I Hope I'm Wrong

About Trump and other things

Well, there you have it. All I can say is that I sincerely hope that I’ve been wrong about Trump’s authoritarian designs and that my critics who think it’s an overblown and even hysterical picture of things are right. But one personal lesson I’m taking from this election—from this political era, really—is to trust my gut a little more. A little over a month ago, I was not happy about the way things were going. Then I got a lot of pushback on the internet and was told I was a silly doomer and my analysis was all based on vibes. This, along with the polls and coverage, made me soften my read and consider other possibilities. But I should’ve known that once people in the media with connections to the Democrats were in my DMs trying to spin me I was actually onto something. I should have had the courage of my convictions and been willing to be wrong, but I hedged a bit. I wish I had been more intransigent and less able to be pressured.

There’s a political lesson there, too, though, that applies to the present moment: having a clear vision of things, even if it is unpleasant or dark, beats no vision or an unclear one. Trump’s campaigns had a clear mythos: a story about what America is and was and where it is going. No Democratic candidate that’s run against him has been able to articulate an opposing vision. This is not particular to this or that candidate, although all of them had individual weaknesses. We can litigate that forever. But it’s really a problem of American liberalism: liberalism is unsure of itself and ameliorative, it’s not a bold vision of the future as it once was in its heyday under LBJ or FDR. Trumpism may be reactionary, but liberalism too, has become too backward-looking—look at my references in the previous sentence. It longs for an old age of consensus instead of gamely going to war to win a new one. American liberalism has also become a land of smug statisticians and wonks who want to test every proposition and shrink from striking out in a new direction, from testing rhetorical appeals in the public arena rather than the statistical survey. Trump and his campaigns were willing to venture boldly and that’s part of what appealed to people. He said, “Follow me and make history,” a dubious claim made by others before him, but it excites people.

My own political orientation certainly also suffers from a certain old-fashionedness, but I’ll just say in my defense I never thought of it as a panacea. Antifascism is a century-old tradition now and the critics of who see in it a longing to recreate an old order are on to something. It’s a politics of memory and meaning that are fading from this world. But it at least has a certain imaginative dimension, it’s an ethos: its mythical core contains a struggle between good and evil. Unfortunately, it doesn’t resonate at this moment. For voters for whom “democracy” was an issue Harris was the obvious choice, but that wasn’t enough people. It’s perhaps too idealistic, too abstract and airy, and not focused enough on practical issues, although for me it’s a social democratic impulse, uniting the struggle for democracy and people’s day-to-day needs. In any case, it’s not a story that the American people get anymore. Maybe they will again now.

The whole idea of the “resistance” was a product of the old antifascist mythos, meant to call forth the French resistance and other groups on the continent. Besides being cringe, what gives that label the lie was that resistants don’t have any institutions to rely upon. The army, the press, the parliament: these have all collapsed in a world where you can speak even metaphorically of a resistance. They have to build their institutions from scratch, they need to develop new political concepts and approaches, recruit new cadres, and form their own world. Relying on old institutional power has failed; Trump and his people have been more agile in adapting to a new media terrain, and so now should liberals and leftists.

The other thing that makes me want to revise my antifascism a bit is the nature of Trump’s victory. My analysis was always predicated on Trump’s movement providing a plebiscitary punch to a weak and fading conservative core. But neither Trump and his movement nor the old conservatives could wrangle a majority: they used their bluster and mobbishness to make democratic noises but had no democratic mandate. It looks like Trump might get the popular vote now, which makes his form of regime quite different than fascists who never succeeded in winning majorities and who had to cobble together coalitions that they then dominated. That’s not to say I don’t worry about authoritarianism and lawlessness—on the contrary—but that I may have to think differently about what type of politics and regime this is if it comes to power with broad public acclaim.

But, to go back to the lessons above, there is value in sticking to one’s guns. I feel committed to a certain analytical frame and political tradition, although it must adapt to new situations. A tradition honors the past but also renews itself to face the present and the future. The people I write about labored on the fringes for decades before seeing even the barest cracking dawn of their type of politics. Now its time has come. They lived by T.S. Eliot’s words:

If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

Let’s keep our little Cause alive. Our time will come again.