Trump’s Rebellion Against Reality
What the riot in the Capitol reveals.
Yuval Levin
The United States Capitol Building opened its doors in
November of 1800 to house the very same institution it still houses today—the
bicameral U.S. Congress created by our Constitution. No other advanced society
can claim that level of political stability over the course of that 220-year
period. The arrangement of powers in even the exceptionally steady British
regime has gone through dramatic transformations unlike anything we have
experienced in America over this time, and most other relatively stable societies
(like the nations of Western Europe, Russia, China, Japan, and others) have
gone through several fundamental changes of government through conquest,
revolution, or political upheaval.
We Americans sometimes still think of ourselves as a young
nation, but our political institutions are among the most established in the
world. We are stable. And to me the Capitol, with its majestic dome and marble
columns, has always seemed somehow to speak of our stability.
But what’s required for political stability? The answer
offered by our Constitution is something like the capacity for keeping our
balance in the face of changing circumstances. Its way of doing this can
sometimes seem mechanical. Our system of government creates an interlocking
array of institutions and powers that takes some of the foibles and limits of
human nature for granted, sets ambition to counteract ambition, and seeks to
avoid dangerous excesses in any direction. As James Madison put it in one
particularly Machiavellian passage of Federalist 51, the aim is something like
a “policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better
motives.”
But that is hardly the end of the story, as Madison himself
soon made clear. “As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a
certain degree of circumspection and distrust,” he wrote in Federalist 55, “so
there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of
esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these
qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
So although our system of government knows people are
imperfect, it still has high expectations of all of us and will not work if
those aren’t met. The nature of those expectations gestures toward the
republican virtue that the framers took to be essential in both citizens and
leaders. And it might be summarized by another Madisonian term—the deceptively
capacious word “responsibility.”
As Madison employs the term (and his uses of it are actually
the first that the Oxford English Dictionary can find anywhere in print), it
describes a mix of obligation and responsiveness. The responsible leader takes
ownership of his actions and duties and takes it upon himself to act in
response to events. The responsible citizen understands that the republic is at
some level his to maintain through both action and restraint.
I couldn’t help but think about this one-word summary of
civic virtue all day Wednesday, as our president incited acts of insurrection
and a mob broke into the Capitol to disrupt Congress’s counting of electoral
votes.
The riot itself is no threat to the stability of our
republic. The Capitol Building has seen more than its share of violence and
trouble over the years. The British famously set parts of it on fire in the War
of 1812. It faced intense crowds of rioters several times in the 19th century,
and many times in the 20th. Puerto Rican nationalists fired guns from the House
gallery in 1954, injuring several members. Vietnam War protesters set off a bomb
on the Senate side in 1971.
In July of 1998, while I was working in the building as a
young staffer myself, a gunman made it past the security checkpoint at the
entrance and tried to rush the office of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. The
Capitol Police managed to stop him before he reached his target, but not before
he killed two courageous officers—Jacob Chestnut and John Gibson. The Capitol
always lives shadowed by these attacks, and by the ever-present knowledge of
the threats it faces. But it has endured them all and gone on with the people’s
work. It won’t be shaken.
The bigger problem, the more fundamental challenge to the
stability of our republic on display on Wednesday, was a set of interconnected
failures of responsibility—failures to take ownership of the fate of our
society, and especially failures to deal with reality. The mob of rioters
obviously behaved irresponsibly. Too many congressional Republicans did,
too—flirting with lies and conspiracies for political gain, knowing it was all
for show. But above all, it was the president’s irresponsibility that made
Wednesday’s drama a real threat to our national stability.
Like so much of what Trump has wrought, the attack on the
Capitol had the feel of fiction, and even many of the people involved seemed to
be playing out a fantasy in their heads, living in a world in which sinister
forces had stolen the election from their lion-hearted hero and they had come
to set things straight by a show of strength. It’s all a lie, every part of it,
yet the actions taken by the crowd were very real, and very dangerous.
There has always been something of this unreality about
Trump’s behavior in the presidency. From the very beginning, it has seemed that
Trump almost fully inhabits a boorish, narcissistic psychodrama playing in his
head. Through the power of his personality and celebrity, he has been able to
draw others into that fantasy world for decades, and through the power of the
presidency he has now been able to project it onto the real world and draw yet
more followers into it.
This hasn’t left Trump simply dysfunctional in the
presidency. He has proven to have a solid political sense and a nose for where
his voters are. And he made some good appointments and some policy moves that
any Republican president would have been proud of. And yet, the entire time, if
you had spoken to people around Trump, you would have heard mind-boggling
stories of their direct experiences with him—tales of a president bizarrely
disconnected, obsessive, impervious to information, fixated on personal loyalty,
endlessly repeating patent nonsense.
All of this somehow held together for his first three years
in office. It often took unprecedented acts of insolence and insubordination
from his staff, and of course he was still an outrageously irresponsible president.
But he averted catastrophe. Then, however, came the year of plague and of
election, when Trump’s escapism and unwillingness to face reality became
untenable. He tried to talk the pandemic out of existence and then to wish away
the election results. But the yawning distance between his fantasy world and
the real world finally became unbridgeable.
This is what we are seeing play out now, and what was most
disturbing about Wednesday’s events. The riot at the Capitol itself was
inexcusable, and we can hope that at least some of those involved will be
prosecuted and punished. But more troubling by far was the way in which their
actions were embedded in a fantasy spun up by conspiracists, and especially the
way in which the President of the United States took up his place in that
fantasy world and sought to govern from within it.
In his tweets and video statement on Wednesday, Trump asked
the Capitol rioters to go home while also praising them and thanking them. You
could almost see him struggling to separate his fantasy world from the real
world and proving unable to do it. He seems plainly incapable of performing his
job at this point as a result, and even more of the people around him than
usual have said so since Wednesday morning.
The curious power and appeal of Trump’s conspiracism is
deeply intertwined with its irresponsibility. At its core is a form of
self-pity. The president blames others for disrespecting and abusing him, and
therefore refuses both to take ownership of his obligations and to face
reality. This has proven an intoxicating mix for an extraordinary number of
Republican politicians and voters in the Trump era, and it has utterly defined
the president himself.
If Trumpism means anything, it would seem to mean this
distinct kind of irresponsibility. It’s not the same as populism—which always
risks entanglements with demagogues but also has legitimate concerns and
priorities that deserve to be heard and should not be confused with one man’s
failings. It’s not any particular policy agenda or set of reforms, as President
Trump clearly doesn’t care about any of the particular ideas that others have
sought to attach to him. Ultimately, Trumpism is a style, an ethic that amounts
to a dangerous and highly toxic irresponsibility.
That ethic did not begin with Trump, of course. Forms of it
are now widespread, not only in our politics but also throughout many American
institutions. It shows itself in a tendency to performative outrage and
exaggerated victimhood, both of which are failures to take ownership of one’s
particular roles and obligations. And it shows itself in a blurring of the
lines between reality and fantasy, expression and action.
But Trump has embodied it in an exceptionally concentrated
form, and at the highest levels of our government—in a job that uniquely
requires responsibility, and is defined by the need to deal with reality. A
recovery of responsibility, broadly understood, is called for in many arenas of
American life. But putting Trumpism behind us would certainly be a start.
Yuval Levin is director of social, cultural, and
constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of
National Affairs.
No comments:
Post a Comment