What a brilliant act of self-critical, satirical performance art by America to elect a reality TV star president. Though the election and the days following it felt like some bizarre alternate reality to many people, looking back now with the benefit of hindsight it seems like the inevitable place our cultural trajectory would take us. The rampant egotism, competition, and contempt, love of will over intellect, the idea that unpleasantness is “real.” Even those of us who didn't support him like to make our points with exaggerated moral outrage and "brutal honesty," with quotes from celebrities and reposts of comments by strangers on the internet, see ourselves as brands to be promoted and America as an arena of competing identity labels. We are all submerged in the cultural swamp that birthed and nourished Donald.
Some people apparently voted for Donald out of morbid curiosity, or general spite toward society in general. Others because they're loyal party Republicans, or because they genuinely believed he'd help the lower class and take money out of elections. I talked to, or read posts from, people who supported him for the first three reasons, but I can't verify the existence of this last group. Trump did throw some stuff into his speeches condemning money in politics to woo Bernie Sanders supporters and working-class voters. Predictably, he's already discarded this half-hearted pretense. He's filling his cabinet with some of the same Republicans he derided as part of the corrupt establishment, and his tax plan will increase rates on the lowest earners, while reducing them further for the wealthy.
There is concern Donald will replace the existing neoliberal corporate oligarchy with something more directly awful. The kind of people who benefit from the status quo, who financed Trump and are being appointed to his cabinet, don’t need a Fourth Reich or an overtly Big Brother police state. Deporting 12 million illegal immigrants and forcing every Muslim to register would be expensive, messy, and of little use to our corporate masters, who are already benefiting immensely from the status quo. Donald and his wealthy associates clearly don’t really care about the rights of Muslims, but they probably aren’t that interested in stamping out Islam from America either. Unless another 9/11-scale terrorist attack or war happens.
I think we can safely say that, like many presidential candidates, Donald is not too attached to anything he promised or implied he would do, whether admirable, like limiting the influence of lobbyists, or vile, like torturing prisoners with worse than waterboarding. He is already canceling his plans to prosecute Hilary Clinton and end, or even significantly change, Obamacare. He conceded that there is some "connectivity" between human industry and climate change.
Donald wanted to be president because he had some vague sense ingrained in him from childhood that becoming president is the ultimate achievement. He has no grand vision for how to create a better America, even a misguided or horrifying vision, because he doesn’t care about goodness or America. Because he has no beliefs, no self-awareness, no impulse control, and no experience, Donald will likely not do too much as president. Like another elderly entertainer, Ronald Reagan, who apparently sometimes did not recognize members of his own cabinet, Donald will leave running things to less-visible people who will gently allow him to feel he is really in control. The inhuman system will continue on autopilot.
Some millennials are apparently gearing up for a fascist apocalypse triggering a Star Wars/Hunger Games/Harry Potter confrontation of good vs. evil. I'm down for this and not entirely discounting it's possibility, but I think we should all be prepared for a far more plausible and grim reality over the next four years, an American government/corporate hegemony continuing to rule the world with soft power, logos, advertising, drone strikes, implied threats of trade embargoes, and massive surveillance nobody really notices or cares about. Domestically, the same cycle of grudgingly offered, then gradually reduced, benefits for the lower classes, the same racial profiling and general flagrant and unpunished abuse of authority by police. If we, God forbid, enter another war during the next four years, it won’t be because it’s a Machiavellian chess move by an evil genius but the catastrophic end result of a diplomatic error by a careless and ignorant man, like the several he has made in the last few days.
This doesn’t mean we should get comfortable. Let’s take the opportunity presented by the less charming face the system now has to become less numb to its abominations. We can put more care and attention into the dystopia we already live in, rather than fearing the rise of a more overt and vicious one.
