Trump in the Age of the New Denial of Tribalism
What You Think You Know You Don't
Alexis de Tocqueville, that penetrating and contrarian mind who first took a completely disinterested view of the American Experiment and, who, unlike his fellow “Europeans” and Frenchman, looked with a positively (as opposed to negatively) jaundiced eye at its fruits, wrote, in Democracy in America, “Among a democratic people, where there is no hereditary wealth, every man works to earn a living. [...] Labor is held in honor; the prejudice is not against but in its favor.” He added: “Equality of conditions not only ennobles the notion of labor, but raises the notion of labor as a source of profit.” Here we have a man willing to see the virtues of capitalism as the root of a kind of equality so long as hard work and honesty are upheld as the bedrock virtues of a culture. de Tocqueville, the chronicler of the decline of the aristocracy in Europe and in France, was, it seems, surprised and delighted that some new set of virtues might replace the degradation and inherent inequality that attended the culture of his own France—against which the French Revolution had gone too far, eradicating it but erecting itself as the “new” populist tyranny to replace the old aristocratic one. One tryanny (even of the mob) is merely a replication of another in a new costume, he seems to have understood. Hence, all of our dystopian literature can be boiled down to a single message: Some seemingly virtuous class rises up and eventually says to the masses, ‘I’m going to give you what you asked for, good and hard. And you are going to accept it.”
That Plato was honest enough to admit from the outset that the only way any utopian society could function properly is if those under the yoke simply accepted the yoke is admirable. For, from the outset, the Greek thinker gives the lie to Utopianism altogether and this explains why so many Plato apologists themselves have spilled so much ink trying to rescue him by adding to his writings a smidgeon of irony—the post-modern excuse and explanation for, well, everything. Never mind that Socrates’ own acceptance of death by hemlock eschewed irony; this means that Plato’s most ardent defenders argue him a coward. Let them. That’s honest after its own fashion too—or at least a kind of Freudian slip to which they deliberately blind themselves.
At least Aristotle fled Athens “lest it sin against philosophy twice,” and said so without subterfuge. Now that’s honesty. He spoke a truth in which he believed and, while he may or may not have been willing to die for it, he was certainly willing to live for it.
de Toqueville shares this Aristotelian honesty in that he was willing to look at the American Experiment with a diagnostic and scientific eye. He was the quintessential but perhaps the last disinterested eye to look at “America” for what it could teach him about what Europe had wrong about everything. Clearly he cared that it was up to human beings to fashion a social and political world that was just, true, right, and charitable. His writings reflect that he saw the French excesses as devoted to the right things willing to sin for them in an “ends-justifies-the-means” way. His writings on America reflect that he saw something different among the hoi-poloi who fled the Ancien Regime for a new start in a new land.
Did they bring their traditional sins and biases with them? Of course they did. Did they tolerate the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery (the fruit of the very Ancien Regime they fled even as it was the truly modern iteration of man subjugating man in an entirely newly perverted way)? Yes—but only for a relatively short time. Did they displace Native populations? Yes—but that is to mask the fact that they also beat them in a war the tribal populations of the Americas completely understood and accepted losing (at least at the time—though not without sadness for the loss of their own noble way of living). What becomes apparent in short order, of course, is that the founding documents of the American Experiment, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, make chattel slavery—any form of slavery—and the forceful displacement of native peoples—completely indefensible. Though de Tocqueville did not live to see it (he died in 1859), I suspect that he would have seen (given an endless hope that human beings are by their natures good) the inevitability of the end of slavery as well as Colonialism. Not only in America—but everywhere. In fact, I’d argue that his writings point admirably toward an equality among men and women of all races, creeds, nations, religions, and cultures based in his core belief that the motivating factor among humans is toward true perfection of their own natures. In this, I think he agreed with the most “noble” of the Pagans and with the most basic of the Christians with whom he must have been deeply familiar—and with whom he might have held not only respect but sympathy.
Though we live in a time that invites us to self-flagellate for the sins of the past (slavery chief among those of which we are most guilty), I can hear de Tocqueville wisely pointing out to us and to others of European descent that the end of slavery began in England and was accomplished legally and literally in the United States first, not last (the first Constitution to explicitly outlaw its practice was the state constitution of Vermont). The “New” world, which the Frenchman embraced, taught the Old World something it sorely needed to learn thereby.
We misunderstand our own moment in the here and now if we do not recognize the universal and enduring existence of tribalism as the fundamental mode in which human relations are expressed between groups of people. The Enlightenment rather nicely unpacked this reality and offered a vocabulary for discussing it—but added terms foreign to the reality of human experience as it had been lived from the beginning.
