"Trumpism" Doesn’t Exist, and Why It’s So Terrifying (Conclusion)
[THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN LONG BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION, AND YET IT'S MORE RELEVANT TODAY THAN WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN.]
“Trumpism” Doesn’t Exist and Yet We’re In a Truly Terrifying Autocratic Place — Will it ever end? Maybe decades from now.
“Trumpism” as a narrative is a dangerous folly.
There surely is a terrifying constellation of political and social dysfunction on the right, one that threatens pluralistic democracy in a way that left-wing dysfunction currently does not. But its creation and march to the center of American conservatism had nothing to do with Trump.
Its roots go back 70 years to a time when outsider extremists reset the conservative identity narrative, when one’s…
“… entrance into the conservative franchise was conditioned on one’s status as a victimized individual… For conservatives [today], negotiation and compromise with the political system as they imagine it threaten both the capacities of the subject and life itself.”[i]
We now face a zero-sum confrontation based on the specious claims that the “real America” is a unipolar conservative Christian nation, rather than a multipolar pluralistic one, and that heroic conservatives must, at all costs, restore America to its original conservative identity.
We all live in that binary now—heroes saving America versus enemies trying to destroy it—because conservatives have spent seven decades making it so. In their framing, either born-again conservative heroes will claim victory over us, or we will assert a multi-polar, pluralistic, consensus tyranny over them.
Any honest assessment tells us: there’s no support the idea that the story arc of the BIG “Big Lie” has run its course. It’s still gaining steam.
The fringy types who most fervently believe it now occupy the core of the Republican Party. They are the Party’s new Establishment.
There is no change of heart coming; one can be certain of that, especially not as religiosity tightens its grip both on the GOP’s base and its messaging and infrastructure. To born-again conservatives—as Reicher and Haslam tell us—the BIG “Big Lie” and its vast life-support system of smaller lies, are a totally coherent, elegant declaration of truth:
“Everything coheres. Everything [about Trump] that was used as evidence of pathology – from the rough language and baying at foes to the devotion and reverence for one who violates all the rules of politics – makes sense within the terms of this vision.
It is a vision realized in its very telling. It is an enactment of Trump’s new America. It is not only a politics of hope but the lived experience of all that is hoped for.”[ii]
We Need to Talk About the “F” Word
Political pollster Fernand Amandi calls conservatives’ new America an “authoritarian, fascist project,”[iii] using a term that’s often thrown about by anti-MAGA forces with no explanation of why it’s appropriate.
A behavioral explanation doesn’t fit their extremism, as it would be inexact to call any American politician today an outright fascist. But a narrative explanation of their belief system and rhetoric fits quite well: the GOP’s style of politicking can accurately be called “fascistic.”
Distill decades of GOP messaging and it boils down to a dominionist, victim-hero mythology that neatly lines up with the attributes of fascistic politicking in Jason Stanley’s book How Fascism Works:
appeals to a “mythic past” (especially the Christian Nation myth)
“feelings of victimhood among the dominant population”
establishing a “hierarchy of human worth”
rewriting people’s “shared understanding of reality by twisting the language of ideals through propaganda and promoting anti-intellectualism”
creating “a state of unreality in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate”
“sexual anxiety” (especially the fury over the feminization of society)
“law and order politics”
“us and them” narratives of exclusion.[iv]
The BIG “Big Lie” checks all those fascistic boxes and now lives independently from any single politician invoking it. An entire political-social-media ecosystem depends on it. At times, the lie even acts as a bulwark against reality itself, as conservatives move Heaven and Earth in their efforts build a counterworld, a “power lie,” that validates their fictional identity as both the real America and its revanchist victim-heroes.
This is the movement that made Trump, not the other way around, and the movement will continue to flourish with or without him.
This thing people want to call “Trumpism” is not a singular historical event that will have its day and then fade, like highwater pants, or mullets, or some right-wing political version of the Macarena.
