Wallace Shawn, he of The Princess Bride fame, contemplates seeing Trumpism in the rear view mirror. Not without what the elite might call “learnings” about Trump’s faux-populist appeal to the non-elite:
To put it differently, the elite had wounded their dignity, had hurt their feelings. For Trump, it was purely personal. He knew these people. He’d gone to school with them. He’d gone to parties with them, night after night. And he loathed them because they looked down on him. They thought he was stupid. They thought he was crude. They thought he didn’t know how to speak. They thought he was dishonest, and he didn’t follow the rules. They thought he was undisciplined, loud, boastful, and overweight.
His not-well-educated followers probably didn’t know any members of the elite, had never met any members of the elite. They knew what they’d seen of them on their computer screens and their television screens. But strangely, just as there is an economic web that links together every person in a given country, from the poorest to the richest, there is also an invisible web of emotion that enables a struggling truck driver in Idaho to resent a Syrian immigrant in Michigan whom he’s never met and to feel shamed and diminished by a prosperous corporate executive in New York City whom he’s never met. And so millions of followers of Donald Trump could feel humiliated by the imagined contempt that they felt flowing down in their direction through this invisible web from the same well-educated people that Trump had sat with at dinner parties a thousand times.
There is indeed contempt among many of the better-educated for the less-educated. “Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so,” David Freedman wrote in The Atlantic five years ago now. “Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart.” All it takes is a casual insult here and there to reconfirm that imagined contempt is real and universal among the better-educated.
Shawn believes any sense of elite superiority is misguided.
Those of us who were in a better frame of mind should not have been congratulating ourselves on our superiority to those who were depressed. We were not superior, we were simply luckier. We were less depressed because we’d had better luck. The machinery of society had operated to our benefit, and we’d been able to do more interesting things. But a lot of us enjoyed feeling contempt for Trump’s followers, just as they enjoyed feeling contempt for us.
The amazing political paradox that the United States faces at the moment is that an enormous number of people of color, many of whom are objectively poorer and much worse off than most of Trump’s supporters, have joined up with the minority of whites who dislike Trump to form a slim majority of Americans who apparently believe in the current American political system, but at the same time there now exists a staggering number of white people in the country—should we make a guess based on current polls and say 50 million out of Trump’s 74 million voters?—who are shockingly alienated from the whole American game, utterly indifferent to the prevailing political setup, with its elections, its Constitution, and its three branches of government, and absolutely delighted to follow a “leader” who attractively performs the part of a rebel but who also may happen to be mentally ill.
For all the elite conservative insistence that the less-well-off have skin in the game when it comes to government safety net programs, they are remarkable unbothered by how many of their own supporters feel they have no skin in the game of the “prevailing political setup, with its elections, its Constitution,” etc.
Pervasive inequality overrides more ivory-tower theories of governance. For strivers who lack spare time, holding power itself is more important than niceties about how one acquires and maintains it. Especially in the face of economic inequality beyond the imaginations of Gilded Age barons and pauperish immigrants with “funny” names.
Trump gave his cult people to blame in lieu of higher wages and better health care. For many that was acceptable. But at the core, it is “economic inequality that has split us into groups that confront each other just short of war. It’s economic inequality that has split us into the well educated and the not well educated,” Shawn writes. And those alienated Trump fans are still critical to what happens next:
Our common future, the future of everyone in the society, depends on which way these particular tens of millions of people will turn, what they become, what will happen with them. Like it or not, this is the group that will determine our fate.
Perhaps. But for now they are not only in thrall to a man who is mentally ill, but addicted to a network of propagandistic media that exploits them for the purposes of some of the very elite he encourages them to hate. So long as it feeds their animosity, they seem not to notice they are being actively manipulated and encouraged to destroy the very (imagined) country they claim to love.
Getting out of this mess is like extracting oneself from a Chinese finger trap. Struggling against it seems only to tighten it.