Case in point: Modern slavery was recognized and called the “peculiar” institution precisely because it sought to break up the tribal societies it attacked and dismantled as they represented a value system at odds with the “new” humanism that vanquished God, Christianity and Judaism, and religion in general (in Europe and eventually the West, anyway), and replaced it with the modern utopianism that would usher in a new age of perfection among human beings. In contrast to the ancient forms of slavery—which were promulgated precisely upon the idea of human dignity—the new institution of slavery denied that dignity, ripped people from their families without replacing them, and denied the values of those subjugated as ever legitimate in the first place. Ancient slavery, on the other hand, recognized basic human dignity and, while it denied basic rights to the subjugated, based that denigration in a “winner take all” mentality that was underpinned by the idea that human beings were supported by their gods, had dignity, had free will, could fail (and could fail) but had to suffer for their defeats—and these defeats only resulted because the defeated had failed in their duties to their own gods. For the ancient Greeks, like Aristotle, this was not so much a matter of what we might call “sin,” but error—and could be corrected through the practice of virtue and the pursuit of the truth. At the same time, as Greek myths and Greek Tragedy do attest, there is some ancient stain, some “sin” to be purged by the sufferings of the Greek tribes. As Dionysus says to Pentheus in The Bacchae, “You and you alone will suffer for your city, but you are worthy of your fate.”
Note that the Greeks and Trojans of Homer’s epics never ask “Why me?” They ask: “What did we do to piss off our gods so badly that they would allow our enemies to enjoy victory over us? For we know out gods are superior to theirs. Therefore, the only explanation for our ruination is some sin we committed and for which we must be punished.” Hence, the first question is always, “What did we do wrong?” And the answer is always the same: “You failed to live up to your obligation to the gods.”
There is no ancient Epic that vindicates human beings in their own actions against the gods. All ancient Epics agree that suffering is the result of the errant exercise of the free-gift from the gods of individual self-determination. Even when, in some versions of the story, that freedom has been somehow stolen (as Prometheus steals fire and gives to human beings the gift of techne). Pride is a virtue among the Greeks. Hubris is its excess.
But we live in a curiously inside-out and upside down age. No longer are human beings to live according to “virtue” so called or to exercise the only biologically discernible reason for the human brain—i.e. judgment for the survival of the species. No. We are to abandon all higher faculties to allow our animal and vegetative faculties rule our actions in a never ending will to survive. Not to live, mind you. Merely to survive. To live on. Forever—because living forever must be perfection.
Right?
The Green Knight, after all, is that vegetative force that one cannot kill. Decapitate him and he merely picks up his severed head and the liquid droppings of the violence committed against him will simply sprout more green life. And yet, the Gawain poet uses him to remind the Knights of the Round Table that that is living but not life. It is our station alone in the “Great Chain of Being” to be those beings—made alone in the image and likeness of God Himself—to suffer the consequences of our actions because by our nature we are free and be worthy of redemption by our freely accepting (in humility) that gift as offered by God Himself.
Which, I suppose, brings me to the title of this particular rumination. Given the status of things at present, one must ask a fundamental question: What is it about Donald Trump that so disturbs the world that he has become the most consequential person on the planet since Jesus Christ?
That seems hyperbolic. It is not. After all, the global elites launched a fake pandemic to save their version of reality precisely because Trump stands for everything they are against. And Impeachment failed. Twice.
[Let me here interject that if you expect me to do a comparison to other figures in history—Hitler, the Buddha, Gandhi, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, etc.—I’m going to disappoint you, because that is not what is about to happen.]
Trump represents the voice and the figure of the small man upon whom the elite has ever relied—whether literally in slavery or metaphorically in subjugation. And he won in 2016. Unbelievable—even inconceivable (“you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means…”). Why? Because every system of control has always been deployed upon the assumption that the commoners were too stupid not only to figure out that the system was rigged against them by the few, but too stupid to run things for very long on the odd occasion their rebellions might succeed.
This makes the American system of politics itself a great danger to the running of the world by the Ancien Regime, whose members have ever seen the successful American Revolution as an aberration and a fact, but no indication of how the world really works. Trump’s electoral success was a great shock to their system—because they had it all sewed up for Hillary Clinton and then…it didn’t work; and, after all, they designed the system!
Enter Impeachment. Enter endless accusations. Enter the sullying of the very word “populism.” Enter the fruition of the nascent idea that any idea from “down below” must be dirty, debased, and somehow associated with fascism (as if that ever comes from the ground-up truly) and to be rejected out of hand. At the beginning of the pandemic, in the run up to the 2020 presidential election, it seemed clear to me that something very grave was afoot. I tried to point out that this was NOT Orwell’s 1984, but Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. But I was wrong, it’s 1984-451, because fascism cannot be administered by the subjugated unless the elite have completed Orwell’s vision of completely taking over reality first (specifically through the utter control of language). So a pandemic appears mysteriously and everyday human beings must rely upon technical, medical, scientific, and bureaucratic specialists—who speak their own obtuse and impenetrable languages—to direct their behaviors until those same specialists can deliver a cure. And most folks have had no other option but to follow along.
So, here we are.
Tom Klingenstein recently and adroitly unpacked the paradox and inevitability of Donald Trump: go here—
Progressives have a tendency to see the power of changing definitions and commanding language as the means to determine the future. Trump, by contrast, doesn’t change definitions, he expresses those we already use. He does not speak some special language his followers have to learn. He speaks the language we already know and in which we already express the most essential things in our lives. As a result, as Klingenstein points out, Trump is a throw-back to a more basic style in war; like Beowulf or Achilles or Gilgamesh, he is bold, crass, vulgar, honest, unethical, unpredictable, and unabashedly masculine. And, he is a winner.
