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UNITED STATES
Three Theories of the Rise of Trump
How a cultural collapse�of civility, civic education, and decorum�brought us �the
Mussolinian con man of our own moment�

By Paul Berman
Tablet
United States
THREE THEORIES OF THE RISE OF TRUMP
How a cultural collapse�of civility, civic education, and decorum�brought us �the
Mussolinian con man of our own moment�

By Paul Berman
February 5, 2018 � 9:30 PM
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In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody
is always at the drowning-point. The tragedy is enacted with as continual a
repetition as that of a popular drama on a holiday; and, nevertheless, is felt as
deeply, perhaps, as when an hereditary noble sinks below his order. �Hawthorne,
The House of the Seven Gables

My favorite columnist lately has been Thomas B. Edsall of the online New York
Times, and that is because, instead of hectoring his dismayed liberal readership or
trying to lead a mob, he has spent the last year and a half with his head clutched
between his hands, debating with himself about the American predicament. �Material
grievances of the white working class,� Edsall has wondered, in effect��isn�t that
what has led to our current fate?� And then, a week later: �Or, is it a matter of
cultural resentments�of racist animosities toward the blacks and the latest
immigrants, together with a surly hatred of the bicoastal snobs?� And, on each side
of this debate, Edsall has piled up graphs and charts and maps of unusual things
(the geographical distribution of job-eliminating industrial robots across the
United States, which strikingly corresponds to areas of Trump popularity) and novel
phrases (�reactance theory,� which refers to people�s allergic reaction to being
told by Hillary Clinton to sit up straight and behave themselves) and marvelous
factoids (e.g., a finding that adventurous people who have moved at least two hours
away from their hometowns tended to vote for Hillary, while their old neighbors,
the stay-at-homes, tended to vote for Trump)�with every last detail drawn from
hyperlinked studies and commentaries by scholars and experts from across the social
sciences and beyond.

At the moment when I began paying attention, Edsall�s debate with himself seemed to
be leaning toward the material grievances argument, or Theory No. 1, with its
invocation of industrial decline and the robots and the flight of the factories.
Then he began to lean toward the cultural-resentments argument, or Theory No. 2,
according to which people imagine themselves to be an aggrieved race, oppressed by
blacks and by the non-white immigrants; or believe that social welfare benefits
have gone to the detested blacks, instead of to meritorious drug-addicted whites
like themselves; or believe that Hollywood and the mainstream press are enemies of
the people. And then, upon further reflection, Edsall began to worry that too many
liberal commentators have come around to Theory No. 2, leading to a problem: �the
tendency in segments of the liberal media to downplay economic factors and to focus
instead on racial resentment and cultural dislocation as the primary forces
motivating Trump voters.� So he steered his analysis halfway back to material
grievances, and he reminded the readers and himself that a shadow has indisputably
fallen across parts of the country.

And, in his subtlety, Edsall has ultimately arrived at a combination of one theory
and the other: �The point here is that the two generalized explanatory realms�the
one focused on race and the other on economic shock�overlap. It is not either/or
but both that gave us President Trump��which does sound plausible. Here, then,
might be a grand amalgamated theory of America�s lurch into demagoguery and
national humiliation, a blend of Theories No. 1 and 2, material and cultural,
rendered substantial and convincing by the sheer density of the analyses that
Edsall has amassed.

II.

I wonder, though. The material-grievances theory and the cultural-resentments

theory can fit together because, in both cases, they tell us that people voted for
Trump out of a perceived self-interest, which was to improve their faltering
economic and material conditions, or else to affirm their cultural standing vis-�-
vis the non-whites and the bicoastal elites. Their votes were, from this
standpoint, rationally cast. The votes conformed to what American political
thinkers like to suppose is the logic of self-interest of democratic politics�which
ultimately would suggest that 2016�s election was at least a semi-normal event,
even if Trump has his oddities. But here is my reservation.

