Like you, I’ve been struggling with the idea that Donald Trump has been rewarded. And he has been rewarded with the most fabulous prize possible, which should not have been available to him. On January 20th, he will receive the Participation Award every overgrown rich kid thinks he deserves. But these half-assed Hamlets have been denied this prize for almost 250 years thanks to our horrifically flawed founders who agreed on one thing: No kings.
In exchange for the ruthless pulse of brutality laced with the nonsense Donald Trump has injected into American life, he will gain almost everything. He will soon have the power to pardon anyone, possibly including himself, along with multifarious spoils we’re too limited by our conventional morals even to imagine. And by rewarding him, we are rewarding Vladimir Putin for the wholesale slaughter punctuated by rape and torture that he’s rained down on Ukraine.
And like many of you, I’m almost always able to summon the agony of knowing that people whom I was raised to love are celebrating this evil. They’re reveling in this failure of karma, a concept that only seems to exist now to mock us.
So I can understand why MSNBC and CNN’s viewership has shrunk in half and why a large chunk of the majority of this nation, who didn’t vote for Donald Trump, has decided that politics is not worth their time. It can ache to approximate anything resembling meaning or hope. What is the lesson to be gleaned from someone who does everything you would teach your child not to do, becoming the most powerful person alive, promising to rule every one of us for the rest of our lives?
That’s why I’m so grateful to be working with Andrea Pitzer on her podcast Next Comes What. From her work on ONE LONG NIGHT, a global history of concentration camps, she has captured several insights about modern states devolving into unconscionable horrors enacted out of the will or license of authoritarians.
Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art to support Next Comes What.
And her episode “Are We the Baddies?” offers, to me, the most straightforward assessment of how Trump won. The question will haunt me for the rest of my life, so the clarity is much appreciated, if not medicinal.
It’s a simple two-word answer that is even better than the two-word answer given by Michael Mechanic, Mother Jones Senior Editor, who offered “wealth inequality” as his solution to the riddle of our time. However, it connects directly to Mechanic’s answer and possibly is only the answer because of Mechanic’s answer.
How did we get Donald Trump?
Propaganda works. That’s it.
Now, that seems simple and obvious. And it’s probably too simple. That’s why it’s so satisfying to hear Pitzer expand on why propaganda works:
People living in a community with good institutions tend to evolve toward their best selves, and dysfunctional or punitive institutions tend to bring out the worst in us.
In the long run, the answer is to build a world with stronger communities, instead of leaving gaps in which people get isolated, and they're encouraged to nurse their grievances against imaginary enemies…
On the big picture side, perhaps the most important thing to remember is the narrative that's built around hatred and exclusion is being funded and driven both directly and indirectly by people with big pockets and a strong desire to change society for their personal benefit. They're doing it so they can get the kind of laws and workforce that will maximize their power and profit.
Of course, there are true believers like Stephen Miller in Trump's political world, people who are dedicated to obscene, inhumane policies. But their power and the movement as a whole is bankrolled by people using Trump's voters and his culture warriors for cynical ends.
Incessant propaganda works, primarily when funded by extremely wealthy people seeking the plunder that comes from dividing people. And it works better in a nation where people have been robbed of a basic safety net that makes life bearable by a cynically coded form of politics that weaponizes racial, religious, and gender grievances.
This answer combines the critical insights of our time from George Lakoff, Ian Haney López, and Jessica Calaraco. From them, I’ve learned the power of right-wing rhetoric. I’ve seen how it has been weaponized into dog whistles. And I’m beginning to understand how America’s systemic oppression of women generates a societal fragility that our rich love to exploit.
Trump is unique in how shamelessly he seeks power, but every narrative he’s seized exists beyond him, and most of them have been nurtured by the right in America since at least the New Deal, if not the end of Reconstruction.
Propaganda works. But it’s no magic. And it need not be clever or 19th-dimension chess. It just requires massive backing, repetition, and time. And with that, it can achieve monstrous horrors. Andrea has seen it over and over again in the dozens of countries that have built concentration camps.
So, how do we fight back? We’re not billionaires capable of building massive propaganda apparatus. Well, you are, George. But not the rest of us.
This is another reason I love working with Andrea. She provides the most concrete answer for rebuilding reality I’ve ever come across. Listen to the end to discover why schools and libraries are among our best defenses against fascism.
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