No one has ever tried harder to throw an election than Trump
did. Barely a day went by when he didn’t say or do or fail to do something
which should have disqualified him in the eyes of every American. There’s no
need to catalog these gross lapses of basic decency, the stuff we teach to the
smallest children who act out even in private. And yet he won. And it’s not
because Hillary was such a bad candidate that people felt they had to vote for
Trump. Some felt that way, of course. But I still have to maintain that those
who said, “I loathe Trump like any decent person but I have to vote for him
because Hillary is so evil” can’t be many. The statement itself is so
irrational, so contrary to all the evidence, that I however large the number of
people who believed this, it cannot account for Trump’s obscene victory.
But something has to. A lot of people right now, two days
after the election, are pulling their hair out to understand. Some, like
Michael Moore, gave us a scenario long before the election that accounts pretty
convincingly for what happened—at least one of his five points does (the one
about the Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin strategy). But Moore himself was
not convinced when he wrote it that Trump was going to win (the week after he
penned a way to stop Trump; he also voted for Hillary, which would have been a
waste of time if he knew Trump would win). His essay was more of an “if Trump wins,
this is how it will happen,” though for marketing purposes (presumably) it’s circulated
as “Five Reasons Why Trump Will Win in November.” Moreover, the whole five
reasons taken together don’t explain how Americans, some of them by no means
stupid in other ways, could cast a vote for this unpredictable, valueless,
inexperienced, unqualified, hateful and mendacious clown.
I thought better of Americans generally. I still believe not
enough of them are stupid enough for their sheer stupidity to have been what
propelled them to do something so stupid. Even very intelligent people do stupid
things sometimes. Einstein probably failed to grab his umbrella when it
threatened rain. (At least it would not surprise me to hear that he did.)
So you still have to figure out how so many not-stupid
people could be so stupid. I don’t like any of the reasons I’m hearing, all the
exit poll data, the lack of enthusiasm for Hillary, the complacency of people
who didn’t vote because all the polls said she’d win—so what was the point?
None of that puts it over the top as far as I can see. The phenomenon was so
big and the act of voting so counterintuitive and counterproductive that
something else had to be at play.
Something neither logical analysis nor research can uncover.
The unaccounted element in Trump’s (stupid—have I said “stupid” enough yet?)
victory was the same force that propelled the sales and hysteria of Harry
Potter books and Beany Babies. Donald Trump rode the wave of a mindless,
hysterical, mimetic fad, the kind that sweeps through every society with pretty
predictable regularity, the kind that leaves people with Rubbermaid bins of
worthless stuffed animals they bought in a frenzy convinced they were setting
themselves up for future riches on the resale market.
I should make it clear I have nothing against Harry Potter
books or Beanie Babies. The animals are cute, well made, fun to play with. The
books are competently written, fantasy-mysteries fun to read, full of safe themes
of love and loyalty and friendship that only the most paranoid fundamentalist
could have a problem with. But the toys are not a hundred times better than the
other cute stuffed animals that were offered for sale during the frenzy, and
the books are not a hundred times better than a lot of other books published
for the same audience in the same period. Indeed their greatness did not get
noticed by all those publishers to whom they were first offered because it was
never their greatness that sold them. Unpredictably, and with a large element
of randomness thrown in, they caught the wave when the culture was ready for
another bit of collective madness.
The species is wired for this, and the global communications
and marketing networks amplify the phenomenon in ways unforeseeable for those
things emerged. And as in all such cases, whether confined to a single household
or town or spread out throughout the world, the individuals so caught up are
convinced that their frenzy is not a frenzy, that they are acting on their own
volition and that they “just really like Harry Potter,” or Beanie Babies or any
number of other fads you can think up on your own.
The phenomenon if you are interested is well analyzed in the
work of Rene Girard in such texts as The
Scapegoat and Things Hidden since the
Creation of the World and many other books.
So this is my conclusion: Trump is a fad.
I almost typed “fraud” but he’s not so much a fraud. He
makes almost no attempt to hide his con. The one insightful thing he said in
his 18 month campaign was that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and
shoot someone and not lose any supporters. (It wasn’t of course his own
insight; he was quoting or plagiarizing, but it was still insightful.) In fact
he marveled as he said it. He couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make sense (even
to him, who has a very low threshold for sense). But he was right. And that’s
the best evidence I can submit for the claim. Fads are not reasonable. Fads
catch reasonable people up in irrational acts.
Fads are things that leave you months later, when they have
finally passed, a lot lighter in the wallet, trying to figure out what to do
with dozens or Rubbermaid buckets full of regret.
