Understanding Trumpism: Reactionary Politics and Authoritarianism

Sean's podcast explores the complexities of Trumpism and its reaction to elite culture and democracy.

### Understanding Trumpism: A Philosophical Inquiry into Political Dynamics
* 🎙 Sean, the host of Vox's podcast **The Gray Area**, engages in philosophical discussions with guests, focusing on **contemporary political questions**.
* 🗳 In the latest episode, Sean speaks with reporter Zach Beecham about the recent election and Trump’s **"undeniable appeal"** in the current political landscape.
* 📉 They analyze Trumpism as a reactionary movement, primarily **rejecting the ruling elites and the professional managerial class**, emphasizing **class and cultural issues over race**.
* 🤔 The conversation highlights that Trump's core supporters are driven by **racial and social grievances**, particularly regarding **immigration** and feelings of **alienation post-Obama**.
* 📱 They discuss the societal alienation and the impact of social media, noting that many **take liberal democracy for granted** and view politics as a form of **entertainment**.
* ⚖ Trump is portrayed as a figure who **lacks a coherent political ideology**, instead serving as a vehicle for various reactions to social change, with a fundamental **desire for power**.
* 🔍 The discussion concludes that while Trump has fixed beliefs on immigration and trade, his approach is more **instinctual than ideological**, revealing a **zero-sum worldview**.
* 💬 "His political genius consists in making himself into an **avatar onto which people can project whatever they need to project**," capturing the essence of his appeal.

Hey, I'm Sean. I host a podcast here at Vox. It's called The Gray Area. Every week, a guest comes on my show and we talk about a question or a topic through the lens of philosophy. You may have seen clips of recent episodes

here on the YouTube channel. This, by the way, is just one of a few podcasts here at Vox. I hope you check them out too. The clip you're about to see is from my latest episode with my Vox colleague and reporter, Zach Beecham.

He covers conservatism and the state of democracy around the world. Zach and I talk about the recent election. Obviously, we talk about Trump's undeniable appeal at this moment and what that might mean for our political future. I hope you enjoy it.

So we can make the case that Trumpism is a reactionary movement. But what is Trumpism really reacting against? What it seems to be increasingly is a rejection of the ruling elites, a rejection of the professional managerial class, which is more about class and culture

than race and the preservation of traditional hierarchies. So how do you make sense of that?

Yeah, I think there's a little bit of analytic slippage going on in that account, and I think we need to be really careful

when we talk about asset classes.  Someone just called me wrong, by the way. I know your slippage there—a little bit of slippage. Many people are saying, and many, many people are saying, that that's actually true.

They're just wrong. And I think it's important to understand that something can be right in one sense but wrong in another. But let's start with 'wrong'. When we talk about what Trumpism is, we need to specify what we're talking about.

And I don't think looking at a general election and saying that person voted for Trump is necessarily saying that person is a Trumpist. If you look at Trump's core supporters, though, the story is one of racial and social grievance.

Anger about immigration, a kind of sense of alienation from the United States after Obama, really personalized the change in social order. All of that is remarkably consistent among the people who will turn out to vote for Trump in a Republican primary.

It's been true over and over again. The evidence is overwhelmingly strong that this is their core motivation in Trump politics and in being engaged in this movement. And nothing about this election result changes that. What that part of the story does

is help us understand why Trump has gained control over one of our two major political parties.  Yeah. And I continue to have a hard time parsing out all the forces that are combining to scramble our politics. I mean, there's so much alienation.

It's a very lonely society. Our democracy doesn't feel very participatory for lots of people, so there's not enough investment in it. I think social media, media fragmentation more generally, and the collapse of consensus reality have all been very destabilizing.

And I'm just going to keep saying that. I think millions of people have never experienced real political disorder. I think they take liberal democracy for granted and, frankly, don't take politics very seriously.  It's become a reality TV show, and they're entertained by Trump

and they think he's funny, and he'll make things cheaper, and also drive coastal elites insane. And that's that's the that's kind of it. Yeah. I mean,
I think that's really that's true for a lot of people.

