Opinion
Defeating Trumpism will require us to love our country more than we hate each other
Defeating Donald Trump was the easy part. Defeating Trumpism will prove to be much more difficult.
Victory will not be achieved through elections alone because it’s not about a candidate or a party. Trumpism is the natural consequence that occurred when we as a society lost hope in the American covenant — the promise that the next generation, our children’s generation, will have it better than we had it.
We see this desperation, anger and fear on the faces of those who stormed our nation’s Capitol, desecrating our institutions and undermining the foundation of democracy. But it’s also visible in the eyes of too many of our fellow citizens walking down any street of our country. It’s shockingly evident in the rejection of science, expertise, institutions and community. It is the guerrilla war of an ideology that rejects ideology.
The coming years will be a constant battle between those who are consumed with the destruction of the system brought forth by the expansion of the American experiment and those who remain hopeful that the same system will guide us forward as it has for two and a half centuries. It is not just democracy that is threatened. It is our representative government, our federalist system and our very republic.
Individual elections can’t prevent the creeping authoritarianism because, like a game of whack-a-mole, when one hammers down, two others pop up. They can’t stop emergent populism or restrain rising nationalism. Democracy can only defend democracy if we agree to a set of rules and recognize that the change required begins within each of us as individuals.
Trumpism is a social response to extraordinary unprecedented economic and demographic change. Like the Luddites during the industrial revolution, the appeal of destruction as a way to stop rapid economic transformation has a seductive lure to those who feel they are being drowned by the new economic realities of the digital age. While many argue that the government may have neither the means nor the obligation to bring all people along, basic morality and the American social contract does.
We have seen strains of this before. In the 1850s, the “Know-Nothing” party filled the void with the collapse of the Whigs. Eerily reminiscent of the “Shy Trump Voter,” Know-Nothings earned their name because, when pressed about their support, adherents would respond “I know nothing.”
This nativist party was primarily an anti-Catholic, anti-immigration movement, though its populist tendencies were revealed in its progressive stances opposing slavery and supporting government spending programs. The collapse of the Know-Nothings led to the rise of Republicanism.
Curiously, at this moment, it is the Republican Party that stands as the most immediate threat to our institutions. The Republican president, GOP senators and congressman working with state Republican leaders have overwhelmingly pushed for seditious actions culminating in the violent overrunning of our nation’s Capitol. We would be shortsighted, however, not to recognize that vast disparities in wealth, income, education and hope present a threat far greater than simple partisanship. Trumpism is a cultural problem manifest in our political system.
Many of these social dynamics did not come about as policy failures. They arose as forces far greater than the government could manage, address or direct. We should not be surprised then that government can’t solve all of these problems.
At a time when trust in institutions is collapsing, we must either recommit to them as a last-ditch effort to stave off collapse, reform them in an attempt to shepherd in a new era, or reimagine and rebuild them in an entirely new way. In the same way that the Founders imagined a framework for self-governance upon rejecting monarchy, we must rethread the fabric of governance to be more inclusive to the growing number of Americans who feel left behind.
Just as Al Qaeda shattered and transformed after the death of Osama bin Laden, this movement will splinter into dozens of factions when Trump exits, taking root in poor neighborhoods sensing decline as well as wealthy communities losing entitlement. It will find a home with white voters anxious about losing status in a changing America and in Hispanic homes stifled by limited economic opportunities and inadequate educational systems. It will be preached to the pews of the religious and equally echoed in the shadows of hate.
Trumpism, however, is not simply about a lack of education and economic anxiety, nor is it only about the demographic changes challenging the very notion of who we are. At its core, this pernicious ideology grows in the tension between those who feel a part of our rapidly changing society and those who do not.
We are rapidly losing our desire for union, and a growing number of us will sacrifice democracy, our health, our very way of life to be free from one another. Defeating Trumpism will require us to love our country more than we hate each other.
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