Yes, we get it: Donald Trump is bad. He shows contempt for women and ethnic minorities. He’s openly courting white supremacists. Protesters at his rallies are being assaulted, and he nods and winks. He’s openly, enthusiastically pro-torture. And that’s just the tip of the awful, puffy-faced iceberg.
And if he were reading this right now, he’d say, “That’s right, and whaddya gonna do about it?”
And he’d have a point.
Because, as various other writers have pointed out, Trump is simply the rotten fruit of the right-wing authoritarianism that the Republican Party, with the help of Fox “News” and talk radio, has been stoking for the past two decades. His supporters have gotten the message loud and clear. Their view of the world—that “equality” is nonsense, that winners deserve everything and losers deserve nothing, and that low social, economic or political status is synonymous with being a loser, a nonentity, a nobody—has been reinforced incessantly.
So yes, obviously it’s important that Trump be defeated. But isn’t it just as important that the worldview he represents be defeated as well? And who’s offering an alternative to that?
The media aren’t. The Democratic Party isn’t. Our Democratic elected officials aren’t. Even our Democratic presidential nominees aren’t (though one comes closer than the other to doing so).
Oh, sure, they clutch their pearls and breathlessly condemn him for being so uncouth. They courageously use words like “racist” and “sexist” and double-check to make sure, yes, we can still unequivocally say that it’s not good to be on the same side as the Ku Klux Klan. They say it’s awful of him to say such rude things about women and Mexicans.
But why is it awful? They don’t say why it’s awful. Do they even know why it’s awful?
It’s that simple. It’s the unifying philosophy that ought to motivate every single progressive citizen, every single Democratic voter, every single American.
And yet . . . find me one public figure who’s saying it.
I’ll say it. I’ll say it till I’m blue in the face. But I’m one not especially influential person. That sentence needs to be on the lips of every single man and woman who say they want to see Trump defeated.
Because if we can’t say why Trump’s worldview is wrong and malignant, we can’t offer a credible alternative.
Suppose I’ve designed a poster with a blue background, and you look at it, and you say, “Oh, I don’t like the blue.” I’ll ask what color you think it should be instead. If all you can say is, “I’m not sure what color it should be—it definitely shouldn’t be pink—I’m just not sure about the blue,” you know what? Screw it, I’m keeping it blue, because you didn’t have any idea what color would work better.
It’s the principle of the Shock Doctrine: when a crisis occurs, power flows to whoever has a plan to deal with it, even if that plan is wholly self-serving. And if you’ve got a crisis plan, and your opponent doesn’t, it benefits you to precipitate the crisis. Trump is our crisis. He’s broadcasting his demented, narcissistic “plan” on every campaign stump. And our only message is, “Don’t vote for him, he’s awful”?
Do we enjoy losing so much that we’re willing to settle for this half-assed non-strategy again?
Our message has got to be, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. Everyone is entitled to these things, regardless of sex, regardless of color, regardless of language or nationality or citizenship. There are no second-class human beings; there are no nobodies.” And we all have to be saying it together, constantly.
I have no doubt that Bernie Sanders believes this. Unfortunately, he's not saying it in so many words. He’s still trying to reach voters who haven’t heard of him, and his self-introduction is narrowly focused on issues of economic inequality. When you get him talking at length, then you hear him discussing social and political equality as well, but it’s not part of his elevator pitch.
That would be OK if not for the fact that the entire Democratic Party is AWOL on the matter. But frankly, it’s not clear to me that the entire Democratic Party even agrees with this message. For instance, we definitely have Democrats who are OK with our inhumane and degrading prison system as it currently exists. We have Democrats who are perfectly OK with a public education system that varies in quality according to local property values, that shunts non-affluent children of color into profit-driven charter schools, and that’s limited to a narrow core of academic standards rather than directed to the full development of every student’s personality and capabilities. We have Democrats who won’t stand up for the right to assemble in peaceful protest. We have Democrats who won’t stand up for a minimum wage sufficient to provide a family a decent living by contemporary standards. We have Democrats whose commitment to organized labor begins and ends with the campaign season. In short, we have a Democratic Party without a guiding philosophy that respects human rights and dignity.
Hillary Clinton, I’m certain, does have a guiding philosophy, but this isn’t it. I suspect that she can’t articulate her philosophy without damaging her chances of victory, because many voters would mutiny against it. I describe her as a “patrician” Democrat rather than a progressive: her record is characteristic of someone who believes in social, intellectual and religious equality, overseen by a quasi-benevolent economic and political aristocracy, and ending at the limits of our borders.
This view does not in any way put her outside the American mainstream—on the contrary, it’s clearly shared by other Democrats, such as Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emanuel, and in fact has long and deep roots in the culture of the New York City region.
What it is not, however, is a clear rebuttal to Donald Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism, because it entails a fair amount of authoritarianism itself.
(Her own supporters, consciously or unconsciously, recognize this authoritarian streak: As Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler document in Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics, authoritarianism was the best predictor of whether a Democratic voter supported Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008. Authoritarians supported Clinton; non-authoritarians supported Obama.)
Thus, if we do end up with a Clinton-vs.-Trump race in November, we’ll find ourselves watching a race between a patrician conservative (in the literal sense of seeking to maintain and preserve existing institutions and power structures) and a right-wing quasi-fascist authoritarian, with no organized entity clearly sounding the call for equality in dignity and rights—including equal political rights, otherwise known as “democracy.” You can appeal to the fears of pro-equality, anti-authoritarian voters until you’re the one who’s blue in the face, but like it or not, many of those voters are going to sit out.
We can address this problem now.
We do it by setting the example for our own leaders, by committing ourselves to advancing the message and philosophy of equal rights, equal justice and equal dignity, here and everywhere. Read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: this is our talking points memo. Hold these truths to be self-evident. Share them around with your fellow liberals, so that when you go up against a Trumpist, you can rebut him with one voice, amplified. Include them in your diaries, in your letters to the editor and letters to public officials, until the discourse is so saturated with them that our Democratic elected officials start repeating them as if they were their own ideas. I see no other way to thrust an alternative—dare I say an antidote?—to Trump’s right-wing authoritarianism into the public conversation.
Ultimately, this is another round in the battle over the meaning of “America.” If we, the forces of equality and democracy are going to win that battle, we have to show up and fight it. It’s not going to fight itself.