Triumph of Ill-Will: Trump’s Election and What Happens Next
I never want to allow myself to forget how I felt last night, or how I still feel today.
Donald Trump — reality TV star, sexual predator, septuagenarian toddler who pulled himself up by his father’s small loan of $1,000,000 bootstraps to become the grotesque embodiment of American excess and wealth fetishization — was not supposed to win this election. Pollsters, pundits, campaign officials, friends, and assholes like me all promised that Clinton was certain to sweep the election, despite her historically low favorability ratings (41.8 favorable, 54.4 unfavorable — a negative spread of 12.6 percent) which were nowhere near as low as Trump’s (37.5 to 58.5 — a negative spread of 21 percent). The only question most of us were asking 24 hours ago was whether it would be a Clinton win or a Clinton landslide.
Certainly the curiosity of Trump’s victory will require explanation, and many pollsters, I imagine, are spending today soul-searching, perhaps while also job-searching. The hilariously titled FiveThirtyEight article, “The Polls Missed Trump. We Asked Pollsters Why.” — while mainly focused on absolving polling organizations of blame and trying to minimize the egregiousness of the polling errors — makes the suggestion that Trump supporters were too embarrassed to tell pollsters who they were really voting for, though even that (definitely plausible) suggestion wouldn’t explain the severity of the mistake.
My own, equally inadequate theory doesn’t focus on the mistaken polling so much as the mistaken popular consensus that a Clinton win was a sure thing: the fact that pundits, entertainers, and political operatives likely live in as much of an ideological bubble as anyone else is not insignificant, and having met or seen or heard from very few Trump supporters allowed us all to imagine they didn’t exist in great numbers. (I can’t remember how many times I’ve watched, say, a Late Show bit and stupidly extrapolated from the reactions of myself and the studio audience to the entire American electorate, wondering: What on earth do Trump supporters have left to watch for entertainment? The answer as of today is: the news.) Of course, this too leaves much unexplained, and we’ll have to work over the coming weeks to understand exactly what happened between the polls and the polling places, while pushing back against the ready-made (before Election Day!) narratives plenty of pundits will be all too happy to provide.
Setting aside the expectation vs. reality paradox of this election, we have still to grapple with the reality of an incoming Trump administration. I’ve seen an incredible outpouring of concern and compassion from friends and strangers alike over the last day, and much of it hinges on the idea that things are about to get very, very bad, and so we’ve got to guard ourselves against defeatism, hopelessness and complacency. But it’s understandably hard to hold onto hope while staring down a calamitous election outcome that has largely existed in the American consciousness only as late-night gallows humor for the past year-and-a-half. I’m still trying to figure this shit out myself, and I don’t pretend to have any more insight into what comes next than anybody else. That said, I thought it’d be useful — for myself as much as for whomever else might read this — to organize some possible causes for hope into writing.
Some on the left have suggested that Trump’s election was actually to be fought for, based on some kind of accelerationist understanding of class struggle and political engagement. These people are awful. They’re also exceedingly rare, despite the lazy and inexplicably ubiquitous caricature of ex-Sanders supporters turning out in droves to vote for Trump to “bring about the revolution” in some vaguely (mis)understood way. I am not among those who see no difference between Clinton’s election and Trump’s — though I’m appalled at the choice presented to voters by an ostensibly democratic process, and, from what we can tell, so are voters — and I think it’s cruel and idiotic to pretend it makes no difference who is the president of the United States for the next four years. People will die because of what happened last night, and as tempting as it may be in theory (and in a long view of practice) to hope for a corrupt and unworkable system to collapse on itself as soon as possible, I refuse to ignore the harm done in the short-term to the poor and the marginalized of the world in favor of a theoretical ploy for some fruitful chaos.
However, none of us have to be accelerationists to find ourselves having elected Trump and hoping for some good to be possible now, either because of Trump’s election or in spite of it. Below are several possible reasons to remain hopeful about the near future.
