Since before last year’s election, there’s been an argument going on about whether the third of Americs that’s die-hard for Trump is driven by racial animus or something closer to economic self-interest (and, in the latter case, also dumb enough to fall for an obvious con). The conclusion I came to pretty early on was that both of these things are, to some extent, true. Much if not most of white America is no less racist now than it was in the fifties, even if people know that you can’t say certain words in public. Racism can’t be the whole story, though, since plenty of plainly racist white people voted for Obama, some of them twice. Racism in America is an attitude, and not every attitude is politically salient all the time.
When voters think they have something meaningful to gain from voting for one party or another – when they see that they have an interest in the issues of civil rights, economics or what have you that are at play in a given election – they’ll vote according to that interest. The rule in American politics has been that interests trump attitudes; as long as genuine interests seem to be at stake, racism can remain widespread without any electoral consequences following from this. What seems to me to have happened in the last few years is that lots of people, especially but not exclusively lower-class whites, have lost any sense that the centrist economic consensus according to which our country has been governed for the last three decades has anything to offer them. When people believe that nothing the government does will ever help them, the only way left for them to choose a side will be to follow their attitudinal commitments – commitments that can grow to be quite passionate in the absence of other, more meaningful forms of political engagement.
None of this is to discount the palpable effects of gerrymandering and voter disenfranchisement – both forms of institutional rather than attitudinal racism – on the outcome of last year’s election and others before it. I’m only offering a theory as to how things got so bad that these factors, which swung maybe one or two percent of the vote in key states, were enough to put a liar, a scam artist, and a probable rapist in the White House.
The theory I’m working with is, to sum up, that politics as usual in the United States works by a system of collective bribery that leads us to tolerate whatever we hate about our neighbors in exchange for the palpable benefits of peace and prosperity. Whatever those benefits may once have been, they’re no longer accruing to most Americans – one point on which Black Lives Matter activists and rural Trump voters might even agree. This has been the state of things for a while – maybe ten or twenty years – but we’re only now starting to realize it. The consequences of this are difficult to predict.
I find all this much more eloquently put in Jean-Claude Michea’s The Realm of Lesser Evil, a series of lectures in which the author (who teaches Philosophy at the University of Montpellier) reconstructs liberalism’s original sin as its co-dependence with a market economy that undoes many of its egalitarian promises. Michea argues that liberalism, which emerged in 17th-century Europe in the wake of brutal civil wars, aspires to depoliticize every moral judgment so that our deep ethical commitments can no longer organize political (and therefore potentially violent) conflict. Since an amoral state no longer has any grounds on which to claim the allegiance of its citizens, it offers the market economy instead: a circulation of goods built on principles of non-judgment and non-interference that, as the liberal promise goes, will guarantee endless growth.
The residue of Michea’s depoliticized judgments would be what I’ve been characterizing as “attitudes;” the market’s promise of prosperity would organize what I’ve been calling “interests.” Trump’s America is what happens when the market’s promise, which is the central pole around which all interests are supposed to circulate, turns out to have been a texture of lies.
Since the French edition of Michea’s book came out in 2007, it takes no account of that year’s economic collapse and the period of secular stagnation which followed upon it. I think that the Michea of 2007 would not have been at all surprised to see this course of events issue in the presidency of someone like Trump. What would’ve surprised him was Marine Le Pen’s defeat in the recent French elections – especially since the French are, if anything, much more cynical than us Americans about the purported benevolence of the invisible hand.
The difference between France and America may just come down to an equivocation that runs throughout Michea’s treatment of tolerance, which he frames as the chief ideological instrument of depoliticization in modern liberalism. By and large, Michea is opposed to a tolerance which he sees as merely the silencing, by increasingly draconian means (and, since he’s an aging white guy, these means for Michea include “political correctness” – more on this later) of hateful attitudes that survive and even thrive beneath this blanket of repression. He proposes to replace it with something resembling the Stoic oikeiosis – an ever expanding circle of concern, within which we come to love our neighbors, and their idiosyncrasies, as we love ourselves.
In practice, it would be difficult for an outside observer to tell which of these two tendencies was operating in a given social formation. They might look almost identical, especially if a society came to cultivate oikeiosis as a virtue that it enforced upon in various non-liberal ways. Under those circumstances, what Michea derides as political correctness might better be understood as a society’s means of enforcing its own norms as to virtue in a manner that goes beyond the impotent liberal consensus.
The practices of a given, apparently liberal, social formation are thus subject to a kind of anamorphosis: depending on where we stand, what looks at one moment like Michea’s “bad” tolerance can look at another moment like Michea’s “good” brotherly love. The proof, though, is in the electoral pudding. White Americans look at their non-white countrymen with barely-repressed hate and envy; they vote for Trump. The French, on the other hand, still cherish – and are willing to enforce, if necessary – the old-time virtues of liberty, equality, and especially fraternity.