Results prove nothing matters

Facts, ability no longer required to get elected

First off, some congratulations are in order. Donald Trump’s election may be a defeat for Hillary Clinton, the Democratic party, pollsters, pundits, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and the Baltic states.

But it is a thrilling victory for Sean Hannity and the approach to journalism he represents; for Ann Coulter and the approach to race relations she represents; and for Vladimir Putin and the approach to international diplomacy he represents, and they deserve every happiness in this moment.

Above all it is a victory for the idea that nothing matters.

As it turned out, it really did not matter that Trump had no experience in politics or governing; that he had no coherent or consistent policies, or rudimentary knowledge about such things as how the American system of government works; that where he was aware of the difference between fact and what it suited him to say at any given moment he unerringly chose the latter; that he singled out vulnerable minorities for scorn and did not care what sorts of support this attracted; that he groped women or defrauded customers or truckled to tyrants or any of the long and familiar list.

None of it mattered, and the people who insisted it did not matter have been triumphantly vindicated.

Of course it does matter, substantively, as much today as it did yesterday. It just did not matter for the purpose of getting elected.

But to the Trump supporters now performing their victory dance the lesson is and will be much more farreaching.

To them, Trump’s majority in the electoral college is a comprehensive repudiation of everyone who stood in their way: of everyone who has always stood in their way.

The idea that you should tell the truth, or know your facts, or treat people decently, all of these and more can now be dismissed as elitist folderol, the precious fancies of people who use words like “folderol.” Because: Trump won! This is the danger of a politics organized around class resentment, but more particularly when class is defined in terms of education.

It is one thing to dismiss “elites” whose claim to status is based on inherited wealth or birth — which is to say most of Trump’s resume. But it is quite another when knowledge itself becomes suspect, and with it rational inquiry, attention to fact, truth. At that point a society descends into madness.

I understand that the resentment is in many ways well-earned, and the contempt often reciprocated: it takes two sides to play class politics. The Trump electorate — ex-urban, less-educated, religiously observant — has every right to feel ignored and patronized by the urban elites they despise, the academics and the culturati and good God yes the media.

And yes, the universities have themselves become toxic to rational inquiry, obsessed with identity politics and intolerant of dissent.

But the answer to that is not just to blow up the place. It is not progress merely to replace the identity politics of the left with an identity politics of the right, nor can resentment, however understandable, of those higher up the cultural hierarchy justify attacks on those below.

Yet that is where we have arrived. You think Trump is going to bring an end to political correctness? It is going to get meaner and crazier than ever, given fresh impetus by the presence in the Oval Office of a white male whose every word and act seems to prove their point.

This is what is ultimately at stake now: not just who shall be president, but the fate of liberal society — the one that conservatives defend — and not only in the United States but across the western world. For rest assured that, just as Trump has derived inspiration from the populist forces cracking Europe apart, so his victory will inspire them.

Until now the gravest threat to liberal values — the idea of a society of equal individuals, rather than rival identity groups; of a government of laws not men; of an economy driven by markets rather than decrees — has come from the radical left. Now it has been joined by the populist right.

How precisely Trumpism will translate into policy is impossible to say: he has been on all sides of virtually every issue, not merely from one day in the campaign to the next but sometimes even in the same sentence. But if we were to take his knownothing, anti-elite rhetoric at face value, it would mean, among other things, the end of any international action against climate change (what do scientists know?), a wholesale retreat from free trade (what do economists know?), and the demise of NATO, and the doctrines of collective security on which it is based (what do generals know?)

As for the rest — the wall, the deportation of 12 million immigrants, the Muslim ban, the illegal military orders — we will have to hope that he is no more committed to these than anything else that came out of his mouth in the campaign.

But Trump, the man? Can we hope that, armed with the powers of office, he proves not so vain, so bereft of judgment, so determined to avenge every slight, as he has been until now? Can we hope, likewise, that he will now surround himself with better people than the second-raters and mainchancers that got him there?

Or will he carry on as before, the candidate of up-isdown, only now with a mandate to put upisdownism into practice?

YOU THINK TRUMP IS GOING TO BRING AN END TO POLITICAL CORRECTNESS?