Sanity won’t be restored by the intermittent victories of pluralist politicians. Moisés Naím, provides a realistic view of where we’re headed when he writes:
“No automatic mechanism guarantees that the failure of populist parties will herald a return to politics as we used to know it. Just the opposite… Countries can become entrenched deeper and deeper in a pattern of protest voting that brings an increasingly stranger cast of characters to the corridors of power. Making stability and good government a distant memory.”[v]
While America may not be in the “distant memory” category yet, our ship of state is not by any measure sailing back toward safe harbor. And the heroic populist tides that drive “protest voting” are flowing, not ebbing—globally, not just here at home.
We Need a New Way Forward That’s NOT a Culture War (We Won That & Still Lost the Country to Autocratic Right Wingers)
Never-Trumpers keep calling for (whining about?) a return to consensus politics, a return to compromise, and to normalcy, as if wishing it might make it so. Honestly, enduring this kind of naïve delusion week after week, month after month, year after year, is like being waterboarded. Commentators on the left, center, and even center-right just keep dunking us over and over in their unreasonable and unfulfillable expectations.
We need a new way. Not a return to the old way. It’s a challenge that Democrats are failing at, miserably, because they are actually prone to the opposite of Empowerment Marketing.
Even the Obama campaign’s “HOPE” slogan hinges on a negative affirmation and an Inadequacy Marketing of the American Dream: i.e., ours is an aspirational union, imperfect from the start, that has to be tinkered with and perfected by each successive generation. The Dem’s “more-perfect union” is forever in the process of becoming (to use a Michelle Obama phrase).
The message at the heart of it is: America’s exceptionalism isn’t quite perfect, but activist government can fix it! (Crudely speaking, it’s the same type of negative affirmation used to sell expensive shampoos that tame frizzy hair.)
Conservatives hear “America is imperfect” and stop listening.
Compare that to the empowering restoration narrative that the right is selling, in which perfection is pre-existing, most precisely in the heart and soul of conservatives. It only needs to be seized and lived by conservatives for it to have a restorative effect on America’s lost glory.
In the Dem’s version, you must hope and “become” and strive to live up to some perfection that is, essentially, always in process and forever incomplete. In the GOP’s version, you are already that perfect thing and just need to be more of it.
Which sounds more appealing? Which storyline would be more effective in helping dissatisfied, borderline distraught people make sense of a changing world, in which they feel that their lot is shrinking and they want to put it back where it used to be?
Would you rather be a victim-hero or a heroic victim?
That question—that contrast and its attendant narratives—offer a paradigm for understanding today’s conservative-liberal divide, and the pro-democracy coalition opposed to GOP autocracy has no answer for it.
So, ultimately, when autocracy arrives in America, it will be as much the fault of Democrats’ for their lack of imagination, gross incompetence, and utter fecklessness. It’s not even that they show up with a knife to the proverbial gun fight; they show up to the gun fight with a green bean casserole whining about bi-partisanship.
And they are terrible at storytelling—have been for the past 40 years.
Pro-democracy forces need a positive, heroic narrative of their own: one that can displace the BIG “Big Lie,” and not just as a rhetorical device. It has to be a narrative that works in practice as a romantic hero identity that can be lived. One that’s not Sisyphean in its endless, open-ended incompleteness, i.e., that we’re ever becoming a more perfect union. Ugh. That sounds not only endless, but ultimately hopeless.
And here is the most depressing possibility, which I would suggest is a strong likelihood: the left will win the culture war at the very same time it loses the country to an increasingly autocratic backlash from the right.
The GOP is backing up the BIG “Big Lie” with results on restoring the “real America” – on guns, abortion, voting rights, education, religion in public spaces, environmental rollbacks, equality and diversity rollbacks, and maybe soon they will succeed in taking away my super-gay marriage, to name a few recent initiatives. Their mythological victim-hero is triumphant in so many ways. So much winning it’s legitimately frightening.
The right has shown that if it cannot win the culture war in the broader culture, it feels no compunction about simply legislating away the impact of the nation’s leftward cultural swing in the name of protecting conservatives’ liberty and restoring America to its true conservative heritage. That’s the climax of their narrative and by God are they climaxing!
