What I find most frustrating among liberals today is the belief that Donald Trump is an aberration, that he represents some disease in the American body politic, that “we’re not like that.”
He’s not an aberration. Americans are just like that. We always have been.
I’ll go further and say all people are like that. Democracy doesn’t create virtue. It just offers the opportunity for it.
All around the world, in 2025, Trumpism is rampant. In Italy it was called Berlusconi, now Meloni. In Brazil it was Bolsonaro while in Hungary it’s Orban and in Turkey, Erdogan. Slovakia and the Netherlands both elected Trumpists to power in the last year. In Israel, it’s Netanyahu. Aspects of Trumpism – racism, misogyny, fear of immigrants – are important drivers of power in India and throughout Southeast Asia.
It doesn’t help to point out contradictions in what Trumpists are saying, but this is most telling. The global population continues climbing. But “we” are in a demographic trap, growing older, about to be “replaced.” By whom, by what? Black folks are just as human as you and I are. So are Latin Americans and Muslims. Yet the trope that “they’re trying to replace us” remains, even though we know the cause of overpopulation. It’s poverty. To people with nothing, children represent wealth. When people have enough, women choose not to overburden themselves. Wealth is how you defuse the population bomb.
There is no nation where this contradiction isn’t in the discourse. Now add religious differences, ethnic differences, fear of the poor by the rich, and even the search for a positive outcome gets drowned out.
The Good News
The good news is that if democracy can be maintained, even in a fragile state, even as a seed in the minds of the people, this fever can burn itself out. Fascists offer no solutions, as Latin America has discovered. Simple ideology is useless in the face of complex problems.
Trumpism is driven by religion, by racism, and by economic oligarchs. It’s true everywhere and has always been true. Study Mexico’s politics, or Brazil’s. They’re no different than us. The rich want protection, not just from the poor, but from the middle class their wealth has created. Churches demand adherence to their prejudices, never mind how or why. Weak men fear strong women. There’s always a minority group that needs to be put down.
What Trumpism offers is simplicity in a complex world. If we hit the “other” hard enough, it’s thought, we’ll solve all our problems “once and for all,” and our children will never have to deal with them. If we go back to how it was, it can be that way again, never mind how horrible the past really was. Nostalgia lies.
Breaking Through
Breaking the fever requires that we engage with others’ fear, rather than dismissing it. The warnings and handwringing that characterize liberal reaction to Trumpism won’t work. We’re in it now and must deal with the consequences.
My advice is to embrace it. America’s greatest triumphs have come from under the thumb of oppression. The 1960s would not have been possible without the 1950s. If Bull Connor had been a liberal Democrat, no one would have ever heard of Dr. King. The fever of oppression burns but it also creates resistance, without which progress is impossible.
Create new movements and go forward, accepting the casualties, but knowing we’re right.
