Breaking up with America
A Failed Prediction
For the past four years I have simmered in a state of moral outrage over Trump’s behavior, watching him trample the defining values of America – integrity, truth, justice – without consequence. How could a country constituted on these ideals not only elect but continue to support a man so inimical to them?
My only resolution to that dissonance has been to view Trump as an aberration (“he didn’t win, Hillary lost”) enabled by spineless legislators. This theory predicted a crushing defeat for Trump in 2020 as the country’s immune response – its ideals called into action – would sweep him out of office. Obviously, this is not what happened; the theory was wrong, leaving me – along with most other liberal white men – shocked at how close Trump came to winning re-election.
But here’s the thing: Most liberals who aren’t white men are surprised that we’re surprised. They fully expected this race to be decided by a razor-thin margin.
Why is that?
Confusing Privelige for Merit
What has finally dawned on me is the terrible alternative: that Trump’s behavior warrants no moral outrage because there is no virtuous foundation of American ideals for him to defile. There never was such a foundation, because it was only ever a myth – propaganda, marketing – perpetuated by the white patriarchy in a perfectly Panglossian sense. According to this theory, Trump was nothing more than the expression of the real America, a country whose principles – whatever else they may be – include the consolidation and preservation of power among the privelged class.
But there is no letting myself off the hook: I am only now realizing that the jingoistic story of America I was raised to believe in is a myth because, as a white male, I have been allowed to experience it as accurate, or at least not violently disabused of its accuracy I was getting away with living in a fantasy without realizing I was getting away with anything. We white men believed in this idea of America because we alone were uniquely positioned to believe it – if not because it was materially self-serving, then because it imbued us with a sense of righteousness for participating in such a virtuous society. Yet we were allowed to believe it only because American society was designed for us, and us alone. And though I would identify myself as empathetic with minority groups – woke, even – too much empathy with outgroups would shatter that self-serving delusion, and so there was inevitably going to be a hard limit to how much empathy my stipulated belief in American virtue would brook.1
The gut punch, though, is not about exploding my own priveliged delusions – it lands with the realization that the resolution of the dissonance prompted by Trump’s popularity is that there is, in fact, no contradiction between his behavior and American ideals. To those who have lived their lives outside the protective coccoon of privelige, there never was the luxury of believing in the moral sanctity of America as an idea, as a bedrock of virtue. Indeed, America was founded by a group of white, slaveholding men who didn’t want to pay their taxes. And that, shatteringly, seems to be the throughline from 1776 to 2020: White male exceptionalism, at its core nothing more complicated than naked social dominance, painted over with a thick layer of jingoistic, faux-democratic bullshit – truths not so much self-evident as self-serving.
And so the trauma I feel watching this election unfold is not in watching injustice go unpunished, but in realizing that my idea of the country in which I was born and raised, and from which I thought I inherited my moral fiber, is nothing more than a fairy tale. And that the reality of this country, as experienced by the the majority of its inhabitants, is not one of justice and merit but of undesevered and abused privelige, oppression, and discrimination. The America I thought existed not only doesn’t exist since Trump rose to power – it never existed at all. We live in a country flawed to its foundation, and right now there seems very little worth salvaging. For liberal white men, the myth has been exposed and our gods vanished. Certainly, there is no legitimate greatness to which we could return. Opening my eyes for what feels like the first time, I percieve this country as a moral wasteland, conceived in the dialectic between privelige and bondage, and never having (or even genuinely trying) to moved past it.
The psychological dynamics of empathy are interesting in this context: Realizing that other groups are oppressed implies the realization that there must be an oppressor. And oppression is just the receiving end of privelige. It occurs to me that this might be the most effective angle from which a white man can be made to see his otherwise invisible systemic privelige. Rather than asking a white man if he’s priveliged (which is virtually guaranteed to prompt a rebuke), it is better to ask: Have you ever felt discriminated against? Have you ever felt oppressed? The fact that we (white men) inevitably struggle to recall any such experiences proves the point: We have only escaped discrimination and oppression precisely because we are the priveliged class.↩︎