“The spectacle of cruel laughter”
It’s likely most of the Monday-morning quarterbacking on why Trump won last week is little more than speculation based on pundits’ existing biases. What novelist Joseph O’Neill offers The New York Time Review of Books is as good as any. Maybe better for being skeptical of conventional wisdom:
The current prevailing theory about Trump’s victory is that most Americans, irked by an unpleasant encounter with inflation, cast an anti-incumbent vote without giving much thought to the consequences of that vote for US democracy. I don’t totally buy this whoops! theory. My sense is that, in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think, young men in particular. And I believe that many more millions are fascinated by Trump not for his supposed business prowess but for his transparent wish to hurt others. He is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed. Of course, political science is not designed to investigate this kind of stuff. The clearest insights we have come from the realm of philosophy and literature. Hannah Arendt and Primo Levi did not rely on focus groups.
Regarding Arendt and Levi, somewhere last week I saw a comment that half of Americans outed themselves as the kind of people who would turn over Anne Frank.
Likely, a large portion of that half are simply grossly misinformed on immigration, crime, and the economy, Dean Baker points out with the help of a graph, but which portion? Is being misinformed on policy a cause or a symptom of Trumpism?
Digby wrote the morning after:
It’s not about policy no matter how much people insist that it is. We know this because in places like Missouri voters just passed initiatives for abortion rights, an increase in the minimum wage, and paid sick leave, all Democratic policies, while overwhelmingly voting for a Republican senator and a president who strongly oppose these things. This is about aesthetics and attitudes. A majority of Americans want an autocratic strongman show and Donald Trump and the Republicans are happy to give it to them.
Referencing several sources, Heather Cox Richardson notes (I added links for you):
[Salon’s Amanda] Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
For decades, in fact, as I wrote at Huffington Post in 2009 about guys in my office back in the 1990s.
“We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era,” Adam Serwer explained in “The Cruelty Is the Point” six years ago. “It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.”
Serwer wasn’t done:
Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.
You see it in the gleefulness of online taunts from Trumpers after his reelection. Others phoned theirs in to our local Democratic headquarters last week. Here’s a classic from 2020:
Daniel Drake asks O’Neill:
What do you think the first hundred days of Trump’s term will look like? Are there any specific policies or obsessions that you think will occupy him?
I think we can expect an attempt to round up, incarcerate, and deport tens of thousands of suspected undocumented immigrants. We can expect a flurry of executive orders designed to transform and weaponize the Department of Justice. We can expect business leaders to gather in the Oval Office to pay homage to the president. We can expect Elon Musk to be horribly prominent, possibly as an enforcer of Trump’s promises to impose tariffs on imported goods. I’m going to assume that the Democratic Party, as we speak, is preparing for these and other eventualities. I am sure Trump will overreach. It is up to the opposition to make him pay for his overreaches. It is not our job to help him “succeed.” It’s not our job to “unite the country” or, as President Biden has suggested, “turn down the temperature.” It’s our job to make Trump fail, fail again, fail worse.
Trump’s already signalling that overreach.
I always suspected Trump couldn’t read (/s): “But citizenship by birth is established by the mere fact of birth under the circumstances defined in the Constitution. Every person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, becomes at once a citizen of the United States, and needs no naturalization.”
Nevertheless, Trump expects (and has reason to) that the MAGA majority on the Roberts Supreme Court will reject precedent again and make the Fourteenth Amendment say what their king wants it to say.
Authoritarian followers do what they’re told. Even on the Supreme Court.