Trump, Know-Nothings, and Resenting the Elites
Bret Stephens’ column today raises some interesting questions about how the next few months will play out politically and whether we can…
Bret Stephens’ column today raises some interesting questions about how the next few months will play out politically and whether we can rid ourselves of the tumor that is Donald Trump. Stephens is a conservative, anti-Trump columnist, a writer who exhibits all of the tendencies one usually finds among the conservatives chosen by The New York Times to be regulars on the op-ed page: He traffics in logical fallacies, cherry-picks data, and applies a veneer of political moderation and a faux professorial tone to make it all go down easily for Times readers, who tend to think of ourselves as just a little smarter and more sophisticated than the rabble.
This context is important to understand the argument Stephens is going to make, because it is the soil from which the Trump phenomenon has grown. Trump’s brand is built on resentment. Its target is, collectively, the people who read papers like the Times, the Washington Post, and magazines like The New Yorker. Its DNA is racist and messianic, nostalgic for an Ur time that has never really existed outside of the narratives we’ve crafted to prop up our sense of American exceptionalism. The strands that make up Trumpism are not new. We’ve seen them before in Nixon and Agnew, in Reagan and both Bushes, in Bill Clinton and George Wallace and others who found political success in American mythology and white backlash politics. But Trump represents a different, more virulent strain that has been strengthened by hero worship and cultish behavior. His supporters don’t speak of him as they speak of other politicians, but as if he is somehow above it all, better. He tells it like it is, they say, ignoring the voluminous lies and distortions. His enemies are their enemies, and even the small swath of Trump supporters who say they dislike him personally describe their backing in the same language he uses, somehow blaming liberals for the deep divisions that exist while proclaiming essentially that nothing is true and that all opinions are permitted. It is a cult of personality, as Jeff Sharlet made clear in Vanity Fair in June:
“To attend a Trump rally,” writes, “is to engage directly in the ecstasy of knowing what the great man knows, divinity disguised as earthly provocation.”
Cults grow from a sense of disaffection, a sense of disconnection. The believer is lost until he or she finds the cult leader, who understands the dislocation, who can explain it in ways that make sense to the believer, that play upon the believer’s resentments and fears, and who then offers a way out or back. Trump is no different. He takes the side of the order keepers and those who have benefitted from White Supremacy and economic division, and blames protesters, oppressed minorities, for the “American carnage” he sees, and for fallout caused by decades of neoliberal economic policies. He is not opposed to violence, nor are his supporters, unless the violence is perpetrated by those they view as lesser or apart. He explains the resentment in racialist terms, blaming Mexicans, immigrants, Muslim, socialists, African Americans, protesters, George Soros, China, bad trade deals, regulations, and a world-wide financial conspiracy. It’s an old script: Stoke the anger of those who see their America slipping away, play to the underlying racism of the nation, its deep tribal loyalties, and its desire to have someone defend it against the elites, someone who can rise up and save it.
The enemies are the usual suspects: the mainstream (allegedly liberal) press, activists, Democrats — and, most significantly, given the pandemic that has killed at least 170,000 Americans and cratered our economy, Science with a capital S.
This is the backdrop for Stephens’ column. Stephens, who like most Never Trump Republicans has not been immune from stoking cultural and economic anxiety in the past, reminds us in today’s column that the deep-seated distrust of elites is likely to be a potent tool used by Trump to pummel Joe Biden and Democrats, many of whom have made a dangerous mistake when it comes to the science of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Stephens makes the argument that a “powerful current of anxiety and resentment” exists out there in many swing districts, one “that Trump has positioned himself to exploit, and that — to judge by his shutdown remark — Biden doesn’t seem to grasp.” Stephens’ evidence is Biden’s comments about a potential shut down if scientists said it was necessary to prevent a second AP wave. Biden said he would follow their advice. Stephens’ reading of Biden was simple: He’s ceding his leadership to unelected officials — as good an example as one might find of Stephens’ use of logical fallacies (the “straw man,” in this case). Stephens is not completely off base, however. The great anxiety and resentment felt by Trump’s base, and many political fence-sitters is very real. As Stephens writes, many “feel talked down to by people whose own track record as experts leaves something to be desired.” What Stephens is describing is something that Chris Hayes pointed out in his book Twilight of the Elites, that trust in institutional elites, in experts and the meritocracy has waned.
This includes trust in basic science and scientific institutions, which sadly has been earned by the scientific community’s fealty to corporate capitalism — most evident in the opioid crisis — and its inability to explain its shifting recommendations on everything from whether we should eat carbohydrates or fats to things whether we should be wearing masks during this pandemic. We live in a world of anti-vaxxers and charlatans who are unashamed of using their platforms to pitch snake oil. In fact, we elected one as president and are paying dearly for it today.
The issue here is not the science, but its interpretation and use. When the FDA, a government agency that is supposed to rely on scientific research to protect Americans cedes its mission to corporate labs — as it does for so many pharmaceuticals — or cooks the data as it appears to have done on plasma treatment, it both plays into the conspiracy theorists and undercuts its authority with those who otherwise might be willing to listen to the experts. What we are witnessing, Stephens says, “is a failure by people who claim to speak, with unassailable authority, in the name of science.”
The last phrase — “the name of science” — is key, I think. It is not enough to claim fealty to science and assume it ends the argument, to proclaim ourselves right and virtuous because “the science” is on our side. This is not how the scientific method works. “Science’ is not about certainty; it is about raising questions and doubts, conducting research, answering questions, offering hypotheses, testing them, and repeating the process over and over and over. We were told masks were not useful, partly because what we knew at the time was limited to their effectiveness in protecting us from other viral strains, and because there was a fear that a run on masks would put emergency workers at risk. As more research was done, we learned that masks were effective, that COVID-19 was not like the viruses we’d dealt with before, and so the recommendations changed. This is a very rudimentary example of how science functions in the real world, though it is being used as political fodder in a cynical culture war pressed by Trump and his know-nothing minions.
Sadly, there is a surprisingly large cohort out there willing to enlist on the side of the know-nothings, and an also surprisingly large cohort of people who are unsure but who are suspicious of authority and elites, but who can be won over if their concerns are taken seriously. If we are to remove Trump from office — which is only step one — we have to find ways to talk to the unsure and suspicious (and those on the left who legitimately see the Democrats as part of the problem) and not just the Trump haters and Never Trumpers.
This is not a call for moderation or political centrism. On the contrary, it is a plea for Biden and the Democrats to move beyond “decency” as his primary electoral weapon and find ways to speak to the real anxiety that is out there. If they can’t, the law-and-order rhetoric, the racism that is both overt and under the surface, that is very much a motivating factor for most Trump supporters, will win out. Trump will win a second term and, if that happens, all bets are off.