Apocalypse. Now what?
There’s hope for change after the current American disasters — but it won’t be easy
WASHINGTON— Is this the end of the world?
That’s a question suggested by the title of David Frum’s new book, “Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy.” In it, he certainly presses his case that Donald Trump has been a disruptive, dishonest and destructive president; a “fascoid” (a word Frum coins for something close to fascism, “but not quite the same”) stirring up resentment and seeming to approach every emergency with the question “How can I make this trauma worse?” Stir in a global pandemic and the economic depression that comes with it and it’s a recipe for apocalypse.
Frum, a Canadian by birth (his mother was Saint Barbara of the CBC), served as a speechwriter to George W. Bush and became an apostate from the Republican Party during Barack Obama’s presidency — accusing his longtime American political home of becoming an insular, “fantasy-based” party of racial resentment catering to the rich. Trump seized on those same tendencies and made them the party’s core identity. So you might guess that from the start, Frum has been a “Never Trump” Republican.
Which hints at a challenge confronted by authors in the Trouble-With-Trump genre of books: No matter how compellingly they catalogue the various outrages, abuses and incompetencies they see in the current president, they are not likely to change many minds. Trump’s supporters chalk it up to just more “fake news” caterwauling; everyone else already believes it to be true. Which may be why in Frum’s new book the indictment of Trump is just a jumping-off point. He’s concerned with America’s reaction. So what next? What comes after the apocalypse? At the end of his introduction, Frum points out that “apocalypse” doesn’t actually mean the end of the world. The Greek word from the Bible “originally and literally means an uncovering, a revelation,” he writes. Not the end, according to religious tradition, but a beginning. “It would inaugurate a new and better order in which justice would triumph at last over injustice.” That’s the post-apocalyptic scenario he’s trying to will into being.
He’s not alone. By coincidence or kismet, while this book was in the mail to my house, I read in the Jesuit journal America a short essay by the Nashville-based American teacher and religious scholar David Dark, titled
“We are living in an apocalypse.”
It’s about the American experience of COVID-19, and starts from a similar premise: the current crisis is a revelation that the world we have been living in is untenable. The destruction of the moment could bring about a whole new world.
“Amid this apocalypse, relationships that were hidden are coming into the light and the order of things is changing. It has to change,” Dark writes.
He is the author of, among other books, a volume entitled “Everyday Apocalypse,” which grows from his religious understanding about this biblical meaning of the word “apocalypse” as revelation and his belief that such unveilings occur all around us in the world frequently. So he is no newcomer to seeing the potential for American society to be reborn.
But there is something in the air — conjured alongside viral particles and Trumpian rhetoric — that makes this idea a common one just now, if not usually framed using the same word.
A piece by Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker this month took stock of how the destruction of the pandemic had inspired a wave of self-organizing mutual-aid citizenship, and explores whether such disaster responses can, as Rebecca Solnit suggested, “lead to lasting civic change.”
Paul Waldman in the Washington Post last month argued the coronavirus crisis “could help us get to health-care reform.” An L.A. Times columnist explained last week how COVID-19 may bring on a universal basic income.
In mid-April a fellow at the Brookings think tank who studies precarious work told me she thinks this crisis might prompt structural change to job protections for low-income workers and a wave of unionization.
Dark writes about his own realization about low-income workers: “To my shame, I was really not aware that people who work at Whole Foods/ Amazon, Kroger, McDonald’s or Walmart do not get paid sick leave. COVID-19 hits and I find this out, and now I am thinking about the injustice of it all the time. In fact, I feel like I am ready to riot. An apocalypse has occurred,” he writes. Just as one example.
“The American economy, as it is currently arranged, is not an economy that keeps it possible for everyone to access what they need to simply live, let alone thrive. But now, maybe more than ever, we can see with brutal clarity the pain of this arrangement and what it costs us.”
Frum, primarily tackling what he sees as the crisis of Trump’s presidency itself rather than the immediate emergency of the pandemic, suggests similarly sweeping reforms to political structures and attitudes in response: methods to “unrig” the political system such as ending the Senate filibuster; statehood for the District of Columbia; and law enforcement, voting and electoral reform. And he suggests the political moment should inspire reconciliation in the partisan culture wars and a rally behind a new green economy.
What all of these people, and others calling for a new New Deal or a political revolution, share is a sense that this moment has revealed deep open wounds in the body of American society and politics, and that seeing them can help the healing begin.
The obstacle might not be the diagnosis, but agreement on the cure. Frum himself acknowledges that while he believes “voters are always right when they identify problems,” they are “often attracted to wrong answers.” The trouble, as always, is in finding consensus about what the correct answers are. And even settling on the scale of those answers.
Congress seemed, for a few precious days in March, to agree that rescuing the economy to the tune of trillions of dollars was a high priority, even while it fought over who would get those dollars and how. Now even that mild point of consensus may have passed. Joe Biden has been flirting with talk of a bigger, more ambitious platform, but the foundation of his candidacy has not been radical change, but rather a no-drama return to the status quo of the recent past.
The major revelation that obsesses Trump these days is neither biblical, medical nor economic, but rather transparently political: a re-election-focused vendetta against his predecessor.
If this is, as Frum and Dark in their separate ways suggest, an apocalypse of a kind, then Americans are faced with the same difficult questions encountered by survivors in so much of the post-apocalyptic fiction that has enjoyed a resurgence in public attention these past few months: seeing the disastrous faults of the world you lived in laid bare, can you build something new? What should that new world look like? How do you get there? And do you have the strength to do the job?
As in fiction, so in reality: an apocalypse is a revelation, which may clarify the imperative to undertake change. But it does not make it easy.