Donald Trump and the Death Rattle of Liberal Civility

Asher Wycoff

The 11 July issue of The New Yorker was dominated by a lengthy George Saunders piece on the Trump campaign. Saunders follows Trump from Fountain Hills to Tucson to Eau Claire and beyond, rendering the hostility that permeates every rally in characteristically matter-of-fact prose. At each stop on this journey, he stands in awe of the mutual aggression between Trump supporters and anti-Trump protesters. Awe is the appropriate word here, for after a particularly alarming clash between protesters and supporters at a Trump rally in San Jose, Saunders summarizes the scene in a glib allusion to Yeats: “The center failed the hold.” In the theatrical narrative he constructs for himself, Saunders witnesses something apocalyptic. He witnesses the undoing of order in United States politics. “This, Mr. Trump,” he proclaims, “is why we practice civility.”

I am fascinated with Saunders’s insistence on “civility.” He believes firmly, and perhaps correctly, that it is not the content of Trump’s proposals that enraptures or enrages people, but their presentation. Conversely, the real problem with Trump is not his racism, xenophobia, chauvinism, or his delight in the prospect of uprooting, brutalizing, or killing millions of people. No, the real problem with Trump is that he relinquishes the stoic dignity of “Goldwater and Reagan” in favor of the empty sensationalism of “Fox News and reality TV.” Saunders is more concerned, for instance, about the spectacle surrounding the Wall (capital W) than the actual proposal of the wall (small w) and its probable calamitous effects. To emphasize civility, often to the exclusion of all else, is de rigueur in liberal election commentary. Again and again, the content of Trump’s platform is granted far less importance than the presentation of it. Pundits and talk show hosts criticize Trump for his “divisive rhetoric.” A Clinton campaign ad plays an extended montage of Donald Trump saying inflammatory things before asking the viewers what kind of president they want their kids to see. Op-ed after op-ed bemoans the Republican Party’s downward trajectory from the Great Communicator to a sideshow caller with a bad toupee. Although some center-left commentators pay lip service to the dangers facing Muslims and the undocumented, it is not primarily the lives of marginalized people that are at stake; it is the sense of dignity in the electoral arena.

This sense of dignity is important to liberals because it offers plausible deniability when Democratic politicians do exactly what we’re supposed to be afraid of Republicans doing. It is easier to give a president the benefit of the doubt who maintains decorum, who has the decency to be surreptitious about their less defensible actions. This has informed the mantra of the Obama presidency. Of course Obama couldn’t change everything overnight, no matter how much he might have wanted to. He’s practical. He takes this stuff seriously. He means business. Did he want to close Guantanamo? Did he want to pull us out of Iraq and Afghanistan earlier? Did he want single-payer healthcare? Of course he did, but his hands were tied! On the other hand, did he want to bomb twice as many countries as Bush did? Did he want to deport over two million undocumented immigrants? Did he want to continue bank bailouts, keep Bernanke as Fed chair, appoint Geithner as Treasury Secretary, and so forth? Of course not, but his hands were tied!

More important to the center-left than material change is the fantasy of change. In the 2008 campaign, we saw an unprecedented effort to raise hopes for a sweeping overhaul of the political system, and in subsequent years we saw the stoic abandonment of every hope raised. The conventional wisdom on Obama went from “He’ll change everything!” to “He’ll change everything, but he’ll wait until his second term!” to, finally, “What, were you really so naïve as to believe that Obama could change everything?” The same field of liberal commentators who deliberately stoked anticipation of systemic change overnight steadily came to treat any note of disappointment or any residual hope as a sign of immaturity. Come now, think pragmatically!

Now with Hillary Clinton, a presidential candidate around whom there is precisely zero excitement, cynical pragmatism is the necessary starting position. After the disappointment of Obama, the best president we can hope for is an experienced, dignified moderate – if that. At the Democratic National Convention, a stadium of liberals cheered wildly as Michael Bloomberg (a man whose entire career centered on making New York City unlivable for the working class) bellowed, “Donald Trump, you are no Ronald Reagan!” The notion that the Democratic nominee would be a better facsimile for Reagan than the Republican nominee should be a damning condemnation of the party’s shift to the right. Instead, to an audience of ostensible progressives, it was a ringing endorsement.

