The Politics of Grievance
The Politics of Grievance
David Roth, “Making Sense of Donald Trump’s Petulant Reign,” New Republic, June 12, 2019.
There seem to be two aspects to Donald Trump’s personality. The first, and the one that connects him to the Evangelical communities, is the messianic. He believes himself to be, in effect, the chosen one sent to redeem and repair America.[1] The secular version of the messiah is, of course, the superhero, and Roth begins his piece recounting a (blessedly) failed animated series called Trump Takeover: The Ultimate Power Trip, in which “Trump was taking over everything and making it better.” One pitched episode has Trump and his team “’uncovering a global financial conspiracy’ and ends with them triumphantly taking control of the stock market ‘to save the world economy from total ruin.’” Another, more pertinent example, “’Politically Corrected,’ begins with ‘America … in a state of virtual collapse,’ which is remedied when ‘Trump and his team go to Washington to take over!’” It is one of the smaller ironies of Trump’s presidency that a show, originally pitched as children’s television, ends up being a perverse reality.
As Roth points out, its questionable whether the show was ever really intended for broadcast, but was pitched primarily to create “buzz,” enough “buzz” to cause a short term uptick in the penny stock market which in turn allowed Trump and the parent company of those pitching the show to cash out and cash in. As Roth also points out, “Trump never declined an opportunity to fish a quarter out of the toilet when the situation presented itself,” and that “reflexive and amoral avarice is one of the ignoble truths of Trump,” but its not the only truth. It’s also true that messianic pretentions inevitably fail, revealing themselves to be either tragic, pathetic, or ironic. There is nothing tragic about Trump, if the tragic emerges, as Niebuhr put it, when “a choice must be made between equally valid loyalties and one value must be sacrificed to another.” It would be what? Self-regard sacrificed to avarice. In any case, hardly the stuff of tragedy. Nor is there anything worthy of pity about Trump, if pity is a response, again as Niebuhr put it, to “capricious confusions of fortune and painful frustrations.” That Trump was ultimately able to profit, even from a failed enterprise, simply affirms his reflexive sense of infallibility and entitlement to “what he perceived to be a divine right to the admiration, and grateful deference, of others.” One is stuck with the irony, and the greater irony is Trump’s “fundamental message,” one that Roth calls “a running litany of shape-shifting grievance, one that centers and celebrates the solitary genius of the narrator at the expense of a cultural and political establishment – big names, not so smart – hell bent on mocking, belittling and victimizing him.” For Trump, it’s tragic that he is not allowed to “take over,” that he is not allowed to make “everything better,” and those preventing him from doing so become an endless source of self-pity and resentment.
It is the politics of grievance. Though I am not the first to notice, I am struck by the differences between the skills necessary to get a job and the skills necessary to do the job and do it well – in the political sphere, the skills necessary to win an election and the skills necessary to actually govern. It’s rare that the two skill sets are combined in one human being, and credit where credit is due, Trump somehow broke the code on the skills necessary to win an election in today’s environment, saturated as it is with social media and a virtual version of reality – alternate facts if you will. The politics of grievance, as it turns out, plays well on social media. While it has been analyzed to death, one shouldn’t have been surprised that social media quickly became a toxic stew of grievance in part because popular entertainment revealed and prepared the audience. Human beings being human beings, the popularity of the Jerry Springer show, as one example, wallowed in the multifarious grievance fueled anger of the deplorables, while shows like Survivor, as another example, turned grievance and revenge into a competitive sport. Trump’s own show, The Apprentice, may have had a bit more “class cache” given its business focus and, as Roth put it, “generations of incandescently toxic cultural lore about business as magic.” It nevertheless cast Trump in the role, not of a merciful God, but a vengeful God, one who dispensed judgement on those who didn’t quite measure up, particularly those who couldn’t quite live up to their pretentions. The theme of the show was not, “you’re hired!” but rather “you’re fired!” though even that was a distortion because the show itself was not about doing the job – the tasks assigned were mostly pointless endeavors designed, not to reveal relevant talents, but to create potential humiliations for the contestants. It was rather about getting the job, currying enough favor with Trump to become his permanent acolyte. The job was the prize, and there the show ended. The 2016 election was simply an episode of The Apprentice, one in which Trump deigned to play the role of contestant for the prize, the job of jobs, with “credulous reality television audiences” voting from home. One suspects that, for Trump, the show was supposed to end there. That he actually might need to do the job, that he actually might need to govern, must have seemed a vague afterthought, which explains, at least in part why his presidency seems a perpetual campaign for office.
