Trump’s Cultural Populism

Populism is the name of the game, and Trump, the unlikeliest of populists, played it to victory. His rhetorical populism amounts to promises to bring back manufacturing jobs to America, to restrict immigration, thereby reducing competition for jobs, and to alter free trade agreements that result in losses of American jobs to trading partners. The promises are for the most part merely rhetorical. Trump’s heart and mind are with his fellow billionaires and his own financial interests. His cabinet appointments tell the story. Trump’s real populism is cultural rather than political or economic. It is to be found in the ways in which he thinks and speaks. As a “thinker” (the word needs to be enclosed in quotation marks), he believes that the truth is subjective; what counts as reality is what he believes it to be, the product of the thoughtless and vain meanderings of his mind. There is no objective truth. What others believe it to be doesn’t count, unless it conforms to his belief. Trump’s “epistemology” (again quotation marks required) doesn’t qualify as relativism since relativists allow for the perspectives of other minds. It is subjectivism, Trumpian subjectivism. Trump’s truth is all about himself in contrast to “the fake truth” of the media and “the scientific hoax” of global warming. And then there is his speech: often ungrammatical and incoherent, the way “real people” speak. When he speaks, he speaks to us and like us many of his core followers, “ordinary folk,” say. Twitter is Trump’s perfect medium, because it doesn’t require, indeed doesn’t allow, the tweeter to develop a thought or an argument. David Brooks put it well: “I am beginning to think that the whole depressing spectacle of this moment—the Trump presidency and beyond—is caused by a breakdown of intellectual virtue, a breakdown in America’s ability to face evidence objectively, to pay due respect to reality, to deal with complex and unpleasant truths. The intellectual virtues may be elitist, but once a country tolerates dishonesty, incuriosity and intellectual laziness, then everything else fails.” …