Indeed, the hate now directed toward Donald Trump closely resembles the hatred many progressives felt for Richard Nixon in the early 1970s. Tricky Dick personified all the ills of the United States’ political culture: secrecy, lies, wars, and misuse of state power. Because liberals fully identified their political critique with one figure, they were left completely defenseless the day Nixon left office.
Personifying the problem blocked obvious and important questions: how did American political culture produce someone like Nixon? How did his administration reshape this culture? What would he leave behind? By failing to pose these questions, his opponents left the door open for the militarism, racism, and neoliberalism of our first B-list celebrity president, Ronald Reagan. [...]
Fact-checking does nothing to disabuse people of the myths that structure their worldviews, which are neither factual nor completely fictional. Myths play a central role in people’s moral orientation, because they reduce reality’s murky struggles into simplified stories of good and evil, greatness and failure. The failure of liberal moralizing to stop Trump has everything to do with the power of myths. [...]
His opponents could successfully debunk these myths, but his supporters won’t abandon a narrative that gives their world coherence without having another framework on hand. Unfortunately, liberal myths are either so weak or so close to Trump’s own story that they provided no alternative. [...]
The liberal refusal to recognize structural racism and diverging class interests has created space for Trumpism. Understanding this entails that we move the struggle against racism beyond diversity management and begin developing economic policies that genuinely benefit working-class people — not just those white working-class voters whom Trump mobilized, but also the white and non-white working-class people whom Hillary failed to mobilize, and the vast number of people who have been disenfranchised, never enfranchised, or simply chose not to vote.
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