How America can recover from the plague of Trumpism and its brutal aftermath
The United States government is on fire. For four years, the fundamentals of democracy have been under attack by Donald Trump, his Vichy-like Congressional Republicans, and right-wing media apparatuses along with numerous conservative digital and social media outlets. As the inferno gained momentum, it was doused with gasoline by reactionary media such as Fox News, which spread disinformation, hate and bigotry. At the same time, mainstream social media companies reproduced lies and conspiracy theories eagerly appropriated by a social base filled with fascists, neo-Nazis, militarists and far-right extremists. The slow burning fire of violence erupted on Jan. 6 with a murderous assault on the Capitol.
The match that lit the fire was thrown by Trump who in a speech just before the assault on the Capitol incited the audience to riot, repeating what he had already said on his Twitter account. But Trump’s actions alone on that day do not explain the insurrection. The homicidal uprising was part of a coup in the making, enabled by a series of events.
These include: four years of lies and misinformation about the viability of the democratic process; an accelerating reign of lawlessness; a desecrating of the Constitution; a growing legacy of personal corruption; the expanding infamy of institutions of government such as the justice department; a fullfledged embrace of ignorance over reason and truth; the rollback of labour and environmental protections; and a war against Black people and immigrants. The culmination of such actions was the movement of white supremacy and right-wing ideology from the margins to the centre of politics and power.
Under the Trump machine, America has tipped over into the abyss of authoritarianism, whose end point was the violence produced by an insurrectional horde that stormed the Capitol, smeared the walls with excrement, beat a police officer to death, and paraded through the corridors of this revered institution carrying a Confederate flag.
Trumpism is a worldview that defines culture as a battleground of losers and winners, a world in which everything is rigged against whites. This is a world in which unity disappears into Trump’s right-wing assault on the public good, truth, the common good, as reality itself dissolves into a rightwing propaganda machine in which politics becomes “a plot to steal from (whites) their natural due as Americans.” Trumpism defines power as immunity from the law, and that the most admirable representatives of power are those who are “triumphant and innocent in the face of every accusation of incapacity, criminality and unethical conduct.” How else to explain Trump’s pardoning of grifters, political cronies and war criminals?
Trumpism paves the way for deeply entrenched legacies of hate to be passed on to his followers and future generations. Its goal is to destroy any vestige of democracy as we know it, however flawed, and replace it with a form of unmoored power free from any sense of social, political, and ethical ethos.
Under Trumpism, society increasingly reproduces pedagogical “death zones of humanity” that undermine the capacity for people to speak, write, and act from a position of empowerment and be responsible to themselves and others. Against this form of depoliticization, there is the need for modes of civic education and critical literacy that provide the bridging work between thinking critically and the possibility of interpretation as intervention. Such bridging work is committed to the realization that there is no resistance without hope, and no hope without a vision of an alternative society rooted in justice, equality, and freedom.
Trumpism evokes the shadow of authoritarianism in the form of a resurgent right-wing populism that dehumanizes all of us in the face of a refusal to confront its spectre of racism, lawlessness, and brutality. Trump’s impeachment is only the beginning of confronting the fascist ghosts of the past which Trump proved are no longer in the shadows or on the margins of U.S. politics.
The influence of Trumpism will long outlast the aftermath of Trump’s presidency making it all the more urgent to reclaim the redemptive elements of government responsibility, democratic ideals and the public spheres that make a radical democracy possible. It is time to reclaim the utopian ideals unleashed by the history of civil rights struggles, the insights and radical struggles produced by the Black Lives Matter movement, and a cultural politics written in the language of justice, compassion, and the fundamental narratives of freedom and equality.