Trump Cannot Live Up to All of His Promises
Granted, Trump now has the benefit of a Supreme Court vacancy to fill, and a Republican-controlled House and Senate, giving Republicans and conservatives control of all three branches of government. (Recent history, including the brief window from 2009–2011 when Democrats controlled the White House and both chambers of Congress, suggests this state of affairs is unlikely to persist beyond two or four years.)
However, Trump built his campaign around unsubstantiated promises and vague or contradictory policy proposals — his platform is practically a laundry list of impeachable offenses. His most notorious promise, to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico, would be prohibitively expensive to construct and would do little to prevent illegal immigration (for many reasons, notably the resistance of the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose tribal land lies on the U.S.-Mexico border, leaving the possibility of a 75-mile-long gap in any such border wall). This has been pointed out ad nauseum by commentators, and it’s possible many Trump supporters even doubt that the wall will be built, or would do much to halt illegal immigration, being satisfied instead with the symbolic stand for white supremacy contained within the proposal itself.
But the fact remains that facts, so undervalued in this election cycle, will start to accumulate as soon as Trump takes office — facts about his administration’s performance and inevitable shortcomings — and while loyal Trump supporters may not be easily convinced that his policies are not living up to his promises, many of the people who voted for him while holding their noses will, hopefully, come to realize this.
Trump’s Unpopularity
And there were many people who voted for Trump (and Clinton) while plugging their noses and suppressing their gag-reflexes. Clinton in fact won the popular vote while losing the electoral college, and Trump’s absurdly negative favorability ratings suggest that most people — by a wide margin — dislike our president-elect. This is going to make it difficult for him to cast himself in a positive light from the moment he takes office — I don’t see a “first 100 days” grace period for a President Trump (and to be sure, it’s our responsibility not to give it to him).
Add to Trump’s unpopularity among voters his unpopularity in his own party, and it becomes difficult to see how he’ll be able to make full use of the GOP’s current monopoly on the centers of government power. GOP lawmakers who were politically forced to disavow Trump in the primaries (and even ones who cycled through the endorse-disavow-endorse process several times this election) may be hesitant to work with Trump to enact his more extreme proposals.
None of this is great news, but these first two factors — Trump’s unpopularity and the impossibility of a Trump administration which lives up to even the most important of his campaign promises — give us reason to think that there are at least major limitations to the fallout from Trump’s win.
Younger Voters
Now for some actual good news.
For all the shaming of millennials that’s gone on this election, “If Only People Under 35 Voted” is a pretty goddamn blue electoral map. Young voters supported Clinton over Trump 55%–37%, even after we voted overwhelmingly (overwhelmingly) for Sanders in the primary. Clinton’s support among young voters was significantly less than, for instance, Obama’s over Romney, but if you’re going to pick a group to castigate for last night’s results, keep looking (perhaps for, I dunno, white people).
Older Democratic-leaning writers seem not to want to acknowledge this, eager at the chance to scapegoat a demographic they’re not likely to lose to Republicans. They talk endlessly about how disengaged and apathetic young voters are, only to mock us when we show ourselves to be extremely engaged and passionate in a primary battle. Perhaps they feel intellectually threatened by a generation that grew up online and is constantly and comfortably swimming in new information and perspectives. The trope of naïve, disengaged millennials is useful to writers who want to pretend they’re radical without putting in the continual work. “Grow up!” was a common refrain during the primary, but the Democratic Party absolutely needs young voters in order to exist. So when we reject the candidates they’ve elevated, they can appeal to our naïveté and entitlement to avoid taking responsibility — but they’d better get us back before Election Day. Last night, in large part, they succeeded in that.
Clinton herself (in leaked audio that was, I felt, undeservedly cast as mocking young people) explained her take on the motives of young voters in this way: “If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing.”
If anything, the fact that young voters are unsatisfied and demanding more of their politicians is surely a good sign for the future of American politics.
