"Trumpism" Doesn’t Exist, and Why It’s So Terrifying (Intro)
[THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN LONG BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION, AND YET IT'S MORE RELEVANT TODAY THAN WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN.]
What if we’re getting the whole Trump phenomenon wrong?
The narrative of “Trumpism” sure is tempting. It’s an easy out, blaming Donald Trump for all our current ills—political and social.
When he arrived on the scene, the world seemed to explode like an old alarm clock in a cartoon—its guts, gears, springs, and gizmos flying out in a fury, in all directions. In response, the easy narrative of “Trumpism” gripped the Left, much of the middle, and the never-Trump right, in the media and political commentariat.
But what if there’s an entirely different explanation for why his transgressive, destructive behavior gets more traction with conservative voters, rather than less; why his rise has been so hard to counter; and what’s to come next in America’s rightward lurch?
And most important, what if that explanation had almost nothing to do with Trump himself?
Could we still call it “Trumpism?” Or would we have to rethink our understanding of the current political moment, and adopt an entirely different approach to restoring the ethos—not to mention the governmental mechanics—of pluralism? Something the right seems hellbent on wrecking.
The media love to pin our national insanity on Trump, getting especially incensed at his “Big Lie” about a supposedly stolen election. But the GOP has always been fond of the “Big Lie.” It’s been a staple of their politicking for decades. Birtherism was a kind of “Big Lie,” as was the Swift Boat attack on John Kerry, as were the freak-outs over Sharia Law, CRT, and Obamacare’s supposed Death Panels, and decades of unending “Big Lies” about a supposed Homosexual Agenda.
Yet all this time, the biggest “Big Lie” of all—call it the original BIG “Big Lie”—has been sitting out in the open, used by the GOP to stoke a feeling of empowerment and passion among conservative voters.
The BIG “Big Lie” that they have been hammering on for years, until its drilled into their base like a catechism, goes something like this:
Un-American domestic enemies are everywhere and in control, and they are destroying the real America—excluded, marginalized, heroic conservatives must destroy their Liberal government tyranny to save and restore the nation.
Senator Warnock Called It Right
In his speech to the 2024 Democratic Nation Convention, Sen. Raphael Warnock made the most insightful and salient observation of this election season, perhaps of the last several decades. He said that behind Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election lurked a bigger and more insidious lie:
“It is the lie that this increasingly diverse American electorate does not get to determine the future of the country.”
He was calling out what the entire political and media class has been missing for years—they talk and write around it, but not directly about it. Sen. Warnock was referring to the BIG “Big Lie,” that only conservative represent the “real America” and they are in an existential fight against domestic enemies for the survival of the nation.
That storyline dates back at least seven decades, and its false hero mythology—now the foundational identity myth of the extreme conservative right—is the true source of America’s political dysfunction.
In fact, a better way to think about Trump (and by extension, “Trumpism” and the entire MAGA movement) is in climatological terms: a rogue storm in a warming world. Hurricanes get individual names, but each is only different in size and shape, not in kind.
Such is the case with Trump. The political climate has been warming owing to the growing power of the BIG “Big Lie,” and the seas of conservative extremism have been steadily rising for decades. Actually, the seas of global right-wing extremism have been rising on a tidal wave of heroic nationalism, and America is no exception.
We are living in a time of narrative drift, when old narratives about “truth, justice & the American Way” and the “real America” are in flux.
Old pluralistic narratives that defined our political norms for decades have given way to a new story:
It’s a new mythology birthed in the mid-twentieth century among outsider conservative activists, a new narrative that has altered our political landscape for generations to come.
It's easy to see why political news, especially its opinion wing, mostly forgoes coverage of political change climate in favor of covering the weather, i.e., storm coverage. The storm is the most tangible immediate thing we can talk about. There’s the immediate storm response. The mandate for repair and rebuilding. The new preparatory steps and preventative measures to be taken. It brings catastrophe down to a concrete and manageable scale.
But America’s political climate change—indeed much of the world’s political climate change toward authoritarian-leaning leaders—is really being driven by tectonic-scale myth making, of the heroic variety.
The American right, particularly through the Republican Party, has been rebranding itself for almost seven decades using a heroic, antagonistic story arc that calls on GOP voters to defeat political enemies and save the American way of life. You can see the same nationalistic, populist narratives in the rhetoric of India’s Mohdi, Brasil’s Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Orban, and many others.
This victim-hero narrative propels conservative politics; in America it binds GOP voters ever more tightly together as they face ever-greater challenges from a changing world; and the only way that they can see the story ending is with their triumph, which will restore America to its mythic conservative glory.
What follows is the story of that story… where it came from… how it motivates an anti-democratic GOP… and why it’s absolutely critical that we stop our obsession with a non-existent “Trumpism.”
Until we face the real problem—i.e., dismantling the BIG “Big Lie” at the heart of America’s autocratic drift—we will continue down the very, very dark road we’re currently on. As it stands today, it looks like America is beginning a rapid downhill run toward autocracy without a decent set of brakes.