pan·de·m(ic)·on·ium
The trump team fundamentally bungled America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Because the trump team is incompetent.
Those are the bare facts.
Americans will continue to pay for that ineptitude in the coming months and years to the tune of thousands of unnecessary deaths. That ever-growing list of casualties, paired with a recession that makes 2008 look like a children’s game, has upended American life in way few could have imagined just a few short months ago.
The trump team’s incompetence is galling, to be sure. But it’s not at all surprising. If you’re like me, you’d have been surprised — astonished, really — if the trump team had mounted even a moderately competent counter-offensive against the COVID attack.
Certainly, the trump-COVID-19 response has disabused Americans of any trust they might have mistakenly placed in trump on that fateful Inauguration Day in 2017.
All Americans, that is, except Republicans.
The GOP rank-and-file have joined trump sycophants on Capitol Hill and in the media in leaping, often haplessly, to the defense of their tribe and their chieftain.
In some glorious future, in which Conservatism has been duly relegated to the ash heap of failed political philosophies, experts will try to understand the trump-Conservative’s mind. Untold numbers of cultural anthropologists, psychologists, historians, philosophers, economists, and (now) epidemiologists, will build full careers on trying to understand just how human beings could have gotten governance so damn wrong.
But what if the answer were simple?
What if the reason — or part of the reason, anyway — that modern Conservatives have followed trump over the ideological cliff is because they simply don’t understand what the job of President entails?
I’ll make this (perhaps controversial) argument below. I’ll do it by referencing, briefly, my experience in corporate America. Then I’ll make a series of observations about you, the reader. Finally, I’ll assert some politically incorrect claims about the modern Conservative movement.
Now, let’s define our terms.
con·ser·va·tive
/kənˈsərvədiv/ (n.) (1) a person who is averse to change and holds on to traditional values and attitudes, typically in relation to politics; (2) an extraordinarily dull person who lacks a even a basic understanding of what keeps the world turning (kidding, kidding, I made that last one up [still, it's true])
Just because they’re all goose stepping doesn’t mean they’re all the same — Conservatives really aren’t a monolith. And Conservative is a broad term as I use it in this post.
Conservative certainly encompasses all card carrying GOP voters. It also includes those political Independents (*groans in reasonable citizen*) who’s political and/or social values generally coincide with the GOP’s. Conservative also encompasses here any American who supported trump in the 2016 general election.
In the broadest sense, Conservative implicates anyone who’s motivated by the the unifying thread that’s woven into the tapestry of all Conservative ideas:
Zealous justification and robust defense of inequality.
on·slaught
/ˈänˌslôt,ˈônˌslôt/ (n.) a large quantity of people or things that is difficult to cope with
In late 2010, I was on the cusp of my start as a litigation associate at a large corporate law firm in New York City. I was about to discover whether the edifying (but also: psychologically, financially, and existentially destabilizing) years I’d spent in law school preparing myself for this experience had been worth the trouble.
I was green as hell.
But even my green as hell black ass understood that big law lawyering wouldn’t be like living in a Law and Order marathon. I knew it would be demanding. What I hadn’t fully grasped at that time, though, was that practicing law at a large corporate law firm is more than an occupation. It’s a distinct lifestyle choice.
So I expected, yes, that big law lawyering would mean long hours. I understood that I’d log those long hours at the expense of time with my friends and family. But I didn’t anticipate that the sacrifice would entail wholesale subordination of the Self. I failed to grasp that many of the interests and passions and relationships that had once animated my subjective sense of meaningfulness would, after sufficient big law experience, atrophy into obscurity.
I expected, also, that corporate practice would involve far more mind-numbing drudgery than it would sexy jury trials. But I didn’t know that the intensity of that drudgery would tap and drain my passion for the law like a spile at the base of a maple tree.
I expected, finally, that the lifestyle would test my resilience in the face of stress. But I didn’t appreciate fully how rapacious that stress would be. I didn’t understand that the black, plastic of my Blackberry would tie me to the firm like the blackened steel of an ankle shackle locks a prisoner to his ball and chain.
Big law firm lawyering is very demanding. The legal questions with which one grapples in that world are intellectually challenging. The work environment is relentless and it’s unforgiving. And the workaholic boys’ club culture can be toxic.
Still, that entire experience — every challenge, every obstacle, every unit of unfairness — pales in comparison to even the easiest day as President of the United States.
That’s the takeaway, here.
But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?
di·plo·ma
/dəˈplōmə/ (n.) a writing, usually under seal, conferring some honor or privilege
I have no illusions about the demographics of my readership. If you’re reading this essay, you and I likely have a lot in common.
You’re probably not black, no. [*chuckles in Black Guy*]
But you’re probably like me in that you’re college educated. You might even have earned a graduate degree. Odds are, moreover, that you’ve spent at least some time working in a corporate office environment. And even if you haven’t, I’d bet that your circle of close friends or family members encompasses at last a few veterans of corporate America.
out·ra·geous
/out-rey-juh s/ (adj.) highly unusual or unconventional; extravagant; remarkable; Conservative (just kidding)
You also understand what it’s like to be President of the United States.
Not because you’re a former President or a civics expert. You understand because for you, the POTUS role is more than just an abstract concept. You’re able to extrapolate and analogize a realistic conclusion about the nature of the role because:
You’ve worked in, and/or around, high pressure roles. That, coupled with your intellectual curiosity and capacity to think critically, means that you understand how much more demanding the role of POTUS must be as compared to literally everything you’ve ever attempted.
