these anti-majoritarian seeds — the founders were suspicious of what we now call populism, but which is better understood as popular passions. The created a government of shared power, with each having a check on the other, and, in a nod both to the slave states and smaller states, they gave the power to choose the president to the Electoral College and they created a Senate “where every state had an equal say, regardless of population” as a counterweight to a majoritarian House of Representatives.
Historically, he says, these features did not prevent the kind of compromises needed to allow the government to function and for the will of the majority to prevail. (This is an overstatement, given that we endured a civil war fought over slavery and our history is replete with moments in which the will and benefit of the majority were ignored.)
Today’s failures go well beyond the structural, however, and while Democrats have contributed the extreme damage has been instigated primarily by one political party. The Republicans for decades have been engaging in a politics of dehumanization and grievance, one in which anger easily slides into hate and hate turns to violence. During the 1960s, extreme factions of the anti-war movement turned to violence, but so did the state — the police riot outside the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the use of police against civil rights protesters, the assassinations of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr. We think of it as existing only at the margins, but that is reductive and creates a false reassurance. Grievance and conspiracy have been the engine of the conservative movement back to the Fifties. Goldwater bowed to it. Nixon used it. Reagan embodied it for much of his public life, and everything the Republican Party has done at least since the election of Bill Clinton was designed to get us to a moment in our political history in which our governmental structures are failing, a fringe minority can exert outsized power, and cruelty is the point.
Today, the growth of conservative media (Fox, Breitbart, One America), social media algorithms that encourage trolling, the worship of celebrity, and a general American distain for learning have brought us to a point at which we have a former president spouting QAnon conspiracies (https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-is-trump-openly-embracing-qanon-now) and actively working to undermine the democratic republic he was supposed to serve.
Sadly, Trump and his followers enjoy a symbiotic relationship, feeding off each other, one giving license to the other’s behavior and vice versa, sucking all of us down with them into the muck and mire.