On Being Complicit

Democracy is not therapy.

Trumpism is dead. The cause: suicide. The method: a cocktail of hubris and credulity.

Not content to enforce standards of citizenship through deportations or consumer discipline through tariffs, the President has fallen back on the typical temptation of his profession: increasingly risky military adventures. After the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it retrieval of Maduro in Venezuela there is now the wider-scaled and somewhat strategically inexact bombing campaign in Iran. Yet the memes and revelry that flowed easily after the former seem now more forced and less frequent after the latter. The spark is gone, so to speak. In its place is a feeling of uncomfortable repetition hanging over the people who ushered him back into office.

So Christopher Caldwell writes in The Spectator. “The attack on Iran is so wildly inconsistent with the wishes of his own base,” Caldwell writes, “so diametrically opposed to their reading of the national interest, that it is likely to mark the end of Trumpism as a project.” A devastating diagnosis from one of Trump’s most consistent and respectable intellectual sympathizers. And a plausible one.

Far be it from me to engage in a Chris-measuring contest with Caldwell, who bests me as much in the depth of his wisdom as in the length, if not girth, of his name.

Contrary to its portrayal in the newspapers, Trumpism was a movement of democratic restoration. At its center was the idea of the deep state. In recent decades, selective universities created a credentialocracy, civil-rights law endowed it with a system of ideological enforcement, the tax code entrenched a class of would-be philosopher-kings in the nonprofit sector, and civil-service protections armed government bureaucrats to fight back against any effort at democratic reform.

Behind the madness and the hair-pulling it inspired in blue state homes and on their televisions there was a coherent method that aligned with the collective outlook of enough Americans to reelect him. Now those Americans, so Caldwell, tells it, are being set aside for the narrow priorities of Israel, the ego of its Prime Minister, and the business interests of his son-in-law. And the people are responding, for this is not a mass suicide by any means. Joe Rogan and Megyn Kelly “have reacted to the invasion with incredulity. … ”[T]he mutual respect between him and his movement has been ruptured, and his revolution is essentially over.” So much for the MAGA death cult.

Of course you do not need right-wing emasculation or left-wing demoralization to look at what we are doing in and to Iran and consider that maybe it was misjudged, to say nothing of it being a dereliction of principles. All’s well for his most fervent opposition, though, who can look forward to interesting new friendships, increases in both credibility and size of the next inevitable No Kings marches, and, one can only assume, a newfound respect for paleocon isolationism.

Only pain and sorrow can come from this. For all of Trump’s faults, he was buoyed less by good fortune than by the constant flailing of his opposition. The Democrats cannot form a good-faith coalition with disillusioned Trumpists, being so inflexible on the fundamental issues between them, with broader objections that are more cosmetic than substantial (“Stop Trump” is as vague as any Iran strategy), and a hatred for them that requires no oil to burn long and hot. The Trumpists in turn are limited in what they can do. They can’t just pivot like Marjorie Taylor Greene and hang out on The View or wait for J.D. Vance to reach any one of his potential final forms. There will be social stagnation like nothing else, and it won’t even impede Trump’s agenda because he’s not short on pro-war supporters. And having said even all that, I cannot let go of Trumpism myself.

2024 was the election for the Trump-hesitant. The cultists, the Proud Boys, and QAnon having receded from the public consciousness, the vacuum was filled by the politically “tribeless,” the culture war conscript, and the “moderate.” Typically anyone who took their political advice from Rogan, Theo Von, Andrew Schulz, or The Free Press. Bridget Phetasy sums up the experience: “If you told the Bridget of 2016 that the Bridget of 2024 was going to vote for … Trump, I would have said, “Wow … I lose my mind in the future.” Her summary of the rationale is more important: “Not really for Donald Trump; I’m voting against the left.” Years of polemics vindicated by the excesses of the Biden administration, gave Trump tacit permission to enact, in Rogan’s words, “radical change.”

I consider a negative vote of this kind less voting as protest than voting as therapy. There is a thrill in democratic participation, a catharsis in committing yourself against the status quo, and validation when that anti-choice is defeated. But things dim as it occurs to these voters that the elected choice must actually govern, not just shitpost. I heard these appeals and felt that they came from a position of weakness. Strange thing to say about someone who can probably crater my skull like a cantaloupe with his bare hands. But the point holds as these influencers came to regret their choices, which is fine on its own, not everyone judges well in high-stakes situations. But it is an altogether different matter when judgment is made with such wishful thinking and naïvety.

