How We Fix The Problem That Caused Trump
I am glad that Donald Trump is gone.
Scratch that — I am relieved that Donald Trump is gone.
Gone from the White House and, more importantly, gone from Twitter.
He has been a tumor upon the body politic, steadily enlarging to the detriment of our civic health. For four years he has attacked our sanity and our feelings of kinship with one another, like cancer does healthy cells. Then, on January 6, the tumor metastasized beyond anything we could have anticipated: into the first armed insurrection to breach the doors of the U.S. Capitol since the War of 1812.
Now he is gone, and amidst the rubble and ruins remaining after a breathless four years, we can all take a deep breath in relief. It’s over.
But that is all we should do.
Many will, and already have, treated President Biden’s inauguration as a moment of salvation: like the last four years has been one, long Good Friday, and it is at long last Easter Sunday. But those people will experience the same devastation that inevitably follows treating politics like a quasi-religion — and politicians like quasi-gods. Witness the reaction of some of the most Devoted Disciples of Donald to his final flight from the White House:
Yes, Donald Trump is gone, and because of that we can begin to heal, but the problems that made Donald Trump possible are still with us.
Indeed, most of them have only gotten worse.
A diverse, polyglot society that shows general tolerance towards those who live differently than they do, that generally trusts its large institutions, and whose citizens generally feel fulfilled and respected is not a society that elects Donald Trump.
Our society is the opposite of this ideal: a society that is intolerant, distrustful, and alienated — and that has been further radicalized by the incendiary forces of social media and cable news. The upshot is an “American carnage” that Donald Trump was all-too-happy to exploit in 2016 — and that he was then all-too-happy to exacerbate for four years. As Yuval Levin writes:
The forces that brought Trump to power — the frustration with the nation’s leadership class, the alienation and dissatisfaction, the mix of profound and ridiculous passions that goes by the name of populism — have not been effectively integrated into our political self-awareness, nor have they been addressed, or satisfied, or dissipated. The disordered character of Donald Trump has driven some of his supporters deep into a terrifying realm of self-destructive fantasies, where they have no right to expect to be taken seriously. But most of his supporters, and most of their concerns, have just been left frustrated by both Trump and his opponents. And a sizable contingent of voters on the left is in a populist mood of its own, which will also want a say in what is to come in our politics.
To begin to rectify this — to begin to put back the pieces of e pluribus and with them remake an unum again — will take much more than just replacing Donald Trump with Joe Biden — though that is a great first step: politics as entertainment makes for neither healthy entertainment nor for productive politics. Indeed, a more boring Biden presidency will allow us to disengage and de-escalate — no matter how much all of us really, truly, deep-down are loathe to let go of Trump.
The next, more immediate, and much more significant step to repair the pre- and post-Trump problems will be to stop the quixotic quest for “unity.” In a continental republic like the United States — a continental republic where the farmers of rural Iowa pledge allegiance to the same flag as the urban professionals of Manhatten — the pursuit of “unity” beyond a shared-devotion to broad ideals like the rule of law and representative government only sows disunity. “Unity” just means “accept what I want or you’re beyond the pale” — and if you keep telling people they’re beyond the pale, they eventually act like it.
Besides, democracy (if that is something we still want) is not about unity — it’s about constructing processes for disunity, for disagreement, for debate. If we want to make the post-Trump years a true post-Trump age, we ought to embrace disunity and democracy, or, as Jonah Goldberg puts it:
Let democracy work by letting people argue — peacefully and hopefully civilly. Let democracy work by letting different communities arrange their lives in ways that work for them. Let democracy, which is about honest disagreement and not manufactured or imposed agreement from above, work.
Let Iowa be Iowa. Let Manhatten be Manhatten. Let us restore the kinship we at one time felt with one another, despite our very real differences, by respecting those differences. Let us accept that those with whom we disagree are Americans too — Americans who believe what they believe, and live as they live, in good conscience and good faith, as wrong as we might think that they are. Above all, let us remember, as a previous president once reminded us, that “we are not enemies, but friends.”
If we are to believe this again, and to act in this spirit, we will reverse and remedy the sense of alienation that has forced us into separate tribes. Then, and only then, we will not only have solved the problem of Trump, but we will have solved the problem that caused Trump.
And then, we truly can rejoice.
