Many at fault for Trump’s rise
What once seemed impossible is now very real
Amonth ago, Donald Trump stood seven points back of Hillary Clinton in the polls. State-by-state projections gave Clinton as much as twothirds of the electoral college. Today, an average of recent surveys puts Trump just one point behind; the electoral college is similarly up for grabs.
What once seemed impossible — that Trump could win — is now a very real possibility: roughly two in five, according to the oddsmakers. We are staring into the abyss of a Trump presidency, and all that that would represent, for America and the world.
That it is even close is something of a calamity, a victory for all that is dark and barbaric in the American character. A narrow Trump loss — at this point the most likely result — would confirm his malign influence in Republican circles, opening the party to years of debilitating internal conflict. Perhaps Trumpism would not survive him; perhaps it would.
The election is still weeks away, of course, and much can happen between now and then. But it’s never too early to start laying blame.
Who should we fault for this disaster? Should we blame his enablers in the Republican party? But which ones? The aging opportunists like Newt Gingrich or Rudy Giuliani, who see in Trump their last chance at power and can’t be bothered to worry about what he represents? Or the equivocators, the odds-checkers, once-respected figures like Paul Ryan or Marco Rubio, who know that Trump is the death of everything they claim to care about but sign on anyway, though only after weeks of contemptible public agonizing — as if the choice were truly difficult? As if they were not weak men following their desires, but good men trying to do right? As if their eventual decision were ever in doubt?
Should we blame Trump’s rivals in the Republican nomination race? They who might have stopped him early, but chose instead to parley with him, thinking his support would prove fleeting, preferring to turn their guns on each other. Even when it became apparent that Trump’s support was real, each calculated he could be the one to face him one on one — each thinking he need only outrun the others, not the bear. Until the bear consumed them all.
What about the media? Should they wear this? For granting him such easy access to airtime, all those “phoners” to friendly hosts, when he had nothing to say? For devoting vast hours to his inane rallies in the hopes, often gratified, that someone would get beaten up, but in the certainty that large numbers of public would be attracted either way? For succumbing to Trump’s months-long war of attrition on human reason — the insults, the craziness, the elemental errors, the literally hundreds of lies, by which Trump advertised his Olympian disdain for any of the usual standards of behaviour, and so made it impossible for anyone else to hold him to account? For failing to break out of the trap of journalistic balance, when the alternatives are a flawed but quotidian candidate on the one hand and a sociopathic, racebaiting manchild on the other?
But maybe we need to go back further. Are Republican politicians to blame, for sowing the seeds of Trumpism — for having played about for years with the coded appeals to race that Trump made over as open bigotry? Should we blame, in the same way, their allies on Fox TV and in talk radio, for demonizing Muslims, fearmongering over immigration, and exalting ignorance and unreason as a prophylactic against the influence of “experts” and the “liberal media”? Or should the blame be attached to the Democratic left, for debasing the currency of outrage, denouncing every Republican candidate, no matter how unthreatening, as a racist, fascist or worse, until they had nothing more to say when the real thing came along?
Perhaps it’s broader than that. Are the roots of Trump to be found in the coarsening of the culture, the celebrification of everything, the degradation of knowledge or civility in the age of social media, when everyone with access to a computer thinks he knows all there is to know about anything? Do they lie in the intellectual chaos of the times, the easy cynicism that claims all truth is relative, the nihilist pose that choices are without risk, that nothing matters because it’s all a joke anyway?
Should we blame the excesses of identity politics, the obsession with racial and sexual differences to the exclusion of individual rights or common human values, the assertion that society is a zerosum conflict between ceaselessly warring groups, providing the opening for Trump to emerge as the champion of white male identity politics? Should we blame the stratification of society by class, class defined not by income or birth but by education and culture, the higher educated and the less so separated by a widening gulf of mutual resentment, such that whichever candidate the former are for the latter are against?
Is it the fault of the Democrats, for nominating a candidate as unelectable as Clinton? Should we blame the Clinton campaign for its inability, notwithstanding the millions of dollars and masses of manpower at its disposal, to put away a candidate as monumentally beatable as Trump? Do we blame the voters, for not doing their homework, exercising judgment, or just basically paying attention?
Yes.