The problem — and I’m as guilty of this as anyone — is the unimaginability.
How do you come to that worldview? How do you hold so much ill will for some others? How much of what is essentially good and generous are you prepared to sacrifice to enact some kind of punishment or rejection?
Donald Trump’s election as US president is a monumental reminder of our unknowability to each other. And yet we are simultaneously so familiar. If you act in anger, I understand and recognise that anger. The same if you act in love. Or fear. Resentment. We share all those feelings and impulses, universally we act on them. So perhaps the problem is one of misdirection. Why would you fear that? Why does that fill you with rage?
It’s hard to shake the idea that I have got people wrong. I’m a true believer in a profound human commonality. Somewhere at our core, I think we share almost everything. It’s a matter of peeling back layers to arrive at a place that is quietly universal. We breathe, we ingest, we fall in love, we consider the world around us, we form a view of our circumstances, we die. These are not blithe trivialities; these are the core facts of wakeful human existence, things we all have in common.
What I take from all of that — and this is perhaps a wildly optimistic extrapolation — is that the fact of that essential human universality, if we admit it, should create a closeness, a sense of truly seeing each other. A lot might follow if we admitted that oneness. But here we are, determined to see the “other” in each other, or at least to apply that sense of otherness to those to whom we also apply various antipathies, some of them visceral, some of them a tawdry, self-aggrandising convenience.
I can’t get past the lost opportunity, of the sense that a world of mutual recognition and easy coexistence could be as likely a human outcome as the thing we have created: a ravenous, insatiable place that easily mixes love, hate and ruthless competitive instinct. Greed beats good into bloodlust and hate.
But elect Trump? I just can’t understand how such a choice is possible. I see a figure like Trump and I see something preying with calculated specificity on every base human instinct; an embodiment of the human project run to some kind of malignant riot. The embodiment of greed. At their heart, the politics of Trump are divisive to the point of being fundamentally misanthropic. They put fear and hate as guiding values. They are the precise opposite of that deeper human possibility: connected empathy.
Greed. That’s the great failing, the one human quality that perverts the truth of us: that we are simple and connected. So I just don’t get it. Perhaps I’m wrong and our impulse to despise, to take advantage, are stronger impulses than the simple unacknowledged reality that we share almost everything.
And yet, I understand that the impulses that drive this political moment are recognisably human. It’s hard, from a certain position, to imagine them being acted out in such colossal unison. Has a moral boundary been crossed? Or are people acting within the moral comfort of self-interest? That’s perhaps the most recognisably human trait of all. We shouldn’t be surprised by it.
Mainstream progressive politics needs to better acknowledge how the politics of someone like Trump appeal to people in ways that are entirely human and understandable, even if they are at the same time morally reprehensible and abhorrent. Moral outrage is not a convincing argument: it does nothing to address the impulse to embrace a Trumpist worldview, and it leads to a sense of dismissive superiority that is ultimately destructive.
It’s all the worse when the progressive challenge to this new right is itself morally bereft on significant challenges: genocide, climate, inequality… there’s a list. There seems to be a view in progressive politics that giving the appearance of difference — of deriding the moral darkness of your opponent — would be enough. Clearly not.
Yes, the quotidian concerns of people doing it tough need meaningful forms of policy address, and a posture of moral superiority needs to be born out in a willingness for difficult deeds. It’s not enough to simply “not be him” and yet strive to be as little as possible yourself. It’s not enough to cast the very human impulses that drive your fellows to embrace this anathema — these recognisably universal human impulses — as something alien and unconscionable.
They’re not. They’re what we are. The dark and light, the good and ugly of humanity. That’s what we need to work with if we’re going to pull this thing together. We need to find some common language of hope.
Is this a moment for empathy? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
