Eight years later, here we are again. I have been opening up space in my classes for students to reflect on the election result, which follows a uniquely tumultuous election cycle marked by vitriolic rhetoric from the Republican candidate: a rhetoric that asks us to despise and fear our neighbors. The Democrats, meanwhile, seemed short on pithy counter-narratives that can reach people where they live. The president-elect is a convicted felon. I want to believe this was not a normal election, where a normal range of disagreements about policy shaped the conversation. But, increasingly, extreme divisiveness and intractability is the norm in US politics.
It is hard to absorb. It is hard for my students to absorb; it is hard for me to absorb. I’m left with this thought, my most charitable interpretation of Donald Trump’s broad appeal. Beset by an increasingly unaffordable and unlivable world, one made all the worse by decades of heartless policy decisions, Americans are looking for a truly independent, truly free political figure. They aspire to cast their vote for someone who commands wealth and is not commanded by wealth in turn; someone who uses the party system and is not used by it in turn; someone who uses the media and is not used by the media in turn; someone free to say what is on their minds; someone who models a path to success that anyone (hypothetically) could follow, without the multiple layers of social gatekeeping of the established professions. (The importance of The Apprentice to Trump’s political rise can’t be overstated.) I can sympathize with and even own much of this desire. It is a sad commentary on the US in 2024—in particular, on the Democratic Party—that Trump, who uses his vast wealth and freedom only to aggrandize himself and to visit destruction upon others, is the only available approximate instance of the independent leader many would wish to see in our public life.
Eric Weiskott 