Trumpism as a Revelation of Evil
By: Benjamin Cain
Tags: Philosophy, Donald Trump, Morality, Politics, America

Trumpism as a Revelation of Evil

The mythic dimension of Trump’s inhumanity

(Image by Darren Halstead, from Unsplash)

On the surface, Trumpism is an anomalous combination of demagoguery and con artistry that metastasized at a high level of American society, beginning in 2016.

More specifically, a celebrity named Donald Trump exploited systemic American weaknesses, such as resentments arising from inequalities, disenfranchisement, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and toxic religious fundamentalism, and he used his reality TV stardom to capture mass media attention and win the presidency. But because Trump was manifestly unfit for that office, he made a mess of everything.

So Trumpism is a story of how American society disgraced itself for four years, how a perfect cultural storm gathered, wreaked havoc, and perhaps will blow after with Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in 2020.

But there’s a more profound side of Trumpism, a mythic significance of the events in question with which it’s harder to reconcile ourselves.

The Nature of Evil

The fuller meaning of Trumpism begins with the recognition that Donald Trump is evil. Just by entertaining that possibility, we’ve crossed the line of political correctness. We throw around the word “evil” in reference to murderers who are safely locked away in prison or to dictators like Adolph Hitler and Pol Pot who are likewise safely dead.

We might suspect Vladimir Putin is more crafty and pragmatic than evil or that Kim Jong-un is likewise more crazy or desperate than malevolent.

In either case, we don’t really know what we mean by “evil.” This is because the old meaning of the word was undermined by the world’s scientific disenchantment over the last few centuries. In short, evil used to be theological and it’s hard to take theological notions at face value anymore.

Nevertheless, the mythic, theological language captures the underlying force of evil, which invites us to get to the bottom of what evil really could be to have given rise to the religious myths and psychological defense mechanisms of mystification, demonization, scapegoating and the like.

Evil long predated organized religions and isn’t just murderous rage. Most murders in the US are due to “intimate partner violence, mental health problems and substance abuse.” Serial killers have something in common, though, with dictators, kings, and other more powerful figures in world history, which brings us closer to the elusive depravity in question.

Evil is natural, although once we understand what it is, we can see why it was mistaken for something supernatural. Nature transcends itself, after all. Nature is what philosophers like Heraclitus used to call a field of “becoming,” of things’ coming and going and being turned into something else. Nature is profoundly self-creative.

Thus, natural selection and a proto-human genetic code gave rise to our genus (Homo) of super-intelligent primates. Being primates, though, we’re social so we form emotional bonds, cooperate in groups, and clash in tribal conflicts. We try to curb our ferocity, to domesticate ourselves and to develop culturally by formulating moral codes and legal systems. We can be good or bad, according to the standards that govern our society.

Evil, then, is an alien kind of inhumanity that’s typically destructive but that’s more precisely beyond our ordinary comprehension. Evil individuals don’t operate within the confines of traditional morality. They have no respect for the law and no capacity for empathy or shame; they have no conscience. They think in alien, robotic terms and their goals seem strange and self-defeating to those who’ve been properly socialized.

If ordinary, good and bad people are like domesticated farm animals, the evildoers are like the humans running the farm. The animals can’t fathom why they’re being raised for slaughter or how the humans manage all the comings and goings in the area. Humans aren’t morally superior to pigs and chickens, since the species’ behaviours aren’t comparable in those terms; farm animals are amoral.

Likewise, “evil” is almost a synonym for “inhuman.” An evil person looks human but isn’t, not psychologically, socially, or morally speaking. An evil person is amoral in a sense since this person doesn’t — and can’t — feel the pull of moral standards or care about moral assessments. But just as human “superiority” is devastating to livestock, since we slaughter or effectively torture most of the domestic animals we hold in captivity on factory farms, the presence of evil or of inhuman creatures in our midst is typically disastrous, from the social or moral standpoint.

However, not all inhumans are evil. Evil persons are the opposite of saints, prophets, mystics, artists, and other benevolent social outsiders. Whereas the inhumanity of evil persons is due to their cognitive deficiencies which make them monstrous or, to use the more technical terms, sociopathic, narcissistic, or otherwise severely mentally disordered, the inhumanity or perhaps transhumanity of what we think of as spiritual leaders is due to their peak states of consciousness, to their immense creativity and powerful idealistic vision.

The Domesticated Herd and the Starkness of Trump’s Inhumanity

Applying this, we should say that President Trump was certainly evil in the sense that he was a malignant narcissist. The debate about whether that’s accurate isn’t even interesting anymore, because the evidence of Trump’s antisocial personality disorders is overwhelming. Trump was far more brazen than Richard Nixon and more depraved than George W. Bush, since Bush had at least superficial guidance from Christianity.

