Why Postmodernism Led to Trump

Prashant Parikh
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read

As is widely known, postmodernism is a broad outlook that emerged in the 1960s partly in opposition to its predecessor, modernism.

The latter movement existed from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It housed many different tendencies but its common core lay in a rejection of the past and a commitment to progress based on science. Both aspects derived from the Enlightenment a century and a half earlier.

Postmodern views also have many mutually contradictory aspects but share the following key features: a questioning of grand narratives of progress, relativism about truth, and the acceptance of differences between self and other. Whatever their merits, and there undoubtedly are some, their primary political expression has been through multiculturalism and identity politics. This orientation generally focuses on varied group identities and cultural forms at the expense of broader economic undercurrents in society.

Each of these three features — questioning progress, relativism, and respect for difference — has seeped into everyday life and often shapes our perceptions, thoughts, and actions without our realizing it. How did they affect the Clinton and Trump campaigns?

The questioning of progress made it easier for Clinton to sidestep the urgent issue of economic inequality and emphasize equality of opportunity instead. The acceptance of difference shifted the Democrats’ attention from economics to culture via a focus on multiculturalism and identity politics. Lastly, relativism about truth can lead at a political level to ignoring objective facts and certainly allowed Trump to do it freely. Incidentally, Sanders rejected all three postmodern features.

It is now clear that the white working class, mainly men but also women, enabled Trump to win. It found Clinton’s avoidance of economic inequality and support of minority cultures disingenuous and it simply discounted Trump’s distortions of the facts. Thus, the political consequences of the postmodern ethos led directly to Trump’s victory. (Modernism isn’t blameless either as aspects of it led to fascism.)

Why attribute these developments to postmodernism? Why not simply identify more surface issues like the gradual disenfranchisement of the white working class and its neglect by Clinton’s campaign? The reason is that postmodernism and its three key dimensions are an underlying deep structure of the age and a consideration of such deeper causes allows deeper and more enduring responses to be contemplated.

Consider two crosscutting divisions of the US electorate into left and right (or liberal and conservative) and elites and masses. Earlier, these two distinctions — left/right and elites/masses — overlapped because the left largely represented the masses but now they have diverged because of the shift from modernism to postmodernism with the concomitant shift from the economy to culture. That is, the left which was previously aligned with economic factors has now gotten aligned with cultural factors. As a result, Clinton ended up representing primarily the liberal elite rather than the liberal masses whereas Trump primarily represented the conservative masses. (Variants of the same analysis can be used to explain the rise of politicians on the far right in other parts of the world and it can also explain Brexit.)

Identifying postmodernism as the underlying cause for Trump’s win makes it easier to see that both the economy and culture are structurally important: earlier during modernism culture was sidelined in favor of economic factors; now, the reverse is true. Some feel belatedly that Sanders might have fared better than Clinton against Trump. This may be true but what is needed for the future is a candidate who can straddle both, someone who can combine aspects of modernism such as economic progress for all with aspects of postmodernism such as cultural nuance and context-sensitivity. Perhaps this very election will propel actions that enable a less divided era to emerge, one that engages with people on both economic and cultural fronts and brings them together in a shared social project.

)
Prashant Parikh

Written by

Prashant Parikh does research in philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence and writes occasionally on art and politics.