Fintan O'Toole: Trump is a symptom not the disease

The worst thing that can happen today is that Donald Trump wins. The second worst is that the defeat of Trump creates a smug belief that the crisis of democracy has passed. Trump is a symptom – he is not the deep-seated disease. We should use the f-word sparingly, but the western democracies have within them something of the same psychosis that produced fascism. The election result, either way, will not cure that psychosis. If we lose sight of that merely because Hillary Clinton wins, we will have wasted a providential warning.

Trump's significance is easy to misread because he is so obvious a product of contemporary media culture. He is a creature of the tabloids and the shock jocks, of reality TV and Twitter. The forms of stupidity he embodies and promotes are those of the internet age in which lies and truth have equal status, 140-character slogans replace thought and Facebook creates for each of us a personal echo-chamber in which we are fed only the information that pleases us. But these are questions of form, not of substance. The stupidity itself is of the old, and not especially rare, vintage. The problem with blaming digital and celebrity culture is that it suggests, wrongly, that if we could somehow clean up our media consumption everything would be okay.

‘Post-truth’ culture

It has become fashionable, for example, to talk of a “post-truth” political culture exemplified by the flagrant lies shamelessly repeated by Trump and the Brexit campaign. It is not inaccurate in itself, but it begs the question: when exactly did we have a pre-post-truth political culture? Was European political culture more truthful when

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

, the most influential forgery in history, was circulating in millions of copies and being read as an authentic revelation of the global Jewish conspiracy? Was US political culture more truthful under Richard Nixon?

In the age of mass democracy, feeding lies to the masses is a standard tool of power. What changes is the willingness of the masses – or at least of a significant section of society – to be stupefied. The problem of political stupidity is like the drug problem. There’s always an illusion that things would be okay if only we could cut off the supply – in the current case, if we could stop people such as Trump from lying about everything from the fantasy walls he’s going to build to the fantasy steel factories he’s going to conjure up on the Great Plains, like the buffalo that were going to return when the Indians did the ghost dance.

But the real problem isn’t the supply: just as there will always be cocaine and heroin and crystal meth, there will always be fantasies and conspiracy theories and out-groups to blame for all your ills. The problem is the demand.

Trump is a demand-side phenomenon. He’s been around a long time, peddling racism, misogyny, fantasies of mogul magic, birther conspiracies and any other stupid idea you might want to sniff up your nose or pump into your veins. And he hasn’t changed: Trump didn’t suddenly become a political genius. At a personal level, he’s the same ridiculous blowhard he was two years ago when his candidacy for the Republican nomination was a joke. When his fans say he’s authentic, they’re right – in the paradoxical sense that he’s the same grotesque phoney he’s always been.

Political idiocy

So the supply is unaltered – it’s the demand that has changed. There are times when very large numbers of people are prepared to swallow the dope of political idiocy. They collude in their own stupefaction. And they do so for the same reasons that people take drugs – because they can’t bear too much reality. The appeal of Trump – like that of Brexit – is escapist. You can get high on hatred and resentment and the ghost dance of economic salvation, even if you don’t really think any of those things are real and true. You don’t have to believe the wall will be built to get a rush from the idea, any more than you have to believe that taking all that OxyContin will cure what ails you.

Why do people crave this high? The source of the demand is the same now as it was in the 1930s. There is a particular kind of fear that we know from history to be especially corrosive of democracy – status anxiety. When people are afraid of losing a status that they have or have had, they turn nasty. The oppressed, who are used to poverty and contempt, can hope for change. But the middling people, those who had a dignity but are losing it, see change as loss.

Trump’s core supporters are not those at the bottom of the ladder – they are those who are terrified of sliding down the rungs. Status anxiety is unheroic and ugly, concentrated as it is among white men who fear emasculation and the loss of racial privilege as much as economic displacement. But it is not a freak phenomenon that will disappear if a Clinton victory restores normal service. We have to recognise that this disease is pandemic. Unless we tackle it, it will create a fever much worse than Trump.