The left needs to get some humility and stop being so smug about winning the culture war, expecting that because the right has “lost,” they should just stand down.
That’s never going happen, and the more the left indulges in whiny self-satisfaction, the more it will continue to lose.
The Story Arc of a Corrupted Hero Story—Where Does It End?
If you are looking for an explanation for the beliefs of GOP voters as well as their increasingly radical behavior and voting patterns (i.e., a kind of *unified field theory of born-again conservatism"*), then the only one that works is the BIG “Big Lie.”
If you “follow the narrative,” not only does it explains the often-cynical extremism of the Republican Party, but also why it works; why it lands so effectively with conservatives; and why it gets them more traction with GOP voters rather than less.
We are now stuck with the BIG “Big Lie,” as much for a lack of effective counter-narrative as for its ability to empower conservative identity. And if it conforms to the typical romantic story arc, the hero will emerge, victorious and reborn, into a world remade.
Conservatives will defeat their enemies, and the rest of us will find ourselves living in a world that largely conforms to the born-again conservative vision of a truly “real American” society.
The pro-democracy pluralism wing of American politics may notch intermittent wins along that path, but I don’t believe it will change the ultimate destination.
Since Trump 1.0, the margins on those wins have been unimpressive, and if we were living in a sane world, the autocratic wing of American politics would be shivering in the woodshed right now, metaphorically speaking. The fact that the Dem’s narrow wins are celebrated as great victories just shows how much our weakened democratic practices and institutions have come to feel normal.
But step back and take a broader view, and one sees a second story arc to follow: the story arc of the story itself, the rise and fall of the BIG “Big Lie” as a potent cultural and political force in our national life.
The story arc of that story, I’d wager, is destined to be that of tragedy and dissolution. The storyline that autocrats use to turn citizens against each other in a cynical quest for power (e.g., “destroy domestic enemies to save the nation”) has historically proven to have a limited shelf life.
That storylines, and all its component lies, have a peak and denouement different from those of the story’s victim-hero. While the conservative victim-hero may win in the short term (again, in a climatological timescale), such a purgative victory is rarely permanent.
The right’s magical thinking will, in the end, be defeated by its own unrealism. Consider this foundational idea of born-again conservatism, offered in 1952 by conservative pioneer and national radio personality Clarence Manion, upon his retirement as dean of the University of Norte Dame Law School:
“Social justice, when it comes, will not proceed from legislative enactments aimed at the perimeter of society. It will rather be diffused through the community as a healthy contagion radiated from the contrite hearts of individual men.”
Oh really? So, the foundational assumption of conservative governance is that social justice is the natural state of mankind, if we just let our urges be guided by God?
Welp, just ask the enslaved people of the United States how that worked out for them.
The born-again conservatives’ utopian aspirations will fail because social justice (to use Manion’s term) is not magically made manifest by the “contrite hearts of individual men.” Such justice and values have never survived without well-crafted social and political mechanisms designed to ensure their survival. And when such mechanisms are taken away, and social justice does fail for the majority (which it will), their savior narrative is fatally undermined.
Because the failure is right in our face, in the real world, not the realm of rhetoric. We clearly see other human beings standing right next to us who do not enjoy the same freedoms we do. Or we stand on the outside, looking enviously at those who are free when we are not. And everybody knows who designed the system and why.
The BIG “Big Lie” storyline of victimized conservatives restoring the nation is useless in forging a pluralistic society that guarantees “liberty and justice for all.” Useless by design. The BIG “Big Lie” only guarantees liberty for some—for the avenging conservative heroes and their “real America.”
The rest of us, however, eventually will demand a way back in. When a BIG “Big Lie” of nationalist populist victimhood has been deployed in a power grab, at least in modern examples in the 20th century (I know that’s a big caveat but we need some reason to hope), the ultimate resolution has proven to be resistance by those cast out. And in that confrontation, the architects of exclusion and division have very often come out on the losing end. Eventually.
