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The Real Face of Washington (and America)
Thank You, Donald Trump
By Tom Engelhardt
Know thyself. It was what came to mind in the wake of Donald Trump's victory and my own puzzling reaction to it. And while that familiar phrase just popped into my head, I had no idea it was so ancient, or Greek, or for that matter a Delphic maxim inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo according to the Greek writer Pausanias (whom I'd never heard of until I read his name in Wikipedia). Think of that as my own triple helix of ignorance extending back to... well, my birth in a very different America 72 years ago.
Anyway, the simple point is that I didn't know myself half as well as I imagined. And I can thank Donald Trump for reminding me of that essential truth. Of course, we can never know what's really going on inside the heads of all those other people out there on this curious planet of ours, but ourselves as strangers? I guess if I were inscribing something in the forecourt of my own Delphic temple right now, it might be: Who knows me? (Not me.)
Consider this my little introduction to a mystery I stumbled upon in the early morning hours of our recent election night that hasn't left my mind since. I simply couldn't accept that Donald Trump had won. Not him. Not in this country. Not possible. Not in a million years.
Mind you, during the campaign I had written about Trump repeatedly, always leaving open the possibility that, in the disturbed (and disturbing) America of 2016, he could indeed beat Hillary Clinton. That was a conclusion I lost when, in the final few weeks of the campaign, like so many others, I got hooked on the polls and the pundits who went with them. (Doh!)
In the wake of the election, however, it wasn't shock based on pollsters' errors that got to me. It was something else that only slowly dawned on me. Somewhere deep inside, I simply didn't believe that, of all countries on this planet, the United States could elect a narcissistic, celeb billionaire who was also, in the style of Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, a right-wing "populist" and incipient autocrat.
Plenty of irony lurked in that conviction, which outlasted the election and so reality itself. In these years, I've written critically of the way just about every American politician but Donald Trump has felt obligated to insist that this is an "exceptional" or "indispensable" nation, "the greatest country" on the planet, not to speak of in history. (And throw in as well the claim of recent presidents and so many others that the U.S. military represents the "greatest fighting force" in that history.) President Obama, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John McCain -- it didn't matter. Every one of them was a dutiful or enthusiastic American exceptionalist. As for Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton, she hit the trifecta plus one in a speech she gave to the American Legion's national convention during the campaign. In it, she referred to the United States as "the greatest country on Earth," "an exceptional nation," and "the indispensable nation" that, of course, possessed "the greatest military" ever. ("My friends, we are so lucky to be Americans. It is an extraordinary blessing.") Only Trump, with his "make America great again," slogan seemed to admit to something else, something like American decline.
Post-election, here was the shock for me: it turned out that I, too, was an American exceptionalist. I deeply believed that our country was simply too special for The Donald, and so his victory sent me on an unexpected journey back into the world of my childhood and youth, back into the 1950s and early 1960s when (despite the Soviet Union) the U.S. really did stand alone on the planet in so many ways. Of course, in those years, no one had to say such things. All those greatests, exceptionals, and indispensables were then dispensable and the recent political tic of insisting on them so publicly undoubtedly reflects a defensiveness that's a sign of something slipping.
Obviously, in those bedrock years of American power and strength and wealth and drive and dynamism (and McCarthyism, and segregation, and racism, and smog, and...), the very years that Donald Trump now yearns to bring back, I took in that feeling of American specialness in ways too deep to grasp. Which was why, decades later, when I least expected it, I couldn't shake the feeling that it couldn't happen here. In actuality, the rise to power of Trumpian figures -- Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia -- has been a dime-a-dozen event elsewhere and now looks to be a global trend. It's just that I associated such rises with unexceptional, largely tinpot countries or ones truly down on their luck.
So it's taken me a few hard weeks to come to grips with my own exceptionalist soul and face just how Donald Trump could -- indeed did -- happen here.
It Can Happen Here
So how did it happen here?
Let's face it: Donald Trump was no freak of nature. He only arrived on the scene and took the Electoral College (if not the popular vote) because our American world had been prepared for him in so many ways. As I see it, at least five major shifts in American life and politics helped lay the groundwork for the rise of Trumpism:
* The Coming of a 1% Economy and the 1% Politics That Goes With It: A singular reality of this century has been the way inequality became embedded in American life, and how so much money was swept ever upwards into the coffers of 1% profiteers. Meanwhile, a yawning gap grew between the basic salaries of CEOs and those of ordinary workers. In these years, as I'm hardly the first to point out, the country entered a new gilded age. In other words, it was already a Mar-a-Lago moment before The Donald threw his hair into the ring.
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