Our Interrupted Dogmatic Slumber
It’s sad that many of us were able to ignore until last night (and many more of us still) just how horribly, fundamentally, essentially racist, patriarchal, and xenophobic our country is. Those of us who aren’t so easily able to escape the ramifications and manifestations of American white supremacy and patriarchy have known this, have had to know this, and have been telling a population that largely refuses to be bothered to listen. Much of American political history can be pretty thoroughly written in the stories of waves of immigrants and the resulting backlash against them by one faction — and the opportunistic capitalization on a new voting bloc by another.
Corey Robin, in his book The Reactionary Mind, defines conservatism as “a meditation on — and theoretical rendition of — the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” (pg. 4). But conservatism is not, or not merely, traditionalism, “the universal ‘vegetative’ tendency to remain attached to things as they are, which is manifested in nonpolitical behaviors such as a refusal to buy a new pair of pants until the current pair is shredded beyond repair” (pg. 22). Rather, conservatism is the grasping at something (some power or comfort) that has already disappeared: “Where the traditionalist can take the objects of desire for granted—he can enjoy them as if they are at hand because they are at hand—the conservative cannot. He seeks to enjoy them precisely as they are being—or have been—taken away.” (pg. 23). Conservatism is always, fundamentally and literally, reactionary.
Sudden political expressions of conservatism reflect more hidden fears of growing insecurity and instability of previous power dynamics:
Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power. “Here is the secret of the opposition to woman’s equality in the state,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote. “Men are not ready to recognize it in the home.” Behind the riot in the street or debate in Parliament is the maid talking back to her mistress, the worker disobeying her boss. That is why our political arguments — not only about the family but also the welfare state, civil rights, and much else — can be so explosive: they touch upon the most personal relations of power. (pg. 10)
This is all to say that Trump’s election, clearly the culmination of a reactionary movement of malcontented Americans, is the unstable and ephemeral backlash (or, in Van Jones’ term, the white-lash) against an even more formidable shift in power dynamics already underway; conservatism exists as reaction, and it always comes too late, because it’s only animated after-the-fact by the very disturbance and disappearance of that power.
This is all sounding overly theoretical, perhaps, so let me put it this way: if enough Americans were disturbed by developments in American political life to make them elect Trump (and — God help us — that’s the situation), it means those developments are already producing changes in power relations. Trump’s election, as noted above, is an unstable and seemingly unsustainable development, but it points to a movement that, with work, can be a sustained assault on American structural intolerance and exploitation. Trump’s election is the counterrevolution that proves the existence of a revolution.
It shouldn’t have taken Trump’s election to awaken us from complacency, but I’ve already seen and felt the reverberations of this disaster in my friends’ words and in my own thoughts. This piece of writing itself is (a small) part of my own response — everywhere I’ve seen people resolving to put themselves to work, and I feel similarly committed.
Now’s the right time to transcend any hesitations of false modesty and self-doubt, acknowledge your talents, and force yourself to put them to use. False modesty is worthless. In an effort to avoid arrogance (or the appearance of arrogance) — the overvaluing of oneself at the expense of others — we often internalize a pacifying, overcompensating sense of helplessness. I do, anyway. But you’re a lot more useful to others if you start with the assumption that you can help, even if that ends up not being true. This election showed us, among many other things, that lots of people were made dangerously effective by ignoring their incompetence. We can’t afford, in response, to ignore our competence.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot of Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” recently, and the conclusion of this election has made it even more relevant. Yeats has a cyclical view of history, but one in which, when things do repeat themselves, they repeat as the opposite of their first iteration. So, in the second stanza, Yeats imagines the second coming of Christ as the arrival of the Antichrist. However, it’s the first stanza that strikes me as relevant (or, at least, more useful than imagining Trump to be the Antichrist):
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
We’ve seen plenty of “passionate intensity” from America’s worst over the last year-and-a-half, but the conviction and resolve now coming from its best give me some measure of hope.
But it’s true: the center won’t hold. We have to adapt.