You’ve wrestled with intellectually challenging problems inside and outside of the workplace. You’re able, therefore, to imagine, realistically, the near unsolvability of every problem the POTUS faces.
You’ve been personally accountable for the outcome of meaningful workplace projects. You might also be a parent (arguably, the ultimate project). You’re able to comprehend, therefore, how much more solemn and ethically complicated POTUS-level responsibilities are than any obligation you’ve ever undertaken.
I imagine that that all seems obvious to you. But those understandings distinguish you, distinctly, from the modern Conservative.
they
/T͟Hā/ (pn.) the third-person plural personal pronoun in Modern English. It is also used with singular meaning, sometimes to avoid specifying the gender of the person referred to: see gender neutrality in language.
There’s, to be sure, no shortage of very wealthy, and very savvy, Conservatives who support trump.
These legacy ivy leaguers very much understand the POTUS role. And they understand that trump is fundamentally incapable of performing the role competently. They’ve calculated, however, that an incompetent trump administration is better for their agenda (consolidation of private political power and economic domination) than the Dem alternative.
But those financial elites are generally unrepresentative of the rank-and-file Conservative in 2020. The average Conservative is, statistically speaking:
More religious than most Americans.
More likely than most Americans to live in an environment that’s rural and relatively homogeneous.
Less likely than the average American to possess (or see the value of) a college education.
These distinctions matter.
Each of them supports my thesis that part of the reason most Conservatives still support trump is because they don’t understand the nature of the POTUS role.
trump aspires to Authoritarianism.
As we’ve seen, American Conservatives skew toward religiosity—specifically, Christianity. That predilection inspires within Conservatives the tendancy to submit themselves to the edicts of male authority figures (e.g., god, pastors, fathers and husbands).
Conservatives reject science-based analysis and impartial advisers as critical elements of sound leadership. For them, an effective leader is a man (yes, a man) who’s leadership derives from some combination of infallible instinct and channeling the will of the divine.
trump revels in this leadership style — a perverse hybrid of fascistic and theocratic impulses. It’s a failing that’s contributed significantly to trump’s ineffectiveness as leader.
trump is a Racist.
Increasingly, rural community is synonymous with Conservative community. And Conservative communities are less tolerant of diversity (ethnic, religious, gender, etc.) than are their Progressive counterparts. Conservatives are unable to see that the kind of conspiratorial, narrow minded, exclusionary thinking upon which bigotry is premised is an ineffective platform for successful leadership. This is especially true in Western democracies where coalition building is politicians’ only path to effecting political agendas.
trump’s agenda has been hobbled by his racist impulse to reject information based on the sources’ ethnicity or gender or partisan affiliation.
trump is as ignorant as he is Partisan.
The GOP — the party of George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and donald trump — has (d)evolved into the chubby, pink face of willful American ignorance.
From their denial of climate change to the predictably ill-fated invasion of Iraq, Conservatives consistently spurn policy that’s based on science and expert analysis in favor ideology-driven blunders. It’s always: tribe over nation, dogma over science, faith over facts.
More appalling, is that Conservatives regard the human carnage that ideology-driven policies typically yield as somewhere between irrelevant and the whole fucking point. The goal of cutting SNAP benefits, for example, isn’t merely to reduce spending (SNAP is just 1.6% of the federal budget). The goal it is to punish poor people for being poor.
trump is an ineffective leader, and his agenda has withered, largely un-enacted, on the vine, in part because his perspective is so wholly distorted and ethically compromised by partisanship.
per·o·ra·tion
/ˌperəˈrāSHən/ (n.) the concluding part of a speech, typically intended to inspire enthusiasm in the audience
Yet this is precisely the sort of candidate Conservatives consistently seek to elevate to the highest levels of power: from Roy Moore to Scott Walker to donald trump.
No one would vote a person like trump to the Oval Office if he understood the POTUS role. It would be obvious to anyone with such an understanding that a person with trump’s disposition and temperament is uniquely unsuited to effective Presidential leadership. Partisan leanings aside.
But the average Conservative does not possess that understanding.
As I’ve demonstrated above, Conservatives are far less likely than Progressives to have been exposed to the sort of ultra-intense work environments and work requirements that are both:
Commonplace in high-level management positions in corporate America; and
Analogous to, and surpassed in their gravity by, high-level government appointments, including the role of POTUS.
For many modern Conservatives, the POTUS role is a dangerously abstract concept. This is especially true for devoutly religious Conservatives without college degrees who live in rural communities. These folks simply don’t have the requisite exposure to cosmopolitan modernity to comprehend the role.
Without a reality-based analog to which to anchor their understanding of the POTUS role, modern Conservatives fall back on the archetypes to which they’ve been consistently exposed. For modern Conservatives, then, the role of President is an amalgamation of:
The authoritarian father figure archetype (as dictated by “traditional” family values [i.e., patriarchy]).
The biblical king archetype (rooted in religious dogma, and therefore, in a patriarchy similar to the authoritarian father figure model).
A pop-culture caricature of what inspired leadership looks like (in the same sense that a person who’s interacted with no actual business leaders might take The Apprentice seriously).
You and I both know that those ideas and characteristics bear little significance to the actual parameters of the POTUS role. Except to the extent they’re characteristics that render a President less effective than he otherwise might be.
But if I were a person who viewed positively attributes like hyper partisanship, impulsive authoritarianism, and fact-resistant ideology, then trump might be an attractive candidate.
This would be particularly the case if I had no fucking clue what it’s like to be President.
Postscript
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