Russell Banks responds to questions about the election put to him by a regular interlocutor from Nouvel Observateur.
1. Did anger and hatred against Obama contribute to Trump’s success?
Until now, on the eve of the winter solstice, at the start of a new astronomical year, I’ve put off trying to answer questions about the election of Donald Trump. I went to Ecuador and climbed in the Andes, cut myself off from radio and TV, the Internet and newspapers. I remained mostly silent, except to utter quiet moans and groans of despair or the low worried whimpering that follows a sudden fall from a great height after you’ve checked for broken bones and found none, but haven’t yet determined the extent of internal injuries. Since returning to the US, I’ve read most of the explanations for Trump’s victory by the pundits and commentators of the left, right, and center, and listened mainly in silence to my friends and colleagues as they try to explain how and why this mentally deranged ignoramus became the most powerful human being in the known universe. It’s been almost too depressing and frightening an event to contemplate. Also, the urge to explain Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton feels like an unwarranted concession to rationality, as if he won the election by dint of superior political strategy and tactics, and if we can only figure out what his strategy and tactics were, we can use them next time against him. This is what most Democrats and liberal columnists and pundits have been doing since November 8th. It strikes me as an exercise in futility, however, and does not take into consideration the enormous historical implications of this election.
You ask, did “anger and hate against Obama contribute to Trump’s success?” Which is to ask if racial bias and racism played a role. Yes, of course they did. So did widespread ignorance and fear and economic inequality. So did deepening anxiety about the fading of the American Dream. So did celebrity worship and reality TV and the widespread reliance on social media for news sources. Possibly so did the Russian hacking of Democrat National Committee members’ email accounts. And yes, misogyny and xenophobia contributed to Trump’s victory over Clinton. Clinton-fatigue contributed, just as Bush-fatigue doomed the early campaign of Brother Jeb. All these factors, plus a dozen more, came together in 2016 in a perfect storm that had been gathering for decades, at least since the Reagan years and probably as far back as the Nixon era. America finally got the president that American culture has been demanding for generations.
Lord knows, he’s not the president we deserve. But he is the one we’ve been asking for since the first Kennedy-Nixon TV debate in 1960, when a politician (JFK) appropriated an actor’s good looks and skill-set and used them to considerable advantage in the ballot box. With Reagan, an actor appropriated the politician’s skill-set to an even greater advantage in the ballot box. The blending of the two archetypes was no longer unusual. Another actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, parlayed blockbuster film celebrity into the governorship of California (we note that he’s recently taken Trump’s vacant seat in the reality TV show, The Apprentice: watch to see if there’s a move to expunge from the Constitution the requirement that the president be native-born). In other words, facilitated by the technological media-revolution that began with TV, our political culture got eaten by our mass entertainment culture.
All those contributing factors listed above—“anger and hate towards Obama,” i. e., racism, along with ignorance and fear and economic inequality, misogyny, xenophobia, fading belief in the American Dream, incompetence and arrogance of the opposing party, the desire for change, and so on—all these elements have been a part of every presidential election in US history. We’ve also seen candidates in the past who were mentally ill or delusional, or both, like Trump, and racist and misogynist and xenophobic candidates; we’ve had plutocrats and oligarchs, crackpots and warmongers and drunks and thieves run for president before, and some of them have actually been elected. I don’t need to name names; you can fill in the blanks with all but the handful of presidents who don’t qualify. But we’ve never elected a president as mis-qualified in every possible way as Donald Trump. And no president has possessed as much raw power over the fate of humanity and the planet as the American president possesses today.
2. You had never figured on Trump’s victory. Since Obama involved himself deeply in supporting Hillary Clinton, isn’t Trump’s victory also Obama defeat?
No one group of citizens is responsible for this calamity; to the degree that we all participate in the wider American culture, we are all responsible. When you ask, “Why so many men, women and voters belonging to minorities haven’t refrained from voting for Trump against their own interests?” you are letting the rest of us off the hook. We who early on found the idea of a Trump candidacy amusing, absurd, entertaining. We who allowed the mass media—we who paid the mass media—to fill our eyes and ears and thus our minds with his image and words, giving him, in other words, the meta-reality he needed in order to exploit the weakness of his opponents in the Republican primaries and the weakness of his Democrat opponent in the national election. By paying attention to him at the start of his primary campaign, we who on November 8th voted for Hillary Clinton made Trump a serious candidate for president, just as much as the neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members did once he got going. Strange bedfellows, indeed. But in normalizing Trump as a viable political candidate, we normalized his core supporters as the so-called “alt-Right”. Now they play important roles in the incoming administration. We should have marginalized him from the start, essentially silenced him, treated him the way the mass media in the past have treated comedians and single-issue religious fanatics running for president as a joke or a chapter in a megalomaniacal schizoid fantasy. By allowing ourselves to be his audience in the reality TV show that has become our national life, we have allowed Donald Trump to become our leader.
