Roots and Rot: Dodging the Blame for Donald Trump
The wiser and most honest conservatives among us have been acknowledging, in the past few weeks, that the ascent of Donald Trump is a huge and historic mistake—but they also want to insist that he’s not just their huge historic mistake. They’ve been passing the blame around. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal has written, rather movingly, of how Trump’s ascent seems alarmingly to affirm bad things that liberals have said about Republican racial attitudes in the past, with the strong implication that this was, until this very moment, unfair—without stopping to ask how different things might be if the Journal’s editorial page had, in 2012, really condemned Romney’s embrace of Trump at the height of his most rancid “birtherism.”
..The same people who have long scoffed, often with reason, at the “root causes” theory of terrorism or crime or whatever—emphasizing, instead, individual responsibility for whatever it is we choose to do— have now become full-fledged rootsers.
.. Or else it’s said that there is a “systematic rot” in American politics, of which Trump is merely a symptom.
.. And that there is economic anxiety is obvious. If this were a sufficient explanation, though, one would expect Trump’s own peculiar brand of Home Shopping Network crypto-fascism to track those anxieties, and one would expect the most marginalized and threatened among us to be most taken with it.
.. If there’s one thing that economists, right and left, agree on, it is that, as Paul Krugman puts it, globalization “is not a problem we can address by lashing out at foreigners we falsely imagine are winning at our expense.”
.. Hitler’s appeal, as any reader of “Mein Kampf” can find, was very marginally about economic grievances, almost entirely to feelings of aggrieved identity and unavenged humiliation.
.. Fascism may have appealed to the economically insecure, but it did not appeal by giving them an economic answer. It appealed by giving them an enemy.
.. one can recognize the grievance without entering into a sentimental view of the aggrieved.