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If Not Trump, What?
David Brooks
| APRIL 29, 2016
Donald Trump now looks set to
be the Republican presidential nominee. So for those of us appalled by this
prospect — what are we supposed to do?
Well, not what the leaders of
the Republican Party are doing. They’re going down meekly and hoping for a
quiet convention. They seem blithely unaware that this is a Joe McCarthy
moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who
walked with Trump will be tainted forever after for the degradation of
standards and the general election slaughter.
The better course for all of
us — Republican, Democrat and independent — is to step back and take the long
view, and to begin building for that. This election — not only the Trump
phenomenon but the rise of Bernie Sanders, also — has reminded us how much pain
there is in this country. According to a Pew Research poll, 75 percent of Trump
voters say that life has gotten worse for people like them over the last half
century.
This declinism intertwines
with other horrible social statistics. The suicide rate has surged to a 30-year
high — a sure sign of rampant social isolation. A record number of Americans
believe the American dream is out of reach. And for millennials, social trust
is at historic lows.
Trump’s success grew out of
that pain, but he is not the right response to it. The job for the rest of us
is to figure out the right response.
That means first it’s
necessary to go out into the pain. I was surprised by Trump’s success because
I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the
bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and
demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and
go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that
over the next months and years. We all have some responsibility to do one
activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this
country.
We’ll probably need a new
national story. Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the
rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through
pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for
people who think the system is rigged.
I don’t know what the new
national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more
redemptive. Maybe it will be a story about communities that heal those who
suffer from addiction, broken homes, trauma, prison and loss, a story of those
who triumph over the isolation, social instability and dislocation so common
today.
We’ll probably need a new
definition of masculinity, too. There are many groups in society who have lost
an empire but not yet found a role. Men are the largest of those groups. The
traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. It leads to high dropout
rates, high incarceration rates, low labor force participation rates. This is
an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness.
Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.
We’ll also need to rebuild
the sense that we’re all in this together. The author R. R. Reno has argued
that what we’re really facing these days is a “crisis of solidarity.” Many
people, as the writers David and Amber Lapp note, feel pervasively betrayed: by
for-profit job-training outfits that left them awash in debt, by spouses and
stepparents, by people who collect federal benefits but don’t work. They’ve
stopped even expecting loyalty from their employers. The big flashing lights
say: NO TRUST. That leads to an everyone-out-for-himself mentality and Trump’s
politics of suspicion. We’ll need a communitarianism.
Maybe the task is to build a
ladder of hope. People across America have been falling through the cracks.
Their children are adrift. Trump, to his credit, made them visible. We can
start at the personal level just by hearing them talk.
Then at the community level
we can listen to those already helping. James Fallows had a story in The
Atlantic recently noting that while we’re dysfunctional at the national level
you see local renaissances dotted across the country. Fallows went around asking,
“Who makes this town go?” and found local patriots creating radical schools,
arts festivals, public-private partnerships that give, say, high school
dropouts computer skills.
Then solidarity can be
rekindled nationally. Over the course of American history, national projects
like the railroad legislation, the W.P.A. and the NASA project have bound this
diverse nation. Of course, such projects can happen again — maybe through a
national service program, or something else.
Trump will have his gruesome
moment. The time is best spent elsewhere, meeting the neighbors who have become
strangers, and listening to what they have to say.
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