(Personally, I think it’s the height of irony that born-again conservatives, who claim to value individual liberty more than anything else, are surrendering their individualism to a gigantic lie about collective identity.)
Yet, the BIG “Big Lie” is still in its ascendency in America: It is a thriving, living story, even if its premise is false. But if the lie stays true to the natural story arc of tragedy, the autocratic urge toward exclusion will peak and then eventually burn out, or be torn down and replaced by something else, hopefully a restoration of some kind of narrative of pluralism.
How much damage the autocratic BIG “Big Lie” will do before that happens, well, that’s up to the rest of us. So far, we have not proven ourselves up to the task of understanding its particular American context, never mind combatting it, and the forces coalesced around it are gaining in strength.
How Do We Get To Something Better? Dump “Trumpism” and Focus On The True Cause of America’s Rightward Drift
We need to stop this obsession with “Trumpism” and recognize that the real power on the right lies in the revanchist, heroic identity narrative of the BIG “Big Lie,” which came long before Trump and owes him nothing.
An obsession with “Trumpism” just keeps the pro-pluralism forces in American politics focused on the wrong thing, on the consequents of the born-again conservative movement, rather than its singular antecedent.
Now, asking GOP voters to give up their victim-hero identity (and their misguided revanchist quest to destroy their nemesis: pluralism) is like asking them to relinquish all knowledge of “who they are and what the world is like.”
Harping on violations of norms, exhorting conservatives to return to consensus bi-partisanship, droning on about wonky policy accomplishments, none of that is going to get us anywhere. Not for nothin, conservatives see Liberal accomplishments as just more evidence that America is becoming less American—even when those accomplishments benefit working class conservatives, as most progressive policies do.
Time and time again, GOP base voters have proven willing to reject reality itself when it doesn’t fit the narrative. Just as they are willing to reject any politician who refuses to invoke and live by the mythology of the BIG “Big Lie,” tossing aside insufficiently orthodox pols (e.g., Club For Growth types like Pat Toomey, who himself pushed out centrists like Arlen Spectre and Lincoln Chaffee).
So, we face a heavy lift, and breaking down the right’s heroic mythology is going to take as many decades as it took conservatives to build it—research in narrative psychology estimates that it takes three generations (80 years or so) for a society to get sufficient emotional and psychological distance from a shared traumatic event to process it appropriately.1
And we haven’t yet even begun any reckoning, or reached any consensus about the true driver of America’s autocratic drift.
Pro-democracy forces will continue losing ground to autocracy until they find a way to counter the right’s Empowerment Marketing…
Until they can unwind conservatives’ heroic, dominionist identity story, which casts democratic pluralism as a threat to their very existence, and by extension a threat to the existence of the “real America.”
When Bill Clinton was running for president in 1992, his political advisor James Carville coined the phrased “the economy, stupid,” to get right to the heart of their case against the incumbent George H. W. Bush. And something similar comes to mind when considering the why of Donald Trump.
Why do people follow him?
Why they won’t desert him?
Why does the party kowtow to him?
Why we are in this mess?
Why can’t we stop it?
Why does MAGA world insist on believing things that aren’t true?
Why don’t they care about facts that so obviously are true?
In what world is a never-ending stream of untruth more appealing than the simple truth that’s staring you right in the face?
Why do they find such glory in it?
There is one simple explanation for all of it—not just for Trump, but also for a dangerous autocratic movement in America that people mistakenly call “Trumpism.”
It’s the lie, stupid. The BIG “Big Lie.”
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT… THERE’S AN ADDENDUM WHERE WE LIST ALL THE WAYS WE WERE RIGHT… HERE
[i] Johnson, ibid, pp.231 & 206
[ii] Reicher& Haslam, ibid
[iii] Fernand Amandi (2024, July 12) Commentary on The Reidout on MSNBC
[iv] Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The politics of us and them (New York: Random House 2018) Introduction pp. XXX & XXXi
[v] Naim, ibid, p.148
László, ibid, p. 165