History professors at The New School are terrified by Donald Trump’s rise to power and how the divisive people he’s surrounding himself with may affect the United States.
“I don’t have a very positive sense of the future right now,” said Elaine Abelson, a Lang history professor.
For a start, Trump’s rise comes amid a global shift toward the right which is reshaping the European political landscape and surprising many governments with populist uprisings, like the United Kingdom’s unexpected Brexit vote in June.
“We mirrored [Brexit] to some degree, in a vote that was quite surprising to the majority, or the mainstream,” Abelson said.
Abelson mentioned another example of this shift is on the horizon as well; France’s spring election could result in similar conservatism with Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party.
In many ways, Trump’s campaign was unlike anything before in American politics, according to Jeremy Varon, another Lang professor. There was an awareness of Trump’s history of hateful rhetoric, such as his questioning of Obama’s citizenship or the tapes in which he discusses groping women, but he still managed to grab the presidency.
“In a profound way, [the campaign is] without precedent,” Varon said.
As odd as it was, Varon noticed that Trump’s campaign had elements of the reactionary and segregationist George Wallace campaign for president in 1968. Wallace’s 1968 campaign relied on the slogan “Stand up for America,” which seems like a precursor to “Make America Great Again.” Wallace’s main platform boasted pro-segregation policies.
Wallace’s opponent in that race, Richard Nixon, called on what he dubbed the nation’s “silent majority,” a multiplicity of pro-Vietnam War citizens, similar to the constituency that elected Trump, Varon said.
Though he drew on themes that previous politicians like Wallace and Nixon also harped on, Trump seems to exist in a completely new realm due to his ability to use social media to rile his supporters.
“He’s the first president to personally use all this new social media. I’m sure Clinton used it, but I don’t know if she was personally attached to it like he was,” Abelson said.
She thinks that his tweeting was both beneficial and destructive for himself. However, Abelson notes, ultimately his supporters were too blinded by his promise of change to care otherwise. Varon similarly suggested that liberal news outlets did not work correctly to combat this blindness.
“The guy wasn’t a career politician; there is a creation of the media, in many ways [Trump] could only have come out of a reality television world that blurs the line between the serious and the silly. He’s very much the product of a sort of post modern information and entertainment environment,” Varon said.
This blurring seems prevalent in whom Trump has chosen to join his administration, people poised to push him to extremely unpopular positions, the professors noted. Shortly after winning the election, Trump named Steve Bannon his senior counsel despite his history as a publisher of racist and sexist articles on Breitbart, a far-right news and opinion website.
“[Sen. Bernie] Sanders said that a racist like him should be nowhere near the White House. But, it’s possible that a racist like him is already in the White House,” Varon said.
“I think they’re extremely scary. These people are not only wedded to his beliefs, but even more so. And many of them have experienced working against the things that many of us care about,” Abelson added.
Varon also pointed out that Trump has been surrounding himself with people closely tied to many things he campaigned against. On Nov. 30, Trump gave the Treasury Secretary position to Steven Mnuchin, who spent 20 years at Goldman Sachs, a financial firm Trump’s campaign strongly criticized.
Varon predicted one optimistic possibility, that Trump’s not terribly ideological. At his best, Trump may be a pragmatic problem solver, who doesn’t necessarily care passionately about some of the most toxic things he’s said.
“Perhaps he will be tempered by the complexity of the world, the complexity of the job, and the fact that policy has to speak to that complexity,” Varon said.
For example, despite riling up the “alt-right” by proposing to build a wall between Mexico and the U.S., as well as banning Muslims from entering the U.S., Trump told his supporters to “stop it” when he was interviewed on 60 Minutes.
The possibility of a tempered Trump would, of course, be ideal for many who do not support Trump as president or the hateful rhetoric that his campaign has seemed to promote.
Varon also predicts that a robust and vibrant protest culture against Trump will emerge outside the conventional process of representative government and electoral politics.
“We’re already seeing powerful signs of it. It’s going to be four years of intense contentiousness and people mobilized against his policy and trying to delegitimize large aspects of his presidency,” Varon said.
“Enormous ‘street heat’ as we call it,” he added.