By Fintan O’Toole
Disinhibition will be the order of the day in Donald Trump’s America.
December 5, 2024 issue, written November 7, 2024
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/12/05/the-second-coming-fintan-otoole/
Excerpts:
Biden has been very good at doing what Trump claims to be capable of but isn’t: getting big things done. The president had tangible successes in overseeing the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine, reducing unemployment to its lowest level in fifty years, extending access to health care, beginning the transition of American industry to a post-carbon economy, and tackling the dreadful state of much of the country’s infrastructure.
Yet he was terrible at communicating those achievements to the general public. This was partly because of his wan and increasingly frail presence. But it was also because many Americans saw his presidency as a truck stop rather than a highway, a hiatus rather than a trajectory. Biden got elected by offering quiet and healing. Perhaps Americans got bored with quietness.
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The very existence of a competent federal government, going about the ordinary business of trying to make people’s lives better, allowed for a creeping amnesia. It became possible to forget what it felt like to live under a Trump presidency, to wipe away all the reasons Trump left the Oval Office with an abysmal approval rating of 34 percent. The paroxysms of rage, the sulks of self-pity, the murderous ineptitude of his handling of the pandemic, the relentless lies and untethered violence of his attempted coup—all of this receded into the past with extraordinary rapidity.
[..]
It’s tempting, in some ways, to do the same for the election result as a whole—to normalize it by putting it down to prosaic explanations like the impact of inflation and the anti-incumbency mood that has swept through most of the democratic world. Those factors are of course very real. Inflation, in particular, acts as a cipher for a much wider range of perceptions, not only of immediate hardship but of unfairness and powerlessness. But we must not lose sight of the much larger consequence of Trump’s victory: it decisively shifts the idea of who is a normal American.
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It was not wrong to see this election as pivotal, and what America has pivoted toward is a knowing and deliberate transfer of power to a nexus of interest groups whose interests are inimical to pluralist democracy. One of them is of course Trump and his family. He will have free rein for personal vengeance against his enemies and for untrammeled self-enrichment.
Another is made up of fundamentalist Christians who will gain control of federal education and health care policies and of federal court appointments and use that control to further roll back the gains made over many decades for the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and people who just believe that they should be able to live their lives as they see fit. A third is the oligarchs who will be allowed to do as they see fit, whether in a free-for-all of oil and gas drilling or in already dangerous areas like social media disinformation, AI, and cryptocurrencies.
Trump’s second coming may not quite herald the end of the world, but it will hand the ship of state over to a motley crew of libertines and libertarians, control freaks and fanatics. It will stage its own spectacles of mass roundups and treason trials for the amusement of the many millions who are, it now seems abundantly clear, entertained by exhibitions of cruelty. It will be a nonstop show, its cacophonous soundtrack amplified by Elon Musk and the thriving denizens of the digital manosphere.
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Harris’s defeat showed that grace, good humor, intelligence, and energy—all of which she demonstrated amply—will not be enough. There has to be a capacity to tap into and redirect the discontent that Trump has been able to channel into hatred and fear. Trump has moved American politics away from parties and toward movements, away from process and toward performance. Those who oppose him will have to be better at playing on this new stage. Harris showed that the Democrats can summon crowds, that they too have the potential to create and sustain the kind of permanent campaign that has allowed Trump to ride out every setback.
Such a campaign must start from the recognition that the people who can form it now constitute the official “enemy from within,” a minority at risk of becoming, unless they can find an effective voice, the erroneous margin of the newly dominant America