3. From Obama’s years to Trump’s years, aren’t we going from dream to nightmare?
We’re moving from the end of one era to the beginning of a new one. From the end of the era of liberal democracy—one might say global liberal democracy, which has prevailed especially in the West since the end of World War II—to the era of the oligarchs. Perhaps the template for the coming era has been cast by post-Soviet Union Russia. Which may help us understand Trump’s apparent enthusiasm for Putin and his regime. He recognizes the similarities and, in as much as he is narcissistically admiring of himself, admires them, too. Trump and Putin are possibly the best the future has to offer. Barak Obama may be the best of the past.
In many ways, Obama has been the personification of the modern liberal democrat: cosmopolitan, secular, humane, global in perspective, technologically sophisticated, more comfortable with complexity and nuance than simplicity and rigid dichotomies. By the same token, like most liberal democrats, he tended as president to be non-confrontational, which sometimes made him seem too eager to compromise and to see the world from his opponents’ point of view. He has seemed naive as to their true motives and the brutality of their methods and means of opposition. He has often come across as elitist and out of touch with the daily realities of ordinary working class and poor Americans.
But these are the sins of liberalism, and in the moral universe of modern political life they are venal sins, easily forgiven. We may not see his like in the American presidency again. Not because he is so exceptional a human being, as because his time, the time when a liberal democrat could be said to express the will of the American people, has passed. It’s the will of the American people that has changed. That change has been gradual and has taken place in small increments over the last three or four generations (if you assume, like Thomas Jefferson, that a generation lasts only approximately fifteen years). It has been so gradual that we have not been aware of its having occurred. Those of us old enough to remember the 1940s and 1950s may remember what it was like to live without television or mass media or the Internet, a world whose economy was not driven by insatiable consumerism and the narcotized worship of celebrity, a nation whose political life was not shaped by the needs and desires of a class of plutocrats and a handful of billionaire oligarchs. But no one else remembers. You almost have to be an elderly person, like me, a person in his mid-seventies, to know that a profound and terrible historical change has occurred.
4. You had told us that Trump was “lazy and arrogant”. Is Trump controllable? Are there institutions that can keep him in check?
Minnesota Senator Al Franken, the one-time “Saturday Night Live” comedian and satirist author, recently noted that Donald Trump never laughs. This is true. After nearly two years of seeing Trump on TV and the Internet and every media outlet imaginable, I’ve not once seen him laugh. Smirk, yes. And he throws out a menacing grin from time to time. I’ve seen him cast a condescending smile. And a fake smile for the camera that rarely shows his teeth. But no laughter.
This is creepy, and not a little scary. I’m not sure if it means anything, except that he must have no sense of humor; but he is the only president in my lifetime that I’ve never seen throw back his head and guffaw. Even George W. Bush liked a good laugh. Combine that with “lazy and arrogant,” however, and give him the vast power of the American presidency, and you have a man to be afraid of. It’s also clear, from his early-morning, daily, revenge-seeking tweets attacking anyone who happened to criticize him the day before, that he’s very easily insulted and angered. He’s a tee-totaler whose favorite cuisine is fast-food burgers and fries, a germ-phobic obsessive-compulsive narcissist suffering from attention deficit disorder (according to the man who ghost-wrote his autobiography), a president-elect who claims to get his information about the larger world from “the shows” (CNN, Fox, Facebook, and Twitter, I suppose he means) and expresses no need for intelligence briefings from the CIA or other intelligence agencies.
A person with this many screws loose cannot be controlled by the usual social, legal or even constitutional checks and balances. He’s too far out of touch with the shared reality of the society that surrounds him to recognize and honor the natural limits to his authority and power.
5. From Obamacare to COP21, from the nuclear agreement with Iran to the normalization of the relationships with Cuba, will Obama’s political legacy be stomped by Trump?
It would be somewhat comforting if I could believe that the inertia of the hugely bloated Washington bureaucracy and the cowardice of a Republican Congress and Senate were sufficiently resistant to executive fiat that nothing good or terribly bad will happen on Trump’s watch. That it will turn out to be like every other conservative Republican administration, a painful but ultimately repairable interlude, like the two George W. Bush administrations. But I can’t believe that. Congress will find a way to placate and reward the cadre of oligarchs that Trump is appointing to his cabinet and administration, and the much larger group of plutocrats who pay for elections in our system of pay-to-play will make sure that their bought-and-paid-for representatives in Congress follow through with the necessary legislation.
It’s too easy to blame the results of this election on Hillary Clinton and thus indirectly blame it on Obama, since so many commentators and even Clinton herself described her candidacy as a continuation and expansion of Obama’s policies and her election as a chance to endorse those policies, such as Obamacare and COP21, the Iran agreement, the Cuban de-escalation, and so on. But for more than half a century Republicans have been committed to erasing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty (unfortunate name) by eliminating all the progressive social programs of the 20th century. They have been relentless in this and have never wavered from their intention. It’s what they really mean by “Make America Great Again.” Now for the first time they have a president who not only won’t block them, but, given his mental state, will probably not even be aware of what they are doing while they are doing it.
