Donald Trump Is Not The Reason We Find Ourselves Here.
Perspective is a powerful, often under-utilized force.
If you were to travel back in time and explain the internet of 2020 (and I mean all of it, down to the hardware landscape that it lays upon) to someone in the year 1920, it would be a pretty bizarre conversation. Now imagine giving the same presentation to someone in year 1420.
We take our own perspectives for granted. We’re so embedded within our internal mazes, our reality is almost exclusively dictated by the walls of our own labyrinth. We often don’t stop to consider how much easier it would be to navigate the jungle with a bids-eye view.
I try to challenge myself to consider different perspectives when I come across stories like this:
At first glance, I would immediately sympathize with the healthcare workers, the people we now all agree to call heroes. The belligerent woman screaming “Go to China if you want communism. GO TO CHINA”, I would certainly think, was incorrect to protest the facts provided to us by the experts standing behind the podium every day.
But what if, just for a moment, we stopped to ponder the thousands_ _of life circumstances and decisions that ultimately brought these two figures to meet each other on 12th street in Colorado on a Sunday in April 2020. The family they were born into, the social fabric of their surroundings, the role models (or lack thereof) in their lives, the media they consume, the multitude of individual decisions they have made, every single day to this point in their lives. The variables are simply endless and incomprehensible.
We are clearly a nation divided. George Packer, in [this] (mostly) brilliant piece, entitled “We Are Living In A failed State” does a marvelous job of highlighting how exactly we got here:
This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together
The second crisis was the financial bust of 2008. Packer continues:
This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were — in health care, financial regulation, green energy — had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.
And so, the groundwork of our fractured state, according to Packer — and the clear empirical data- began to take shape in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. Again, I could not agree more with Packer.
He drills his thesis home:
This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.
Packer makes an astute point, one that I wholeheartedly agree with. Our government bailed out those responsible for the monumental collapse, without so much as a slap on the wrist. The working class, mostly, emerged from the wreckage with a deep distrust of government and corporations.; those who were not paying attention began to take the stability of their incomes for granted.
Until we were all individually coerced to confront a globally collective pandemic. We find ourselves in rough waters with a shaky captain, indeed.
Where I vehemently disagree with Packer, however, is the direction in which he casts blame for our current reality:
Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster.
The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have.
Yes, Trump is a man who suffers from Narcissistic Personality Disorder Syndrome (it’s an actual disease) and fundamentally lacks the ability to lead because he does not have an ounce of empathy in his body. It is of course true, that he see not just this circumstance, but every circumstance in “personal and political terms”. Doesn’t every politician?
But did Trump “collaborate with the enemy”? I find it hard to believe Trump set himself up to be caught with his size 42 pants down. Are we being honest about our own shortcomings, or are we trying to dazzle the elite by attaching our dinger to an obscure French General?
It is entirely fair to be critical of awful leadership. But to suggest that our current reality would be much different with another leader at the helm, in my opinion, is foolish at best and ignorant at worse. Would our nation have rallied behind Hillary? doubtful. We would simply be writing a different op-ed.
It is always easier to deflect the responsibility of looking inward, of auditing our shortcomings.
In looking inward, we absolutely do find ourselves in a “failed state” as Packer himself presents. We find a country who’s GDP has risen 79% since 1980 (adjusted for inflation and population growth), while income of the bottom-half of earners have risen only a meager 20% during that span. We uncover a country wherein the after-tax income of earners near the middle has also badly trailed G.D.P., rising only 50 percent. If we were to examine the facts and value data above our fragile feelings, we would find at least part of the back-story of our divided political landscape:
And so, we can continue to point fingers, much like Trump himself, or we can dig a little deeper. We can choose to be swept up in a sensational moment, or we can arrive at our problems with a disciplined understanding of how we got here.
In the end, Trump is only doing what social media itself ultimately does: expose people for who they really are. So, who do you want to be? The world will broadcast the rest.
