As the Trump Era draws to a close, that expression sounds more and more like wishful thinking. We worry that Trump’s “base” may continue to support him independent of his political office; we watch the emergence, within modern Republicanism, of a second nazi party whose members set the unwritten law of obedience to the fuhrer over any written legislation. But it would be history repeating as farce if any of these predictions came true. At least Hitler had some gravitas; Trump’s petty-grudginess and general clownism make his charisma a continuing mystery.
Sociological explanations help us understand how the Trump bloc formed, historically, out of poor whites who saw no higher calling for politics than the expression of resentment and rich, dumb crackers followin through on their long-standing, canine obsession with lowering the tax rate. All this is in consequence of a longstanding national decay with its roots in the Reagan-era promise to make Thatcher’s quip that “there’s no such thing as society” come true. On the basis of that unrealizable dogma, we’ve built perhaps the most hellish society possible in an era of general abundance. in 2016, voting for Trump was a way of voting for that trajectory while trying to vote against its consequences.
Yet Trump’s appeal was clearly then, and is clearly now, deeply personal. Loyalty to Trumpism is loyalty to Trump alone, as the outcome of the Georgia senate races showed and as Hawley, Pompeo et al are going to find out to their disappointment over the next four years. Trump’s supporters find a solution to their political and social anxieties, not in any particular set of policy outcomes (an intervention of which they had already long ago despaired) but in the person of Trump himself. Therein lies the mystery of his personal appeal, a mystery deepened by the objectively observable nastiness and unpleasantness of his personality. Trump’s fans see a version of Trump that looks to the rest of us like a hallucination.
The problem is that we’re looking across a genuine cultural gap, disguised by a shared language and national citizenship but frankly as deep as the one that separated the Aztecs and the Spanish conquistadors. Every attempt to decode that culture of the other and its symbols is speculative at best.
In that spirit, I suggest that Trump’s charisma is best understood as that of the boss within a celestially-projected corporate/office structure that has taken hold, among a particularly decadent set of trailer trash, realtors, and waterbed salesmen as an orienting vision for American culture. For them, “the office” is a locus of socialization, social security, and (in the case of Trump’s most loyal demographic, the non-college-educated small-town rich) personal dominance. They would like to see this cultural structure become the norm nationwide, an aim that only secondarily involves political means. What every office absolutely requires, however, is a boss, and Trump projects a version of that character deeply familiar, even dear, to small-business tyrants everywhere.
We outside the Trump movement are excluded from participation in this imaginary, universal office by our sense of professional independence, our well-worn cynicism about working for the man, or both. Lots of us – doctors, lawyers, professors – sacrificed the best years of our lives getting educated enough not to have bosses. Minorities especially are aware that the organicist, familial ideology of the office conceals an exclusionary, exploitative machinery that crushes and discards those at the bottom of the corporate ladder. We thus form an accidental coalition against the businessification of America.
This coalition is on the political back foot, despite representing a decisive majority of Americans, for three related reasons. The first is that our government carries out its most basic obligations – for example, health care – through the medium of the workplace, lending credibility to the delusion that offices are places that care about us. The government has thus abrogated its role as a structure for social organization; it can’t even organize consent around the results of election and the peaceful transfer of power.
The flip side of this abrogation is that other forms of organization gain power in proportion as the state loses it. This imaginary “business of America” has been well-positioned to acquire the government’s lost authority even as it works busily to undermine that authority.
Trumpism’s third source of strength is a kind of evangelical zeal that wishes to convert by incorporating. Trump’s supporters know what they want to do with the rest of us. It may look like they want to kill us, but actually they just want to make us bend the knee; the threat of violence is a means to that end. There’s a kind of sacred delight in imagining doctors, lawyers, professors – the sort of people who boss other people around all the time on the basis of their professional qualifications – forced to start off in the mailroom of America the business, while people who boarded the Trump train early sit comfortably in the penthouse offices.
Trumpism has thus developed an organizational strength that will be difficult to overcome, but which is entirely dependent on the continued presence of the boss at the top of the pyramid. There can be no question of a replacement for Trump. Basic to the experience of having a boss is the arbitrary character of the boss’s authority, consummately ascribed rather than achieved. A boss can’t be elected by employees, because that would make him beholden to them. Trump’s death or imprisonment, whenever it comes, will reveal American the business for the phantasm that it is. What happens then to the energies it has unleashed or to the deeply-held cultural symbols that produced it is anyone’s guess.