On the New American Progressivism
There has been no greater gift to the American Left than Donald Trump, for he and his personality cult embody everything that the Left tried for decades to pin, falsely, on American conservatives, without much success. Suddenly with Trump, every leftist lie about conservatism became an all too horrible truth, every untenably vulgar smear all at once an inescapably vulgar reality. Except for this one inconvenient truth: Donald Trump is not, and never has been, remotely conservative, and hence even his cult followers, whatever they may once have been, are now as unrelated to any sort of American conservatism as is their dear leader. Of course, such facts have no bearing on the Left’s labelling process, for we are speaking here about political rhetoric, not political theory, and their designation of Trump as a conservative for rhetorical purposes, though purely propagandistic, is, I suspect, causing effects in popular perception and public discourse from which actual American conservativism, if it ever happened to reappear, would be unable to extricate itself for decades.
Here is some of the main evidence the Left uses against Trump, and by very deliberate extension against all of “the right.”
Trump fosters populist irrationality and small-minded “anti-elitism” that engenders both foolish beliefs and paranoid fears. True.
Trump teases the racist fringe of his base, and incites general intolerance in his mainstream followers, for the sake of political gain. True.
Trump shows a callous disregard for the basic human dignity of those segments of society he sees as having been unfairly advantaged or politically overvalued, and which he therefore seeks to cut down to size. True.
Trump takes the concept of the presidential “bully pulpit” far too literally, issuing rabble-rousing edicts and coercive executive orders with abandon, often openly using the (presumed) power of his office to play favorites, pardon and protect his supporters, and attack or intimidate his opponents. True.
Trump is a cynical profiteer who exploits his governmental power to enrich himself and his chosen comrades of convenience at the expense of those he deems dispensable. True.
Trump openly sympathizes with and makes excuses for the world’s worst tyrants, while spitting on long-time Western allies and demeaning his own country in the eyes of the world. True.
Trump is, in the end, a vulgarian whom one cannot even imagine reading a real book, loving a great painting, enjoying serious music, or being moved to tears by King Lear, and this vulgarity is actually inseparable from his specific appeal to his followers, who worship him as a sort of warped idealization of their own worst instincts and weaknesses. True.
He is indeed all that, and worse — but none of that is in any way indicative of conservatism, a political disposition of which Trump displays not one instinct, not one iota. On the contrary, he is, in the final analysis, as in the first analysis for that matter, a progressive at heart — a progressive pragmatist to be precise, or perhaps we ought to say a pragmatic progressive, but a progressive nonetheless. The saddest mystery of this political age is the question, which may never be completely answerable (although I myself have been working through the issues in writing consistently for more than a decade), of how this lifelong reflexive progressive megalomaniac and sociopath managed to worm his way into the minds of millions of decent human beings who might truly have been called conservatives prior to 2015, but who sacrificed that respectable heritage — the Reagan mantle — in a desperate (the key word) lunge at self-protection, in the form of a blustering fool prepared to say anything they wanted to hear if only they would follow and love him. He did, and so they did. The rest, unfortunately, is history; more specifically, it is aggressively making an ugly laughingstock of the American portion of history.
It is one thing, of course, to simply deny Trump’s conservatism and identify him as progressive, but quite another to show how this identification is reasonable. Denying his conservatism, at least in the American sense of that word, is quite easy by way of a simple review of his most common policy preferences and overall tone. Consider his protectionist economics and his preference for state-controlled and heavily manipulated markets. (Has there ever been another man who thought it possible, let alone sensible, to take random potshots at the feet of the entire global economy, demanding that it dance for him or die, according to his daily whims?) Or think of his consistent advocacy and apologias for a Russian dictator, even through that dictator’s brutal and unprovoked war of annihilation against a neighboring (and previously Russian-oppressed) country. Or his moral equivalency games with the two Koreas (one communist and one republican), falling for a laughable little thug’s flattery, thereby legitimizing and facilitating the thug’s nuclear threats and developments. Or his direct intrusions into the workings of media, academia, legal practice, and business, as though these institutions existed only at the mercy or under the dispensation of the president, and must therefore adhere to his personal will and political pronouncements or be punished. Or his open mockery and belittlement of close military and economic allies, long seen by conservatives — certainly in the age of nuclear weapons — as a necessary bulwark against totalitarian threats to American power, and an invaluable asset in the effort to advance the principles of liberty worldwide, goals that are most obviously in America’s national interest in a world in which oceans of distance no longer offer any protection at all.