This election was not a victory of one ideology over another; it was a victory for celebrity. The Republicans could have run Elvis, and even without hiring an impersonator for the televised debates, Elvis would have won. We might hope that Trump breaks the law or committed an indictable crime in the past (like statutory rape, a possibility, or fraud, a strong likelihood), resulting in impeachment. But then we would have Vice President Mike Pence as president, who would know exactly what the Republican Congress was doing and would be quite happy to accommodate it. For the same reasons, Pence is more likely than Trump to appoint right wing ideologues to the Supreme Court. He himself is an ideologically rigid conservative straight from the heart of the religious right. So not even impeaching Trump will help.
6. Trump’s campaign took on the Republican Party establishment that was supposed to explode in the event of his defeat. After victory and opportunistic rallying around the president-elect, what will become of the Republican Party as it confronts its unpredictable leader?
In the past, political parties have on occasion been so divided that they have dissolved and disappeared from the political scene, like the Whigs in 1860 over the question of ending slavery. In most cases, the schism has been over a single irreconcilable issue. But in a two-party system like ours, when a wide range of policies and personalities divides the party, the party tends to embrace one side or the other (whichever is perceived as the election-winning side) and simply moves as a whole in that direction, the way the Democrats moved to the left in 1972 with McGovern and then swung back to the right in 1992 under Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats”. The problem for Republicans in 2017 is that the schism is not over any particular set of issues or policies; it’s over Trump himself. He won the election for the party—practically in spite of the party—but not in the interests of a set of policies articulated by a platform or even by the candidate himself (except in the negative: against immigration, against terrorism, against free trade, against…whatever bugs you). Worse for them, since he was elected Trump has backed off many of his earlier positions, slightly softening his hard-edged stance on immigration, for instance, and stocking his administration with hard-charging billionaires and generals whose presence gives the lie to his earlier push against Wall Street and his call for a new isolationism. My best guess is that the Republican party leaders will cross their fingers and hope that Trump is too busy having fun at the White House entertaining Russian moguls and models and B-list Hollywood celebrities like Sylvester Stallone, tweeting through the night, while leaving the hard work of dismantling the New Deal and Obamacare to the grownups. Otherwise, if he gets involved with actually governing, he may cause the party to identify wholly with him in a cult of personality, the party of a strongman promising salvation, abandoning all political principles and ideological and party commitments, except the principles and commitments that advance the power of its leader. This is how a republic becomes a fascist state without having to endure a civil war.
7. You supported Bernie Sanders. Is there a Sanders’ legacy? How do you explain that the Democrat Party was so cut off from the lower classes? Do you still believe in has the capacity to reform itself? Does it have to slide more to the left?
If we actually had a multi-party system instead of a two-party system and thus had a party that called itself Socialist, Bernie Sanders could have run for president as a Socialist and not a Democrat, and he might have ended up as the Secretary of Treasury in a coalition government gathered around Hillary Clinton’s centrist Liberal Democrats. There would have been room for him and his millions of enthusiastic supporters in that governing coalition. But for Bernie and his supporters, it was Hillary’s way or the highway, and so it remains today, six weeks after the election.
Could he have won the general election if he had beaten Hillary in the primaries and won the nomination of the Democrat party at the convention? I don’t think so. Given the choice between Trump and Sanders, too many Democrats would have stayed home on election day rather than vote for a 72-year-old, rumpled, Jewish, self-declared socialist railing against Wall Street billionaires. And no Republicans of any stripe would vote for him instead of Trump, no matter how scary and strange Trump might seem to them. Sanders’ surprisingly successful run in the primaries pushed Hillary to her left, which placed her squarely in the American political center. This was a good thing, if you wanted the Democrat party to avoid becoming merely the multi-racial, multi-cultural version of the Republican party it had become since Hillary’s husband and his cohort took it over in the early 1990s. But if you yearned for a powerful, truly progressive, leftist opposition to both the Democratic and Republican parties, Sanders’ campaign was essentially an ego trip for him and his supporters, among whom I counted myself. Since the Democrats’ convention in July, he has faded so quickly into political irrelevancy that it’s hard to remember now that he ever ran for president
8. What kind of resistance will Americans be able to mount against Trump given that Congress–and soon the Supreme Court–will be controlled by the Republicans? And you, Russell Banks, what can you still hope for your country?
What shall we do to oppose the madman Trump and the billionaires who have taken control of our country? More importantly, and perhaps more personally, how do we avoid falling into cynicism and despair? I ask for all Americans, not just for those of us who identify ourselves as liberals or leftists or progressives, men and women who have always thought of themselves as sitting somewhat outside the political mainstream. In the past, we could imagine forms of opposition that could be effective in bringing about change, often at great cost and even loss of life—in the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the anti-war movement of the late sixties and early 1970s, for example. But that was then, and this is now, and in the intervening years the world has changed in ways that have only reinforced and legitimized state and corporate control of all imaginable forms of opposition. Perhaps we are entering a new Dark Age in which small collectives of humanists must gather together in secrecy to preserve the humanist texts and traditions and images that have helped us continue to be holy and loving creatures, sacred to one another, passing those texts and traditions and images on to the generations yet to come. Instead of trying in vain to overthrow the oligarchy, perhaps we should study how to outlast it.