I do not think the election was normal. I think it was the strangest election in
American history in at least one major particular, which has to do with the
qualifications and demeanor of the winning candidate. American presidents over the
centuries have always cultivated, after all, a style, which has been pretty much
the style of George Washington, sartorially updated. It has been the calm style of
a qualified professional, self-assured, reasonable, courteous, and majestic, though
somehow modest, too�the style of a civilized and experienced personage who could
not possibly be a lout toward women, and would not be capable of whipping up a mob,
and would never dream of jailing the leader of the opposition, and would never
regard the White House as a marketing opportunity. Now, it is possible that, over
the centuries, appearances and reality have, on occasion, parted ways, and one or
another president, in the privacy of his personal quarters, or in whispered
instructions to his henchmen, has been, in fact, a lout, a demagogue, a thug, and a
stinking cesspool of corruption. And yet, until just now, nobody running for the
presidency, none of the serious candidates, would have wanted to look like that,
and this was for a simple reason. The American project requires a rigorously
republican culture, without which a democratic society cannot exist�a culture of
honesty, logic, science, and open-minded debate, which requires, in turn, tolerance
and mutual respect. Democracy demands decorum. And since the president is supposed
to be democracy�s leader, the candidates for the office have always done their best
to, at least, put on a good act.

The American project requires a rigorously republican culture�a culture of honesty,

logic, science, and open-minded debate.
The decision to vote for a man with Donald Trump�s appearance and demeanor was,
then, distinctly unWashingtonian, so to speak�a decision in favor of a style that
might be regarded as more Venezuelan, or Ugandan, or historically Italian (which is
worth examining). This raises a question, though, about the grievances theory in
its versions Nos. 1, 2, and amalgamated. A grievances theory could perhaps account
for a radical break with the American political tradition if the grievances in
question appeared to be abysmally deep�grievances as profound or profounder than
any material and cultural complaints of the American past. But are the white
working-class complaints of our own time abysmally deep, by historical standards?
Edsall has cited a paper for the Brookings Institution by Anne Case and Angus
Deaton titled �Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,� which Deaton drew on
not long ago in an op-ed for The New York Times�and the paper makes clear that, for
a good many people right now, life is, in fact, pretty bad. Case and Deaton observe
that, in America, the bulk of the population has been doing somewhat better in
recent years, judged by, at least, the rate of premature death, which is a
significant way to judge. Even the blacks and Hispanics with no more than a high
school education, who might be regarded as the vulnerable of the vulnerable, have
seen an improvement in their premature death rate.

But their whites counterparts have done poorly. The whites with no more than a high
school education have seen their own premature death rates grow worse, and there is
reason to suppose that, in the future, the rates will worsen yet again, and this is
largely for the worst of reasons, which is early death from drugs, alcohol, and
suicide�the �deaths of despair.� These people, the working-class whites, have
absolutely hit the drowning-point. And down they have gone, as if in a panic. It is
not easy to account for their panic, though. The authors of �Mortality and
Morbidity� put their emphasis on the decline of traditional industrial jobs,
beginning in the 1970s, which would seem to be a simple explanation. And yet, the
same decline seems not to have devastated the non-whites.

It cannot be said that unemployment has posed a problem, even if, for a lot of
people, today�s jobs are not as well-paying and interesting as yesterday�s. In
2016, the unemployment rate for whites had descended to 4.2 percent, which is not
too bad. Lately it has descended to 3.9 percent. The panicky despair that has
overwhelmed so many people, then�what can explain it? Is it, as Hawthorne says, a
matter of sinking beneath one�s hereditary order? A loss of status, caused by the
industrial decline, that besets the whites but not the non-whites? The authors of
�Mortality and Morbidity� speculate about a variety of disasters that are not at
all industrial or economic. They point to a crisis in marriage and family
structure, which has afflicted certain social groups, and not other groups. They
mention some religious developments�not a decline of faith or of church membership,
but the rise of denominations whose preachings dwell on matters of personal
identity, and the decline of denominations whose preachings dwell on matters of
community and tradition. They cite medical developments. These appear to be central
to the larger disaster: the role of irresponsible doctors and their prescriptions,
and the role of maleficent pharmaceutical companies.