No, it is obvious to all those impervious to, or at least healthily skeptical of, leftist rhetoric, that the branding of Trump as a figurehead or apotheosis of American conservatism is pure puffery designed to score electoral points against the Republican Party as a whole by associating the entire so-called “right wing” of American politics as racist, black-hearted, anti-intellectual, and thuggish — the labels that the Left has tried to attach to every Republican leader since Ronald Reagan was governor of California, but with little efficacy, since the labels simply didn’t stick to the likes of Reagan or William F. Buckley. Finally, in Trump and some of his more prominent acolytes, both in the White House and in the “new media,” the Left has found a Republican figurehead on which the labels will stick, and they are taking full advantage of it. The usual song and dance suddenly seems surprisingly apt and fair. However, this is only because, to say it again, the figurehead on whom they are using the tactics this time is not conservative.
Insofar as Trump is anything at all, politically speaking, he is fundamentally a progressive — a fact that no one on “his side” of American politics has the guts to state today, because they are all small men seeking short-term personal advantage over the good of their country. But since I am neither on “his side” nor on the side of his propagandizing opposition, let us take a moment to consider, all at once, what a progressive is, broadly speaking, and how Trump and his movement fit the definition.
Trumpism espouses pragmatism through and through — “What is true is what works.” Or rather, Trumpism, carrying pragmatism’s essential relativism to its logical and more straightforward conclusion, boldly asserts, on a daily basis, “What is true is what we prefer to believe today.” This is a fundamentally progressive tenet, as evidenced by the fact that the American philosopher most closely associated with pragmatism as a theory is John Dewey, a “democratic socialist” and lifelong critic of the individual intellect and defender of what he called “the social mind,” i.e., collective thought and collective truth.
Trumpism bases its approach to economic policy on the premises that, (a) human social interaction is perfectible in the sense of being susceptible to an organizing principle according to which there would be no losses or trade-offs, but only gains for all, and (b) government masterminds, untethered from any limits of constitutional restraint or the private choices of private citizens, understand and can therefore achieve that perfected state of social interaction, if only private citizens would cease resisting and place their full faith in the masterminds’ decisions and policies. This, needless to say, is of the very essense of progressive thought in all its variations over the past hundred and fifty years, right up to the movement’s recent pea-sized heirs Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and of course Donald J. Trump.
Trumpism believes that government agencies may and should be weaponized to silence political opponents by means of public intimidation, legal harassment, and the direct purging of individuals or factions, including those within the movement’s own political party, who do not comply with all of the movement’s policies and preferences. In other words, Trumpism has not opened a new debate within the Republican Party — as Goldwater and Reagan did, for example — but rather sought to quash all debate by forcibly identifying the party with itself and its leader, such that dissenting voices are systematically and mercilessly isolated, vilified, and effectively un-personed by the movement/party. Such methods and attitudes, of course, are the very personification of progressive authoritarianism in practice, as modelled most infamously by the most infamous of all progressive political movements, namely Stalinism, Hitlerism, and Maoism.
Trumpism is generally populist in the sense of making its strongest appeal to the supposedly downtrodden and disaffected — that is, encouraging identifiable and collectivizable segments of the population to feel afraid for their very survival, to believe they need protection and salvation, and then of course to turn to their leader as the man who alone can provide the protection and salvation needed. Whether it be “the workers,” “Christians,” “the poor,” “real Americans,” “the black community,” or “white males,” the mantra is effectively the same: Society, in the form of “They,” have forgotten or rejected you, but our movement, our leader, will restore your dignity and revive the world “They” have taken from you — but without our movement, our leader, all will be lost.
Above all in scope and importance, Trumpism assumes that government, in the right hands, has both the real ability and the proper authority to address and solve all societal problems, real or perceived, thereby reducing all social existence to vectors of government policy, all moral development to government dictates, all social institutions to a morass of arbitrary, unpredictable, ever-changing regulations, and all subjects of popular discourse to tribal political talking points. Of course, this is the very lifeblood of progressive political thinking, stretching back two centuries, from its highest philosophical theory to its lowest practical instantiation: society as merely an effluence or alternative name for The State. That is, The State and its whims and rules are to become the all-encompassing, inescapable context of daily life at every moment, for every person. In this utterly and definitively progressive spirit, Donald Trump and his followers are, to put it mildly, deeply hurt, or rather apoplectic, whenever they feel it is being suggested, by individuals or by the facts, that there may be areas of social interaction, public experience, and personal prosperity, where Trumpism has no currency, where Trump himself has no place in the conversation — where life is, or could be, going on perfectly well without Trump.
Progressivism in all its forms is a constant push to remove all thoughts of State-independent (that is, apolitical) existence from the minds and hearts of the citizenry, in favor of the general presumption that all of life is not merely political in the broadest sense, but specifically governmental, and ultimately tied to a leader or cadre of leaders embodying The State. Trump represents that profoundly progressive spirit, albeit in the most trivial and genuinely vulgar — and therefore in a sense the most naked and absurdly direct — form in which it has ever been imposed upon a society.
