Trump and Post-Ideological America

Amid the post-election havoc was the recent gathering at Harvard University of political strategists from the campaigns of Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Hilary Clinton, there to discuss how they won and how they lost.

Like the election itself, the event was less than civil with shouting and accusations flying. One man who managed to raise his voice over the din was Tony Fabrizo, Trump’s pollster. He explained to those who managed to stop talking for a moment his take on Trump’s victory.

“Donald Trump is post-ideological. His movement transcends ideology,” Fabrizio said, according to the Washington Post. “Through his own antennae – and, trust me, many times I had this conversation with him – Donald Trump understood the fold in American politics. It’s the reason so many Trump supporters and so many (Bernie) Sanders supporters agreed on so many things.”

Fabrizio appears to have an interesting point. How else to explain a liberal Democratic billionaire, posing as a Republican conservative and supported by white supremacists, convincing tens of millions of voters who pull from both political parties and from all socio-economic and ethnic groups to vote for him?

Much of the post-election analysis has focused on the white working-class voter turning out because they felt unattended to for so many years. Some may have bought Trump’s claim to return manufacturing jobs and restore the Rust Belt, but that doesn’t begin to explain the election results.

The last time voters ushered a wealthy candidate into the White House as champion of the working class was the height of the Great Depression. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs may have well saved American capitalism, but those policies earned him the scorn of his upper-class brethren who viewed his pragmatic approach to policies that were progressive, if not radical, as a betrayal.

Other than his penchant as businessman wheeler and dealer, Trump enters the White House, and government, pretty much a blank slate. Who knows exactly what his agenda will be – conservative-business or liberal-progressive? Or a bit of both?

As the first president to use social media almost exclusive of any other forms of media, Trump appears to be feeling his way along as to how to govern. It seems a monumental task for him; a 70-year-old man who all his life has pretty much did things his way and succeeded.

No doubt that is how he expects to govern, but he may have a rude awakening when he realizes there are many – perhaps too many for him – checks and balances that will require him to wheel and deal. He will have to negotiate with everyone from a Senate committee chairman to the Chinese premier.

Trump’s election has disrupted a status quo that many argue has long needed disrupting. However, at least for a majority of Americans, Trump’s crass behavior, coarse communications and seeming alignment with extremist groups such as white supremacists makes him unfit to serve as president. But if the status quo needed disrupting the only candidate in this election that could have done so was the only non-status quo candidate among the nearly 20 who vied for the presidency since the primaries – Trump.

Perhaps Trump is post-ideological, elected on a post-ideological wave. Does that mean America has an ideological vacuum? The Oxford Dictionaries defines post-ideological as “a time in which (a particular) society is no longer characterized by a strong adherence to political or social ideologies.”

Trump’s pollster, Fabrizio, thinks so, as he told the gathering at Harvard’s Kennedy School, “We really live in a world where everybody thinks that ideology is linear, and that, ‘If you answer these 10 questions correctly, that makes you a conservative.’ But not every conservative is pro-life. Not every conservative is anti-gay marriage. Not every conservative puts 100 percent emphasis on this or that.”

If Fabrizio’s post-ideological argument is correct, then that might explain why the media, the Clinton campaign and the majority of Americans who voted for her missed Trump’s ascension. It might explain why voters from Christian evangelicals to Republican conservatives to Democratic union members found salvation in a billionaire who lives in a gilded tower in New York City.

Depending on the influence of political leaders in power, ideological vacuums could produce positive, progressive change. History shows they often fill with destructive forces. This is why the white supremacist alt-right is more than worrisome. Trump appointed an alt-right nationalist, Steve Bannon, as his senior aide. The alt-right believe Trump has their back. Does he?

Sometimes, ideological vacuums are filled by groups behind political leaders. After the election, an alt-right leader, Richard Spencer, appeared at Texas A&M University and gave a speech to about 400 people. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Spencer said this when a student asked how he could claim the United States started as an all-white nation when Native Americans were already here when Europeans arrived:

“It was terrible, bloody and violent, but we conquered this continent,” Spencer said. “We won and we got to define what America means and what this continent means. America, at the end of the day, belongs to white men.”

