Such a disinterested ruler — a good emperor, let’s call him — would see a crucial part of his role as reassurance, recognizing that in a diverse, fragmented and distrustful landscape, any governing coalition is going to look dangerous to those who aren’t included in it. If he comes from a historically dominant group and speaks on their behalf, he needs to go out of his way to address the anxieties of minorities and newcomers. If he’s building a coalition of minority groups, he needs to reassure the former majority that the country of the future still has a place for them. Whatever the basis of his power, he needs to be constantly attuned to the ways that diversity, difference and distrust can make political conflict seem far more existential than it should.
Our last two chief executives recognized that they needed to make efforts along these lines, but with exceptions — George W. Bush after Sept. 11, Obama in his 2008 campaign — they were not particularly successful. In Obama’s case, his White House failed to grasp the feeling of abandonment and crisis in the white heartland, and the extent to which that feeling was creating a new identity-based voting bloc. He failed to grasp, too, how threatening the regulatory state’s enforcement of liberal sexual norms was to religious conservatives, how much it made them feel like strangers in their own country.
From that alienation and fear came Trump, who is barely even trying to reach out and reassure, to make his nationalism seem larger than just white identity politics, to make the groups who feel afraid of his administration sense that he has their anxieties in mind. There might be a form of nationalism that helps bind a diverse society together, but Trump’s seems more likely to bind a “real American” ex-majority in opposition to every other race and faith and group.
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