Trump’s kinship with his critics not easily dismissed
An autopsy of Donald Trump’s presidency can proceed from an early example of his memorable utterances. On his 13th day in office, Feb. 1, 2017, the first day of Black History Month, he said: “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.”
His word salad was interesting not because it revealed pristine ignorance concerning the African American leader, who died in 1895. Neither was it notable because of his ignorance about his ignorance. Rather, his statement about Douglass revealed, beyond his notorious laziness, his nonchalance about his ignorance.
This gave him an immunity to embarrassment, an immunity that was the crucial ingredient of his political magnetism for scores of millions of Americans mesmerized by the strange but undeniable charisma of Trump’s serene obliviousness regarding reality.
He began his political career spouting birtherism and concluded it raving about an election-rigging conspiracy so vast that it involved legions in many states, and so cunning that it left no evidence of itself. As Trump skittered across the surface of public life, many of his critics were too busy savoring their superiority to him to recognize their mental kinship with him.
They consciously are participants in the postmodern rejection of reason. He and they are collaborators in the rising rejection of the Enlightenment that produced classical liberalism and this republic.
Postmodernism rejects, as Adam Garfinkle writes, the Enlightenment belief in a positive-sum social order in which human beings, who are both competitive and cooperative creatures, can prosper without making others poorer. Hence, the Enlightenment belief in, and Trump’s disbelief in, free trade. Postmodernism is the ill-named revival of a premodern mentality: The social order as constant conflict, unleavened by trust and constrained only by the authoritarianism of the dominant group.
In “The Darkening Mind,” written for American Purpose, Garfinkle says that “the farther we look left or right, we see the erosion of the” Enlightenment aspiration of institutionalizing positive-sum relationships. This aspiration, which gives dignity to modern politics, undergirds the case for capitalism -- a spontaneous, consensual order of freely cooperating individuals.
In zero-sum thinking, Garfinkle says, “the consent of the governed” is “an empty piety” because legitimacy attaches to whichever group imposes dominance. And as American culture and politics increasingly reveal, “in the zero-sum mentality, no neutral space can exist in what is by definition a totally conflictual environment.”
For minds steeped in zero-sum nonthinking, simple-minded us-vs.them stories “work better than positive-sum, more nuanced portrayals of human relationships,” says Garfinkle, who adds, “the cacophony of zerosum shouting between right and left extremes,” amplified by “clickbait-oriented commercial media,” spreads zero-sum thinking nationwide.
As Trump’s four-year snarl ends, recognize that the least intellectual president had a mentality akin to that which has closed the academic mind. To people whose social theories and politics are infused with postmodernism, Trump has been like God — because he is the explanation of everything. Actually, postmodernists are part of the explanation of him.