The United States finds itself amidst a worldwide reaction against globalization, cosmopolitanism, and elite governance. Terrorism threatens civilized security; climate change threatens our earth and our health; globalization threatens to leave us homeless and rootless; refugees threaten to render ever-greater populations superfluous; technology threatens to make humans superfluous; bureaucracy threatens a tyrannical rule of nobody; and rampant inequality combined with corruption threaten to undo the legitimacy of government, business, religious, academic, and other institutions that are the bedrock of our lives. The problems are so enormous that hoping for a solution feels juvenile.
To whom shall we turn to for guidance in such perilous times? The same politicians, funded by the one percent, who have lined their pockets and led us to the brink? The business community with deep interests in the status quo? The media, corporate owned, who feed us pro-and-contra as if it were a tennis match? The cultural elite that is obsessed with itself and sees the majority of Americans as rubes and bumpkins?
The people have turned to Donald Trump as their tribune. Why?
Part of the problem is that they saw no good alternative. Hillary is to my mind a supremely competent person. Hillary’s loss was painful for me and many others. But we also must listen to what the voters say. They want change. When Trump says that Hillary has been in and around power for 20 years and asks what she will do now that she hasn’t done then, he is right. The voters despair of change. Hillary and Bill Clinton are now worth somewhere around $50 Million according to Forbes Magazine. Whatever Trump may be worth (and we don’t know), he earned his money through dirty business, but at least he admits it. The Clintons come across as hypocritical, claiming to be warriors in the public interest. But in 14 years between 2001 and 2015, they earned $230 million through speaking engagements, book deals, and consulting gigs. While the media largely covered the Clinton’s email server scandal, the social media world lit up over the pay-to-play scandal around the Clinton Foundation that was revealed in the Wikileaks hacks. I have no love for Wikileaks and I understand the hesitancy to publish hacked private emails. But there is no doubt that Hillary’s willingness to enrich herself and her family in and around her public work and her apparent conflict of interest during her time at the State Department that contributed to her defeat.
Perhaps even more important was Hillary’s labeling of Trump supporters deplorable. Worse, she doubled down and said maybe only half of his supporters were deplorable. This is a form of bigotry. Granted, Clinton did not make bigotry a centerpiece of her campaign, as did Trump. But Trump’s bigotry was always presented as entertainment, as a flourish. He walked a fine line between bigotry and hyperbole; at times he crossed that line. But Trump could always plausibly say he didn’t mean it. With Hillary’s comments about the deplorables, there was no doubt. She, and so many of us, her supporters, feel immeasurably superior to Trump supporters. Too many of us see them as uneducated, rude, racist, sexist, xenophobic, and less important. Our privileges are justified because we are better. We elites need to face our very real bigotry; if we don’t, this election will be just the beginning.
But still, why Trump? Why did the people choose a plutocratic billionaire playboy and harasser with no public experience and no apparent administrative competence to be their savior? On one level, Trump’s celebrity and narcissism allowed him to stay in the race even when he said and did things that should have ended his candidacy. There have been other “outsider” candidates who have captured the people’s imagination, and then crashed and burned. I think of Herman Cain and his 9–9–9 tax proposal and his insistence on a three-page limit on all congressional legislation. Cain was the most-covered candidate in the 2012 Republican field according to Pew Research, until allegations of sexual assault ended his campaign. Somehow, Trump just powered through much more specific and numerous allegations. And his supporters did not care.
But there is a more important reason that Trump — hardly a man of the people — was able to become a leader of what he aptly describes as a mass movement. The key to understanding Trump’s success is to see how and why he has been able to commandeer a movement.
In her chapter on “The Totalitarian Movement” in Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt notes that the leaders of movements are marked by their “extreme contempt for facts as such.” The reason for this contempt for facts is that the world is complicated and uncertain. For the masses of people who are suffering dislocation, instability, and meaninglessness in their lives,
“movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.”
The great danger in all movements is that they can have no firm goal; as movements, they continually need to stir up their supporters who drive them forward. If any goal is met, a new one must be contrived. So movements are motivated less by a firm end than by a promise to fulfill a deep spiritual need. That is why movements mobilize masses who are longing for a “completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world.” There is a “desire to escape from reality because in [the mass of the people’s] essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects…”
That Trump has so insightfully characterized and mobilized his supporters as a movement is evidence of his deep understanding of what he is doing. He possesses an incredible instinct for those words, phrases, and insinuations that give order and sense to the movement. He pokes at racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Islamism and in doing so allows his supporters to construct coherent narratives about the America Trump will restore to its greatness. He appears as the truth-teller, the one who reveals those hidden truths that polite society and the elites refuse to utter. And because the elites are so careful to not offend anyone and have placed so many topics and truths off the table of common conversation, Trump looks like a prophet and a truthteller.
Like the earlier mob leaders, the spokesmen for totalitarian movements possessed an unerring instinct for anything that ordinary party propaganda or public opinion did not care to touch. Everything hidden, everything passed over in silence, became of major significance, regardless of its own intrinsic importance. The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered with corruption … The modern masses do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience … What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.
Stanley argues that the effort to create a consistent reality must be in the service of some “simple reality as a means to express his power.” The only question Stanley sees is, “What is the simple reality that Trump is trying to convey?” For Stanley, the answer is obvious. “The simple picture Trump is trying to convey is that there is wild disorder, because of American citizens of African-American descent, and immigrants. He is doing it as a display of strength, showing he is able to define reality and lead others to accept his authoritarian value system.”
But this assumes that Trump’s movement is a totalitarian movement, one that seeks to fully actualize its fictional world through terror, an assault on the rule of law, the empowerment of a bureaucratic secret police, and total domination. Arendt describes the way a totalitarian government is grounded in a movement. Her description of the danger in movements is relevant. But there is simply no evidence for this idea and no need to believe that Trump is a totalitarian figure.
What is more, there is no coherent ideology underlying Trump’s movement. The very premise of totalitarianism is that there is a single, unifying, total idea — an ideology — that is to be actualized and affirmed. Trump has no such governing idea. His pragmatic openness characterizes his particular movement and is what makes his movement both so popular and so dangerous. It is a 21st-century movement in the sense that Trump, as its leader, does not insist on any kind of fidelity to a single idea. He empowers all sorts of fantasies (anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, racist, misogynistic, nationalist, and more). But no one in the movement must pledge fidelity to one idea. What he does as the leader of the movement is make it acceptable to establish whatever conspiratorial fantasy one wants. And the way Trump does this is through a cynical and nihilistic war on reality.
The power behind Trump’s movement is cynicism. What Arendt saw in movements in general and Trump has now made real is that cynicism is deeply liberating. When reality is oppressive and messy and disorderly, cynicism gives people permission to remake their realities in ways that are more comfortable:
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.”
The totalitarian leaders Arendt described sought to make their followers believe their ideologies and saw that they
“could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
Trump has mobilized that same cynicism, but without the claim of guiding or leading an ideologically driven movement. He has empowered a uniquely American and individualist version of a movement, one that grants individuals and groups license to create and defend their own meaningful realities.
