In the past few days I have read presidential election assessments by the dozens. Some I have sought out, yet I needn't look for most others — they arrive in bulk. This bountiful gush of opinions about what went wrong is a national, even international, phenomenon. Inboxes everywhere are overflowing with assessments, emails are rife with appraisals, political websites are packed with habitual self-agreements, newspapers are running short on bloviation ink — and cable news? Worse than ever, no doubt.
I've learned little from this titanic capsizing of emotions. And don't mistake, nearly all the analyses have been emotional; otherwise some objective, rational conclusion would have been drawn by now. The AWOL latter must be sought — a straightforward, dispassionate synthesis of all the whirling antitheses emerging viscerally and intellectually.
Once these opposites clash, they'll balance and merge into one, revealing that singular, higher truth. Right? If only it were that simple. Still, I retain some intellectual trust in the old Marxian method of thesis + antithesis = synthesis.
Let's begin with this reaction from novelist Joseph O’Neill, writing for The New York Times Review of Books: "My sense is that in this era of the Internet, there are millions more fascists in this country than people think.... [Trump] is an evil guy, a villain—and many Americans are excited by it. Harris and the Democrats, by contrast, are boring, boring, boring. In this sense, the election was like a choice between four more years of church or four years of violent entertainment. Nihilistic consumerism, as much as authoritarianism, prevailed."
Now that's about as from-the-gut, glandular and splenetic as analysis can be. Nevertheless, does O'Neill have a point? Of course he does. Even in the splenetic there's usually some factual element. Trump is an objectively evil, villainous guy, for whom 75 million Americans just gave a thumbs-up. So unquestionably there are "more fascists in this country than people think." On the other hand, they, these "fascists" — number unknown — have been a voting bloc for decades.
Historian Richard Hofstadter essentially pegged them as fascists when in the mid-1960s he labeled them pseudoconservatives (a terminological accuracy I adopted years ago). These voters were far more malevolent than Hofstadter's term suggested, which he made clear when describing the pseudos and their leaders.
Nearly always in American history we've had villainous demagogues preying on the politically paranoid, he noted. The fearmongers foment populist panic by identifying some monstrous domestic threat that can be eliminated only by upending "the system," which, to the paranoid, represents a society out of control. Only a strongman can rein it in, and that's the product he sells — his ability to do so.
Six decades ago Hofstadter described pure Trumpism and that significant bloc of paranoid Trump voters. In the 1960s they would have been Goldwater voters (Hofstadter's "focus group," as it were) and some, Birchers. Perhaps there are, today, "millions more fascists in this country" than people thought, as O'Neill writes. But "many more millions," as he adds? Goldwater received 27 million votes; Trump, 75 million. Goldwater's U.S. population, 190 million; Trump's, 336 million. Goldwater's vote, 14% of population; Trump's, 22% — disproportionate but not vastly disproportionate.
And remember that Trump has been exploiting all that came from Goldwaterism. Our malevolence of a president-elect is in some ways unique but largely the accumulated quintessence of 60 years of pounding ultraconservatism and far-rightism — from the Arizona senator to Reagan to Gingrich to Bush II to ... this. I get what O'Neill is saying, parts of which are incontrovertible. His thrust, however, is dubious: that from a politically philosophical point of view, a whole lot of real fascists voted Trump back into the White House.
Offering a radically different perspective is former governor Andrew Cuomo: Trump won because the Democrats blew it. Writing in the Daily Beast, Cuomo coughs up a 10-point argument around his Dumb Democrats thesis, which I won't dissect here. Taken together, though, his op-ed reads like a Democratic politician who has an alternative "vision" of the party's future, and that party would be ever-so wise if it were to hoist Andrew back on it shoulders and allow him to lead it to victory once again.
That's a strategic pitch, not emotional, nevertheless I raise Cuomo's argument because it's pinging quite a few others out there which are so emotional they're borderline hysterical. As Charlie Sykes put it in his latest Substack piece, "Apparently, the Democrats have decided to bypass the autopsy and move straight to an orgy of self-flagellation.... The moderates blame the woke left; the progressives blame the moderates; and nobody (for the moment at least) wants to say anything nice about Kamala Harris’s campaign."
The above is classic irrationality, with hot tempers streaming from every side. It's also just plain stupid, in that it's suicidal.
Moving along, The New Yorker's Susan Glasser is anything but hot-tempered and over the top. She's a solid, analytical thinker. Writing on Election Day Eve, she observed that no matter who wins, "[Trump] will have proved that the most vicious campaign of lies, misogyny, racism, and xenophobia ever waged ... was not enough to stop nearly half the country from supporting him."
Note that Glasser stopped short of a sweeping fascist assessment. That's key; it's what sets columnist Glasser's argument apart from novelist O'Neill's. Hers is indisputable. Trump did prove that lies, misogyny, racism and xenophobia can prevail. Having established this as a fact — a ghastly presence stripped of all irrationality and emotion — Glasser, all the same, leaves the question hanging: What went wrong?
Some will laugh at that. She just told you. What she told us is a fact, and a stand-alone fact tells us little without its context. I confess I'm stretching the old Marxian method I referenced above, nonetheless, the two together — simple fact and, or versus, complicated context — are something along the lines of a thesis and antithesis.
Thesis: Trump prevailed, and rather overwhelmingly, with pure, fascistic evil. Antithesis: Trump's vote-percentage of the U.S. population was not overwhelmingly disproportionate to that of Goldwater's in 1964.
Now, no American intellectual of the mid-1960s argued that U.S. voters were heavily fascistic, based on Barry Goldwater's vote total. Indeed, historian Hofstadter was making the point that the senator's right-wing extremists were outliers — they were the pseudoconservatives and political freaks who have been with us throughout all American history.
As for Trump's vote total, we must add to America's preceding, ever-present extremism the forthcoming and compounding history of the last 60 years — the relentless totality of the purest of pseudoconservatism that he was able to exploit and build on.
So ... context. What's the context in which the fascistic president-elect has thrived? What immensity has been present in the American electorate for years — increasingly present as well as increasingly worrisome among informed voters?
IGNORANCE.
Mass, poisonous, politically corrupting ignorance, that essential ingredient of Trumpism that linked up evil and resulted in last Tuesday.
I once believed that 2016 was a black swan event. It wasn't — that much is clear, because it just came back to bite us in the ass. Furthermore, Trump has had another eight years to exploit not just the mass ignorance of 2016 but the ignorance that's been multiplying — almost exponentially, it often seems — ever since. Not stupidity, not necessarily, just neolithic ignorance.
There's more. Only a societal ignorance that far transcends the demographic boundaries of Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, Twitter, talk radio and other perverse, far-right miasma could have diseased Americans to the virtually psychotic point at which evil could win the popular vote.
In a way, Trump is right. America does have "an enemy within." This nation's truest, most powerful enemy is right here at home. And if Americans fail to overcome the enemy of ignorance — well, you know the rest of that story.