For like Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton is civil, dignified, and practical. As we have been told countless times, she knows how to get things done, and she knows how to be respectful as she does them. When one points out that the things Clinton has “gotten done” in her career include the expansion of the carceral state, the destabilization of dozens of Latin American and Middle Eastern countries, the evisceration of the welfare system, and even periodic support for a Trump-style border wall, one gets the stock liberal response. “Sure, Hillary’s done some distasteful things in the past, but any political career as long as hers is bound to have some blotches! Besides, do you really think Trump won’t be worse?”

Of course Trump would be worse than Clinton. But I’m tempted at this juncture to side with the George Saunderses among us after all. Maybe the critical difference between the two candidates does lie more in their presentation than in their platforms. Maybe the problem is not that Trump intends to deport eleven million people, wall off the nation, administer religious tests, and the like, but that he announces these intentions, boldly and without apology. The civility for which the center-left feels such nostalgia is an integral component of the United States liberal project’s ideological legitimating mechanism. This mechanism disguises the everyday violence without which the United States project could not be sustained, and condemns it where it cannot be disguised. As regards the past, this mechanism takes the form of retrospective self-criticism. In an appropriately Kantian fashion, the United States holds out an ideal of absolute human freedom, far beyond anything it could concretely achieve. Although it builds itself through one brutality after another, it looks back upon each brutality it completes with scorn, regarding it as an unfortunate hurdle that had to be cleared on the path to its ultimate goal. Through this teleological outlook, United States liberalism confesses to, and in so doing, absolves itself of its own crimes. When similar crimes are committed in the present, they are stifled, silenced but no less noxious, like flatulence at a funeral.

When Trump is condemned as “un-American” for his racism, xenophobia, or whatever else, the temptation is to point out that Trump’s proposals are not without precedent in United States politics. The border wall is not a novel idea, nor is a policy of mass deportation. The proposal of Muslim exclusion has been likened, not unfairly, to everything from the Chinese Exclusion Act to the refusal of Iranians during the Carter administration. But perhaps this misses the point. The remarkable thing about Trump is not the content of his proposals, but his utter lack of shame in presenting them. Under Obama, mass deportations, border fence expansions, and remote bombings have been carried out in mortified silence. Trump has grabbed hold of the liberal establishment’s guilty secrets and turned them into rallying cries. And he has done so with astonishing success.

I believe what we see crystallized in the phenomenon of Donald Trump is the implosion of United States liberalism’s self-criticizing mechanism. The rejection of decorum is a synecdochic representation of a more fundamental rejection: that of critical thinking. Trump has no time to second-guess and no time to apologize. He has no time to interrogate the past or the present. He’s a business man. He wants to get us a good deal. He has to act fast. He has to commit. As an unnamed Trump supporter tells Morning Edition, “He’s a negotiator. Of course he takes a hardline position.” The liberal project’s internal critical mechanism must go out the window. The time is to uncritically embrace excess in all its most dreadful forms. This approach has understandably resonated with a wide swath of frustrated, white, middle-class United States citizens. The new normal post-recession has compromised their once-guaranteed future of pleasant domesticity, has introduced doubt where they have only known certainty. When all that is solid begins to melt into air, who can waste time being polite? Take the firm position. Get a good deal.

Liberal civility offers no response to Trump. Trump’s campaign is a fundamental rejection of it. It is an open celebration of the systematic expropriation and violence that forms the material basis of the United States liberal project, a refusal to cloak it in euphemistic terms. Trump’s supporters are sick of being civil. They are sick of being “politically correct.” They are sick of exercising restraint when unbridled capitalist excess has screwed them over and, more insultingly, looked so fun in the process. The frustrated petty bourgeoisie is laying claim to the excess that the bourgeoisie has so far kept to itself. And we are nowhere near prepared for that dreadful moment when they finally seize it.