When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
Sinclair Lewis (attr)
There is yet another round of explanations of Trump’s popularity among Republicans, especially evangelicals.
Before discussing them, I should concede that my confidence that Trump would flame-out quickly was mistaken. It has been obvious for a long time, to anybody with two eyeballs connected to a working mind, that the Republican Party is a dysfunctional mess. Even so, I believed the party still had a sane backbone which would dismiss him quickly.
Sorry. My bad. The sane have left. It’s like when a gathering is over and the adults have all gone home, but a handful of hangers-on remain behind to revel in their nihilism and drink till their eyeballs fall out — they are the modern GOP.
But Ellis Washington has an entirely different theory of it; he believes Americans are charmed by a real-life instance of John Galt, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Unlike Trump, who is a real American icon of flesh and blood, Rand’s Galt protagonist in Atlas Shrugged, was originally conceived as a symbolic figure of free market capitalism rather than a “two-dimensional” or realistic person. In an earlier essay I liken Trump to the legendary Olympian god, Prometheus, a comparison that Galt has been equated to, as well as to other iconic figures from literature and history. “More icon than character” was how writer Mimi Reisel Gladstein defined Galt as being portrayed. Ayn Rand’s own notes specified that she anticipated that the Galt character would possess “[n]o progression” and “no inner conflict” because he was “integrated (indivisible) and perfect.”
Trump and Galt follow a very nonconformist, iconoclastic worldview the diametrical opposite of Collectivist, Socialist, and Marxist economic organization portrayed in the novel, in which society controlled by legions of tyrannical apparatchiks and incompetent bureaucrats create a corrupt culture that fosters mediocrity in the name of egalitarianism not equality (e.g., equality of out comes over equality of access), which the novel understands as the inevitable consequence of socialist idealism.
Washington overlooks that John Galt (and Hank Rearden, and Francisco d’Anconia, the other heroes of Rand’s novel) are ethical businessmen who actually produce stuff. Trump has gone bankrupt four times, leaving the people who accepted his valueless promises empty-handed.
“I love the poorly educated.”
Donald Trump
But that’s not how Sarah Posner sees it. No. She thinks evangelicals are flocking to Trump because he is a political version of Joel Osteen, that Trump is, basically, a prosperity gospel televangelist.
But Trump, whose Bible has seemed like more of prop than a campaign-animating principle, understands other impulses of evangelical voters. This intuition also enabled him to best Cruz, 30 to 13 percent, among non-evangelical voters in South Carolina.
That impulse, which is Trumpism in a nutshell, is the magical thinking of how Americans get rich, whether it’s by surviving a reality television show, getting lucky with an investment, winning the lottery or being blessed by God.
I’ll grant there is a lot of magical thinking going on, but that’s the only thing Posner gets right. Trump’s crude insults of — everybody, actually — should have undone him a long time ago, but they haven’t; that’s because they are what his admirers want. Trump isn’t running on promises of easy riches (though he has promised that, too), but on the envy and malice of those left behind by change. He is a perverse maestro of class warfare.
Friedrich Nietzsche had Trump’s number a long time ago.
The aristocratic outlook was undermined from the deepest underworld through the lie of the equality of souls; and if faith in the “prerogative of the majority” makes and will make revolutions — it is Christianity, beyond a doubt, it is Christian value judgments, that every revolution simply translates into blood and crime. Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers …
The Antichrist, §43
I don’t think that the country writ large is as sick as the Republicans, but I sure wish the Democrats had stronger candidates.