No, much more intriguing are the implications. What does it mean for a society to be led by an evil inhuman, by a monster or a supervillain? The United States is hardly the first country to have to grapple with that question. On the contrary, benevolent individuals in positions of great power are the exceptions rather than the rule.

The political and economic systems that concentrate power are dehumanizing, which means that the more power over others you have and the longer you have it, the more likely you’ll lose some of your capacity for empathy and shame, as you find you have to “sell your soul” to the system. Moreover, positions of dominance attract those who are already at least partially dehumanized or amoral, whether due to their defective genes or to their upbringing or circumstances.

Thus, the real question before us is what it means for evil to have ruled so openly and to have conquered the so-called global champion of liberty, not just the typical hot spots for political inhumanity, namely the unliberated, war-torn parts of the world that are governed typically by strongmen and organized criminals.

The United States was supposed to be the beacon of hope for all other nations, and here it was, finding itself in thralldom to a nakedly evil man. The comparison to the rise of European fascism in the early twentieth century is apt in that in either case evil seemed to rise out of nowhere. The societies (the democratic US and the Weimar Republic) had held the contrary, Enlightenment values of reason and individual dignity.

At least, there was supposed to have been that discrepancy. Yet the Enlightenment conquered medievalism by force, not just by the spread of optimistic philosophy. Napoleon “liberated” territories by conquering them, and Portugal, Spain, France, England, and the Dutch conquered the New World in colonial fashion, taking their practice of slavery with them to build labor forces. There was thus a tinge of inhumanity to the Enlightenment, as a result of industrialization. The mechanistic thinking that was efficient in economic terms began to dehumanize the European capitalists and colonialists.

Similarly, the business skills of managing a large corporation in a competitive environment are often antithetical to morality. Morality tells us to feel bad about the thought of making an innocent person suffer. But morality is out of its depth when we confront the hyperobjects of big business and global politics. CEOs and politicians have little choice but to become monstrous because the scale of their problems is transhuman, which is to say beyond the limits of the traditional moral codes that civilized us. These leaders stand apart from society in trying to manage such large parts of it.

Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution launched a new breed of inhuman, and that affected the evolution of early-modern Europe and of the First World (the technologically developed countries).

However, even if historically modern societies are systemically inhuman, and therefore the juxtaposition between ordinary civility and the alienness of the powerful managers of modern institutions isn’t so clear-cut, at least from an objective historical standpoint, we distracted multitudes don’t see our systems as evil, despite the global catastrophes wrought by consumerism.

We strive to be good according to the myths and fictions that guide us: we aim to be happy, to exercise our freedom without knowingly endangering others, to “live the dream” as it’s presented in the public imagination conjured by the entertainment industries and by the onslaught of corporate advertising. When an inhuman outsider comes along and trashes our norms and ideals, making a mockery of our way of life, he threatens to prove that any culture that could be so swiftly overturned could only have been arbitrary and absurd all along.

We’re liable to react in the same way to those who seem to be benevolent prophets, messiahs, or artistic radicals. We scapegoat or marginalize them, because they threaten our inherent conservatism, our comfort with the status quo.

The Apocalypse of Trumpism

What, then, is Trumpism in the fuller sense? “President” Trump was very nearly a functional anti-Christ, the bastardization of a benevolent revelatory figure. President Obama was far too tame and urbane to be the true Christ-like savior he pretended to be in his 2008 campaign, to elevate the population by speaking truth to power, let alone by challenging the predatory faction on Wall Street.

Donald Trump is potentially a transformational historic figure, but only in so far as he inverts the message of the spiritual geniuses from the Axial Age. Rather than uplifting his followers, Trump has devised an evil cult that enslaves tens of millions of Americans in the rabbit hole of his narcissism and petty grievances.

Trumpism encompasses the paradox in which the free world comes to be run — unmistakably, without even a hint of a fig leaf — by a monstrous embodiment of evil, while we nevertheless give each other deer-in-the-headlights glances as we refrain from grasping the importance of what’s transpired. We can’t help but attempt to normalize Trump, if only to remain sane, or we revert to our tribal political squabbles, but rarely do we appreciate the mythic dimension of Trump’s arrival.

Trumpism is (1) the poisoning of the free world by an inhuman supervillain, together with (2) the masses’ flight into self-imposed ignorance when we fail to understand the apocalyptic lesson, which is that it’s evidently possible to stand beyond the principles of mainstream morality. We can lose our “humanity” and be alienated from everything that once comforted us, until all we have left is our parasitic, robotic impulses.

If the inhuman outsider is angelic or demonic, what are we benighted insiders, we domesticated herd animals to that unencumbered alien being?