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?