If this is a post-ideological era, does America want to define itself as this? Or does America want to define itself as what it actually is, a diverse nation fighting for equality and inclusivity for all people?

The Weimar Republicans

On a recent visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., where I was chaperoning my son’s eighth grade class, I was struck by the exhibits detailing Adolf Hitler and the Nazi’s political rise. Some of the same phrases and words used then are echoes in today’s campaign for president, particularly from one candidate.

For years, the country has been wrought with financial instability, a government unable to work effectively, and a segment of the population fearful of perceived threats from a religious and ethnic minority. That country was Germany in 1933, the year Hitler and the Nazis came to power, replacing the Weimar Republic, a poorly structured republic with weak leaders. Many voters wanted a leader with a strong hand. The country became fertile ground for Hitler and the Nazis.

To be absolutely clear, Donald Trump is not the next Adolf Hitler and Republican Party leaders are not Nazis, but what is deeply concerning is the language Trump chooses to use, and the inability in the GOP’s high ranks to demonstrate unequivocally the party’s opposition to those words. This is where his fellow GOP candidates have failed. They allowed Trump to bully and intimidate them and now they look weak – could any one of them stand up to North Korea’s boy dictator let alone Vladimir Putin? – and Trump looks invincible.

One of the searing lessons from Hitler and the Nazis is that words of exclusion and hate spoken from a popular leader will telegraph to the ignorant and intolerant that hating certain groups is acceptable in society. Repeat those words often enough – it doesn’t take many times to convey the message – and things get out of control.

Hitler and the Nazis knew this well. After priming the anti-Semitic pump with state-sanctioned proclamations of intolerance, they had to do little to get the intolerant, fearful segments of the population – Hitler’s willing executioners – to attack their Jewish neighbors and anyone who opposed their ideas. The Nazis just stood by to make sure the attacks were ruthless enough.

Trump’s atrocious racial language about Muslims and Latino immigrants has now done the same thing. The willing executioners are loose, whether Trump wants them to be or not. Ex-Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke broadcasts to his racist followers that to not vote for Trump is to oppose the white race. Trump rejected Duke’s endorsement, but his language has endorsed their intolerant thinking and behavior.

Like the citizens in the Weimar Republic, many of Trump’s supporters are disenchanted, rightly or wrongly, with the federal government and the two political parties. They seek a strong leader to make things right, like getting rid of Muslims, Mexicans and anyone else they fear is the cause of their problems.

As Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post wrote in a recent column, it was just a matter of time before a candidate like Trump, inspiring the masses by spewing invective speech, would come along and get in reach of a major party’s nomination.

“It grows from the failure of our political system to adapt to demographic change, economic disruption and a reorganizing world,” Robinson wrote.

The same words could have been written about the Weimar Republic in 1933, which struggled with weak political parties, social transformation and the Great Depression. Robert Reich, former U.S. Labor Secretary and now public policy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recently wrote this about the election: “Some Americans are rebelling against all this by supporting an authoritarian demagogue who wants to fortify America against foreigners as well as foreign-made goods. Others are rebelling by joining a so-called “‘political revolution.’”

In any other time, Trump’s calls for banning Muslims and walling out Mexicans from the United States would have qualified him – in the view of Republicans and Democrats – as an intolerant extremist unqualified to lead a nation whose credo is tolerance; a place where we welcome all people as created equal.

Instead, as he wins one GOP primary after another, and makes one hateful statement after another, the Republican Party appears ready to capitulate in the worst way, by warming up to him, but only because he could win the White House.

As Dana Milbank of the Washington Post reported last week, “Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that it would be a ‘no-brainer’ to support the nominee, even if it’s Trump. ‘Winning is the antidote to a lot of things,’ he reasoned.”

Perhaps, but when the intolerant start burning mosques because they were inspired by Trump’s ascension, what would be the antidote for that? If the Republicans or Trump think that would be something they could control and stop, then I advise them to visit the Holocaust Museum.