Dionne - One Nation After Trump

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In loving memory of Matthew Harris Ornstein

Are we to be one people bound together by common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor; or will we become a divided nation? For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future.

Barbara Jordan

The Perils of Trumpism and the Call to Engagement

A merican democracy was never supposed to give the nation a president like Donald Trump.

We have had more or less ideological presidents and more or less competent presidents. We have had presidents who divided the country and presidents whose opponents saw them as a danger to everything they believed in. But we have never had a president who aroused such grave and widespread doubts about his commitment to the institutions of self-government, to the norms democracy requires, to the legitimacy of opposition in a free republic, and to the need for basic knowledge about major policy questions and about how government works. We have never had a president who daily raises profound questions about his basic competence and his psychological capacity to take on the most powerful and challenging political office in the world. We have never had a president who spoke more warmly of dictators than of democratic allies, and whose victory came with the assistance of a foreign power that meddled in our election.

We have, in short, never had a president who, from his first day in office, plainly showed that he had no business being president.

Trump arouses anger, yes, but also fearfear about whether our institutions can survive a leader who praises strongmen abroad and sees them as a model for bold leadership; fear about the instincts and commitments of a narcissistic politician who assails and insults revered national heroes, from John Lewis to John McCain, simply because they refuse to fall in behind him; fear about the future of a tolerant, multiracial, and multiethnic nation under a leader who freely demeans whole groups of Americans; fear about an incompetent executive branch staffed by loyalists with contempt for government and little understanding of its critical functions; fear about the countrys standing in the world, given his cavalier and often hostile attitude toward long-standing alliances and toward many of our closest friends; fear about the future of gender equality under a president who shamelessly demeaned women and bragged about assaulting them; fear of the likelihood of corruption on the part of a chief executive who refuses to separate himself from his business empire in any meaningful way; and, finally, fear for the future of the United States great experiment in freedom and democracy.

In his duplicitous reaction to Russias efforts to undermine our democracy, he has shown us how the dysfunction of our politics puts our nation directly at risk. It makes us vulnerable to outside efforts to use our internal divisions to sow chaos and weaken our nation. Trump uses terrorist attacks to personal advantage, as when he responded in June 2017 to the death of seven people and the injury of dozens of others in London by criticizing the citys mayor and trying to score points in our domestic debate on gun control.

And far from bringing us together, Trump demeans his office by regularly turning its power to petty and often cartoonish assaults on his enemies, particularly in the media. Thus, his sexist Twitter outburst against MSNBCs Mika Brzezinski and his posting of a video two days before the nations July 4th holiday of his violently wrestling a figure labeled CNN. These and other episodes we describe in these pages reveal a presidency devoted to the interests, proclivities, and will to power of one man, not to the needs of the nation.

Yet precisely because the crisis created by Trumps rise is so profound, we believe that the popular mobilization and national soul-searching he has aroused could be the occasion for an era of democratic renewal. If Trump is a threat to our democracy and the product of its weaknesses, the citizen activism he has inspired is the antidote, the way to vindicate our long experiment in self-rule. Opposition to Trump is calling millions of Americans to a new sense of citizenship.

We offer One Nation After Trump to encourage this new engagement and to insist that the movement against Trumpism needs not only tactics and strategies but also a visiona hopeful and unifying alternative to his dark and divisive assessment of our countrys prospects. His opponents need to offer clear, compelling, and practical ideas that respond to a distemper that led many of our fellow citizens to feel such disgust with the status quo and such anger about their place in it that they were prepared to risk empowering a deeply and obviously flawed demagogue.

We also propose answers to what we see as questions our country must face. In some cases, we suggest that the conventional responses to them are wrong or incomplete. In others, we highlight what we feel are the underappreciated insights of historians and political scientists who draw our attention to the long-term nature of the problems we confront. At the same time, we also acknowledge the very good work that journalists and scholars have done in a short time to help our country understand how we came to this moment and what we face now.

We thus ask: Where did Trumpism come from? Why were nearly 63 million Americans persuaded to vote for him? What is the nature of Trumps threat to our free, democratic republic, and how can those who would protect it take him on? How can we defend those whose rights he undermines? How can we create a politics that is not a zero-sum game pitting Americans against each other along the lines of race, class, gender, region, and background? And how can we begin solving the problems and responding to the legitimate grievances that gave rise to Trump in the first place?

If Trump represents a unique hazard, he did not single-handedly create the circumstances that made him president. He did not become the dominant figure in the Republican Party simply because of his mastery of reality television, cable news, tweets, and the power of the oft-repeated lie, as helpful as these were to his unlikely ascent.

Rolling back the Trump threat requires seeing that he represents an extreme acceleration of a process that was long under way. It involves the decline of basic norms in politics, governing, and the media as well as the decay of institutions that are central to republican government. The radicalization of the Republican Party and its primary electorate began three decades ago. Absent these forces, Trump would still be a loudmouthed developer and brand-peddler far removed from the levers of power.