I wonder if the cultural grievances haven�t made their own contribution. The 2016
election has reminded us that enormous portions of the American population have
never managed to adapt to the grand social reforms of the 1960s, such that, half a
century later, equality for blacks and for women still feels to them like an
offense to the natural order�an imposition foisted upon an innocent America by
sinister people from far away in the federal government and the ocean coasts. Arlie
Russell Hochschild�s sociological study of Tea Party partisans in Louisiana,
Strangers in Their Own Land, summarizes the feeling in the very title of her book.
So, yes, here are plausible reasons for panic�economic, industrial, medical,
marital, theological, and cultural. Still, is there anything new in this kind of
panic? Panicky fears about modernizing elites and far-away powers are an old and
quaint social custom in more than a few places around the country. Nothing is more
traditional than a spasm of paranoia, and the Confederate flag is its banner. And
Hawthorne is certainly right to observe that fluctuating waves of despair have
always been an American reality. Still, the resentments, fears, spasms, and
despairs in the past never managed to put a wrong-looking person in the White
House.
Besides, white people at the end of their rope were hardly the whole of Trump�s
electorate. Mostly his voters were the Republican Party stalwarts of yore, country-
club and evangelical alike. College-educated sophisticates in whole regions of the
country solemnly preferred Donald Trump to all 16 of the other Republican
candidates in the primaries of 2016. An impressive 25 percent of the American Jews
voted for Trump!�the politically-conservative Jews, largely Orthodox, even if the
Orthodox neighborhoods of America have not been epicenters of a post-industrial
wave of drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide. The decision to do something
wildly radical, then, the decision to set aside America�s small-R republican
political tradition in favor of something new and untried and disgraceful�where did
this decision come from?

III.

I think we need a Theory No. 3, on top of Nos. 1 and 2. A Theory 3 ought to

emphasize still another non-economic and non-industrial factor, apart from
marriage, family structure, theology, bad doctors, evil pharmaceutical companies,
and racist ideology. This is a broad cultural collapse. It is a collapse, at
minimum, of civic knowledge�a collapse in the ability to identify political
reality, a collapse in the ability to recall the nature of democracy and the
American ideal. An intellectual collapse, ultimately. And the sign of this collapse
is an inability to recognize that Donald Trump has the look of a foreign object
within the American presidential tradition.

Dimly I recognize that, in presenting my Theory No. 3 in this way, I may have done
a less than good job at drawing Trump�s admirers into a healthy debate. The
admirers are likely to feel that I have merely thrown insults at them (and perhaps
they have found a way to return the favor, which is by voting for Trump). Or they
might tell me that, in the 19th century, Andrew Jackson was likewise regarded as a
barbarian and a dictator by a certain kind of snob, and so was Abraham Lincoln,
and, if America has a quaint and odious political custom, snobbery is it. And, to
those complaints and objections, I have no way to respond, except by affirming that
Jackson and Lincoln were entirely within the American tradition, and the
Mussolinian con man of our own moment comes from a different planet altogether,
which ought to be obvious at a glance. But I have to acknowledge that what is
obvious to me is invisible to others. Even some of the people who would have
preferred someone else in the White House have come to look upon Trump the way that
Mike Pence pretends to do, as a conservative American politician with a clever and
unconventional style, and not as any sort of Mussolinian con man at all. And yet,
to my eyes, this is the sign of the cultural collapse�this, the truly worrisome
development, which will outlast Trump.

How exactly to define a cultural collapse? How to identify and investigate it? I
put the question to Thomas B. Edsall and the scholars he has been quoting and
summarizing. I ask them: isn�t there a matter of civic education and understanding
to be discussed, together with the matters that are economic, sociological and
political? Mightn�t the matter of civic understanding prove to be more fundamental
than any of those other matters? A further question: If we are facing a collapse in
the civic culture, shouldn�t we come up with policy goals to address the collapse?
Shouldn�t liberals be promoting a wave of popular education on themes of American
civilization and the nature of democracy? And a wave of elite education? I grant
that civic education may sound like less than a revolutionary goal, but we students
of the history of democracy know that, on the contrary, civic education is
absolutely a revolutionary goal�maybe the deepest and most glorious revolutionary
goal of all.
***

Read more of Paul Berman�s political and cultural analyses for Tablet magazine
here.

Paul Berman writes about politics and literature for various magazines. He is the
author of A Tale of Two Utopias, Terror and Liberalism, Power and the Idealists,
and The Flight of the Intellectuals.

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