Democracy is not therapy. It is the balancing of outcomes to find which of your options you can tolerate more than the others. Voters in 2024 had to decide between a menu of unattractive uncertainties from one side and the massive uncertainties of the side running against it. Even if you’re only voting against the former you still assure the prolonging of the uncertainties provided by the latter. This is much less fun, and turns you into something closer to Ethan Hawke’s grim preacher in First Reformed. Except you must press the button and detonate your vest. There is no last-minute morbid penance, no Amanda Seyfried type coming to complete your salvation. Democracy is the ultimate leap into the abyss, a race to the bottom of the bottomless pit. That’s how it felt to me, anyway.

A nominal concept that develops around a national leader has two possible fates. It can curdle under the namesake’s ego and die with them or it can perpetuate into every facet of society until it takes on a form totally out of the namesake’s control and often in spite of their intentions.

Trump’s growing supply of dissenters tend to prefer the first one, understandably. Trumpism is parasitic upon the figurehead’s solipsistic mindset. Remove Trump and Trumpism can no longer feed. But this, in addition to being wrong, has its flaws. Demystifying Trump’s personality cult often ends up reinforcing it. Media images meant to expose his villainy end up glamorizing his antiheroism. And there is a disorienting difference between Trump being described and Trump seen firsthand. When people argue at you on his personal traits—his egocentrism, his caustic way with language, his inexhaustible capacity for grudges, his eccentricities and lack of grace, his intuitional (as opposed to deductive) intelligence—they think they are describing the perfect bully, when in truth they are just as likely to describe someone who has helped or inspired you or, in my case, they are just describing you. Indeed, because Trump is not lazy or self-sabotaging, and thrives on being hated to the most unhinged degrees I’ve ever encountered, this is as close as anyone anywhere like me will ever come to having real power, and will likely ever have.

But so what? Erase Trump as conclusively as you can, his governance will still radiate outward and guide future events beyond what anyone now thinks possible. Take Trumpism’s predecessor Thatcherism. “The price of [Margaret Thatcher’s] success was a society in many ways the opposite of what she wanted,” John Gray wrote. “Her goal of unshackling the free market was achievable, and to a measurable degree it was realized.” As to “restraining bourgeois values,” she was less successful. Thatcher’s agenda was driven by “nostalgic dreams” of the 1950s: a nation of middle-class tradesman, kindly vicars, Sunday roast in every stove, Dickens and The Book of Common Prayer on every shelf, holidays in Blackpool, Armchair Theatre, and so on. What she got by 1990 were upwardly mobile desk jockeys with services taking over trades, rampant secularism, restaurant reviews by Will Self, Zadie Smith and Irvine Welsh, stag dos in Ibiza, Peep Show, and Park Life. An absolute nightmare legacy. But nothing backfired more than her dream of snuffing out Labour’s electability permanently. All it needed to survive was the shallowest possible leader to appropriate the Thatcherite framework, “spinning” and focus-grouping it until it was “Labour” in name only, and not even really that. What we think of as the New Labour “era” may be seen more accurately as a Thatcher glow-up.

I can only guess how Trumpism can mutate in kind. Say it succeeds in permanently imprinting populism and nationalism onto America’s collective consciousness through its turbo-democratic ethos. There’s no telling what form in politics or culture it will take, because both terms are broader than adherents and critics like to think. And soon enough the Democratic Party will have to get with the program and find a suitable leader to take possession of these new tools to reshape the country as they see fit. Conversely, it may even succeed in Iran, asserting American sovereignty over the global order without reducing its hegemony. But hegemony corrodes with increased sovereignty as other nations read the room and assert their own. And with human rights platitudes reduced to an option, which I do genuinely believe they will be, the temptation to opt out will be taken more often to unpleasant results. Sure, we can wield our World Police prestige in some rhetorical way, but no one will care. And at best we can attend to our own long-delayed domestic reforms.

If the end of a political concept is not so clear cut, neither is the nature of your adherence. It does not rest on innocent notions of support, or deployment of the voting power, but on your willingness to be complicit in the reality that flows from it. Complicity has as many variants as populism, and not all of them are derogatory. Complicity is its own kind of power, with discernible merits over dissent, however strident or remorseful or impotent. Given the option, it can be the easier, happier one to take. Particularly if complicity is already encoded in your DNA. My Norse ancestors practiced human sacrifice. My Spanish ancestors brutally banished it. What have your ancestors ever done? Molest sheep? Die face down in a peat bog? Whine about the Pope because TOWIE doesn’t exist yet? How quaint!

But complicity is also exacting. It’s the same dilemma that modern churches face. Do they want pews filled with the skittishly committed or just dotted with a handful (if that) of sincere devotees who have made peace with the stakes? Another thing Trump and I have in common is a tangled sense of personal destiny. He may be destined to be the hero at the rally, just as I am destined to be his only spectator. But in the bottomless pit we share we will be content knowing that one’s grotesque hatred and the other’s weak nerves are stuck some several hundred feet above us.