Paul Campos looks at a now viral speech by conservative billionaire Thomas Klingenstein, a prominent money guy behind the reactionary Claremont Institute. In it, we get a glimpse at why so many people who would seem otherwise capable of looking at the overwhelming evidence that Trump is manifestly unfit for office have decided that he's the "right man of the job".
In this vision of America, the country teeters on the edge of destruction. In this, Trump's supporters and critics align. For his supporters, if he's not elected, America will collapse; for his critics, if he IS elected, American democracy could end. It is exhausting, of course, to constantly be on the edge of disaster, but that's our moment.
The evidence in support of "Trump is a threat to democracy" seems pretty clear. He worked to overthrow the 2020 election; he routinely violates the laws that as president he is sworn to uphold; he has explicitly promised that he will use his office to punish his enemies; he has worked to strip women of their right to choose and will likely work to strip other rights from groups of Americans he hates. This is in the historical and written record.
What Klingenstein argues (and I defy you to listen to the whiny speech in its entirety) is that America is about to collapse into a Maoist hellscape. "Multiculturalism"/DEI, "socialism" and tyranny are on the march and about to stamp out American freedom. The Left hates America, you see, and wants to destroy it.
Now, there is a fair amount of "America is uniquely bad" crap on the academic left. However, the argument that "DEI is killing everything good about America" is largely projection. It's projection that is felt extremely keenly by billionaires. Yes, given substantive control of government, Democrats will absolutely raise taxes on billionaires - hopefully by a lot. For a certain brand of billionaire, ALL taxes are theft and raising them on anyone (but especially the billionaires) is just obviously Marxist.
Where this falls apart is in what Campos terms the "Fascist Contradiction":
The Fascist Contradiction is that the Nation is essentially great and pure and chosen for its world-historical destiny, but simultaneously decadent and depraved and almost past all saving, hence the need for its resurrection via the leadership of the Leader. This is amusingly (or maybe not) captured by Trump’s claims that America had ceased to be great by 2016, became great again for exactly four years, then ceased to be great on January 20th — or perhaps January 6th — 2021, but can become great again in a few months.
You can't have a logical framework for this. It exists beyond cause and effect or the historical record. For instance, Klingenstein's critique that the left thinks that slavery makes America an unredeemable country isn't true (outside a few outliers). However, slavery did put America on a different path that continues to have echoes down to today. So was America great when it had slaves? Jim Crow? If it only became great after Jim Crow ended, was it just great during Reagan's presidency?
One of Obama's greatest rhetorical flourishes was in pointing out that the American project was about creating a more perfect Union. Democracy, in this framework, is an action verb. This ultimately is the normie liberal position. America is an ongoing project. For Trumpists, America is his rhetorical gambit of "American carnage".
In the 1960s and '70s, a similar dynamic was roiling our politics. It was an age of assassinations, hyperinflation, unprecedented political corruption and national humiliation. In the end, we came through it. It led to an aging Irishman selling an optimist vision of what America might be and the general ebb and flow of political fortunes, but the country survived and hopefully will again.
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