So, it is as easy to hate Trump as it is to hate Beowulf or Achilles or Gilgamesh. Because men of action are rare, flawed, and necessary. And there is great shame that we are not those men. And it takes great humility to agree to be led by them. To accept them is to admit that we ourselves do not possess either their virtues or their willingness to exercise nascent talents to achieve their ends—talents that we ourselves either do not possess or do not exercise because we lack the courage or audacity to do so. So, men like Trump appear from time to time and disrupt the status quo so thoroughly as to throw the elites into a panic and to enflame the passions of the common man (on both sides) as we have seen so thoroughly and literally demonstrated since Trump took that ride down the escalator on June 15th, 2015.
At the time, I did not know what to think of the man. Part of me could not believe that he was running for the Republican nomination. Part of me thought that he entered the primaries in order to hand the eventual election to Hillary Clinton. Part of me believed he was exercising (finally) his vitriol against the ruling class for having used him for so long. After all, their country clubs would never accept him as a member; but he’d be invited to all the right parties when he was expected to write a check. And checks he did write, over the course of his long career in real-estate development and then in pop-culture as a truly successful villain in the universe of reality television.
If you want to see Donald Trump in high relief in a new way, especially if you have internalized the normalcy of hating him, then look at those who oppose him, the lengths to which they stoop to stop him, and the virtues they represent. Are these the principles for which you actually fight? Those of Joseph Biden, who has never met a payroll? Bernie Sanders who owns three mansions and whose spouse bankrupted a college in Vermont through bank fraud? Barack Obama who published, what, one(?) law review article even as he edited the Columbia Law review and NEVER once practiced law? And now lives in a palatial mansion whose occupants didn’t have to follow Covid protocols in the middle of the pandemic but whose servants did? AOC who majored in economics and even earned a degree and doesn’t recognize that the socialist model for both human behavior and economics is fatally flawed and always ends in misery except for the elites that deliver it to those from whom they steal? Or, is your support of these alternatives rooted in a gut instinct that anything must be better than the bad Orange Man?
But the reality is that the old Democrat Party, the party of the “working man” no longer exists even remotely. It has shed the false-patina of championing the common man and woman and revealed itself to be that which it always was: the party of the elite, racist, subjugating, smug, rich, and intellectually superior to the hoi-polloi that it alone can cure of their imperfection, by force if necessary. Read Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel All the King’s Men to see what Trump looks like to the establishment before Trump made Willie Stark literal. Can we or should we admire either man? Heavens NO! But do we come to admire what they stood and fought for and against? That’s not a rhetorical question. Read the novel and then see what kind of answer you make to yourself.
But there is no cure for common sense (thankfully) and blue collar workers, farmers, the middle class, and legal immigrants of every stripe, and blacks are starting to abandon the Democrats for the Republicans—but not the Republicans of the fever-swamp of establishment DC, but the Republican Party as re-fashioned by the populism of Donald Trump. Even the establishment Republicans (the Bushes, the Cheneys, the McCains before them, the McConnells, and so on) hate Trump. Hate him. There’s an old-saw in the South repeated by many a sensible grandmother to her grandchildren: “Show me who your friends are and I’ll show you who you are.” Let us add to our lexicon a corollary: “Show who your enemies are and I’ll show you who you are.”
The establishment Romans in their day hated the Jews because the latter simply would not accept subjugation and were, plainly expressed, pains in the asses. Who the hell do the Jews think they are that they, unlike every other enslaved population, won’t accept their defeat and subjugation? For their part, Jewish establishment types had hated Jesus Christ for precisely the same reasons: Who is this strange man who has the audacity to tell us and everybody else that our interpretation of Mosaic Law is completely incorrect?? What do we do with such a man? We all know the answer to these questions: We must kill him. Because if people actually buy His ideas, we are done for.
This is not to elevate Trump to some godlike status. But it is to speak to the deeply important vein of human wisdom into which his very existence has tapped. For Trump has touched not just a nerve, but everyone’s nerve. This is no small feat. And at this point his affront is no longer a matter of his behavior; his very existence is the threat.
Threat to what?
That I think is the core question. Don’t avoid answering it for yourself. Perhaps we have not seen ourselves to a moment of all out war. But consider what Faulkner (as narrator) said about Abner Snopes in his short story Barn Burning: “There was something about his wolflike independence and even courage when the advantage was at least neutral which impressed strangers, as if they got from his latent ravening ferocity not so much a sense of dependability as a feeling that his ferocious conviction in the rightness of his own actions would be of advantage to all whose interest lay with his” and then ask yourself this question:
Whom would you trust in a bar fight? Donald Trump or Joseph Biden.
If you hate Donald Trump but would choose him in a scrape, then I think you must, if you are being honest with yourself, re-assess the “allies” with whom your comfort has moved you to align. This is neither easy and it’s not comfortable in the least. But given that you and you alone, as Dionysus said to Pentheus, are “worthy of your fate,” it’s an important exercise—perhaps for the salvation not merely of the country but of your very soul—for you to conduct.
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