Arthur Schlesinger suggested a president must have two qualities to do the job. The first is a vision for the future of America, the second is the ability to explain why and convince others that his vision is best for America. It is hard to believe that Trump has anything that resembles a “vision” for America, at least not in Schlesinger’s sense. Those who did have a vision, and perhaps made the mistake of assuming that Trump shared (or could share) that vision have been pushed quickly to the cub. One thinks of the likes of Steve Bannon with his version of a crypto-fascist state, sensing the potential of his incompetence for destruction of the liberal “bureaucratic state.” Those remaining who might have a vision – one thinks of Barr and Pompeo with their version of explicitly Christian nationalism – remain in part because they have come to terms with Trump’s messianic sense of himself, seeing some divine sense in his madness, and are willing to play along. While the former has little potential to win over a plurality of Americans, the later at least has the potential to win over a significant and energized evangelical minority.
What Trump offers, however, is not a vision, but an emotion, a multifarious sense of grievance that is shared by a broad spectrum of the American public, one that crossed traditional party lines and upset the pundit’s predictions. Grievance, by definition, is reactionary, and within the political realm grievance is always directed at the current state of the union. Trump is grievance incarnate, and he has little need to articulate or contextualize his grievance. For that, he has Fox News. While grievance is not necessarily conservative, it is, by definition, reactionary, and as Roth points out, “the politics of Fox News are reactionary,” and conservative, and they are “also hard to pin down – they are about a feeling, a combination of distaste and distrust for all the things that other people are getting away with,” presumably all the things that the Fox News audience either can’t or won’t deign to get away with. It is no secret that Trump is audience member one for Fox News, and like funhouse mirrors, each reflects and distorts each other. Grievance, however, not only signals impotence, but also the moral superiority of outrage, and Fox News feeds not only an inchoate sense of outrage, but also a sense of moral superiority that resonates with the moral superciliousness of those good Christian people who make up a significant part of Trump’s base and justifies “the small and stubborn thing” that animates his “deliriously incoherent politics,” his shameless pursuit of comeuppance. He seems to be positioned to get his comeuppance, not only for himself, but by projection all those who share his sense of grievance.
As any third-rate dictator knows, one can use the power of the state to exact comeuppance, which imbues it with a sense of legitimacy, a sense of political purpose, at least for a time. It perhaps goes without saying that grievance is not a governing vision, and it is endless. “By mathematical necessity,” as Roth put it, “this deeply spiteful vision of the world and one’s place in it also conjures a world-historic capacity for taking offense.” If one’s enemies come around, so much the better. It contributes to Trump’s need “to make himself look impressive and happy,” and conversely if one’s erstwhile friends fail the loyalty test, if they make him feel less than tremendous and great, given his position, they can become targets of world-historic and world-histrionic ire.
That by way of saying, grievance isn’t a governing strategy, though it quickly saturates governance top to bottom, but again, as any third-rate dictator knows, it is an effective tool to maintain power. As grievance incarnate, he has secured the faith of a significant segment of the American population. I use the word “faith” judiciously. There is, perhaps, a certain segment of the population that voted for Trump rationally as an extension of Reagan’s small and ultimately simplistic notion of governance – getting rid of the complex government programs “that are confusing and don’t seem to be working,” and start doing the things that are simpler and comprehensible. For some, of course, that is code for complex government programs, those that regulate and limit corporate operations and corporate profits, and Trump can govern as Mr. “I alone can fix-it” if he simply continues down his spite-driven path, destroying the Clinton and Obama regulatory legacy.
At one point, Daniel Bell pointed out that when religions fail, cults appear. He was writing in the late 60s and early 70s, when it appeared that both secular political ideologies and the mainstream religious institutions religions had failed to provide for social stability. Though he did not put it quite this way, he longed for a deeper conservatism, a fulfillment of what Niebuhr might have called the ironic element in history. For Bell in a general sense and for Niebuhr in a more specifically Christian sense, “faith tends to make the ironic view of human evil in history the normative one.” It recognizes that there is “no possibility of exercising power, without running the danger of over-estimating the purity of the wisdom which directs it.” At its best, religion demands of leadership, first and foremost, humility, and it is humility that Trump, as a cult leader, in his messianic pretentions, lacks. For those who follow the cult leader, it is not merely an “over-estimation” of Trump’s wisdom, but a complete abdication of one’s own critical faculties and complete submission to the cult and “the wisdom which directs it.” Trump’s so-called base, the 39% of the populace whose faith in his presidency seems to be absolute and unwavering, draws on something deeper and more perversely profound. I am not the first, nor will I be the last to note that Trump is not a political leader. There is no platform, no ideology, no theology that would render his actions comprehensible beyond the toil and trouble of his seething stew of resentments – beyond, that is, Trump himself. Trump is, however, a cult leader. He is Jim Jones or David Koresh as President. If we allow it, he will lead us to the same apocalyptic end.
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