Right. Like a lot of people, especially the point about taking liberal democracy for granted is so important. I think it's that when you live in a stable political order
for a long period of time, you just come to take it as a baseline.

This is the way that things are, and you can't... It's something you can't even envision fundamental change. It's that you don't even have the vocabulary, or the sense of perspective, necessary to believe that you should be envisioning radical change.

It just doesn't enter into your daily life, right? If you look at interviews with swing voters and the way that they talk about politics, or talk to them yourselves, right, the sense that you get is not that these people are like,

“I want to burn American democracy to the ground.” It's that they've got a choice between two candidates, like they do every election, and they pick the one who represents whatever their grievances are at this moment in time, or their anger or frustration or

Or even hopes and dreams are, at this moment in time, and lots of different things go into a voter changing their mind, election to election. What speaks to that, and the stuff about who Trump really is and what he really stands for?

Other than the system-threatening part of it, it just doesn't even register right because it's too—it seems too remote to feel real. Not just remote; it also feels—I think we've talked about this a little bit—it feels a little too silly.

Yeah. And absurd, often. Right? I mean, figuring out how to situate Trump in this story has always been weird for me. I think he's too nihilistic to be the leader of anything other than a personality cult. But the question, I guess, for you as a...

Has he become more like a vehicle that serious ideological reactionaries are using to advance their serious political project? I mean, I'm going to say yes and no. So yes, in the sense that Trump does not have the mind for detailed policy work.

Right? It's just not what he cares about. It's not—that's terrible. Yeah, it is not. He doesn't want to, like, try to understand how something like Schedule F is going to work. He's not going to be in the details...

Going through staff directories. He doesn't really know how the federal government relates to local prosecutors and what the authority is to punish the people who went after him, but he wants to do it, and he wants someone to figure out how to do it.

And that's like the stuff that he's immediately concerned with. And then there's the stuff that's relatively far afield, like, do you think Trump really has a sense of what the Department of Labor does or cares? Absolutely not.

No, no, no, he has no sense. Right. And he'll just do whatever people around him, the last person he talked to, suggested that he does, or the person he likes that he talked to. So in that sense, yeah,

a lot of what happens in Trump administrations—now that we have to use the plural—is going to be determined by the political world around him. And I also don't think he has a sincere commitment to anti-democracy either.

He's not ideological in that sense, not the kind of guy who has a clearly defined... you've never read a book by him where he lays out a coherent political ideology that he sincerely believes, right? He puts forward... this is my problem with him, right?

Like he's not committed to anything. I have always thought that his political genius consists in making himself into an avatar onto which people can project whatever they need to project, and he's just so well equipped to be this kind of vehicle that I'm talking about.

Because, again, I genuinely do not think he cares about anything other than himself. I mean, if the man had to choose between preserving liberal democracy for another century or building a beautiful new golf course in Saudi Arabia, is there any doubt he'd build the fucking golf course?

I mean, that's his level of commitment to democracy. No, but I think that's a mistake. Because it's not that he doesn't have a commitment to democracy in the sense that he's not attached to it.

He doesn't like it. He doesn't like the idea that he can't do whatever he wants when he gets power, or he gets very angry when people say, 'You can't do that,' or 'That's illegal.' And he openly admires leaders

in other countries who have either always been authoritarians, like Xi Jinping in China, or who have torn down their own democracies, like Putin or Viktor Orbán in Hungary. He likes them; he thinks they're strong and that it's great that they get to do stuff like that.

And again, this is not an ideological commitment to authoritarianism. It's not like Trump has a sincere belief that authoritarian systems will work better or deliver better in some meaningful sense. It's a gut-level, 'I like that; I want to be like that.'

That's what he said in that interview, sorry, and those comments that were recently reported: 'I want generals like Hitler's generals.' It's not like he was saying, 'I want generals who will follow my orders to exterminate the Jews.'

He's saying, 'I want people who listen to me and do the things that I say, whatever those things are, however crazy they might seem.' And in that sense, he has a gut-level authoritarianism. It's not a spur-of-the-moment thing; it's reactionary in the sense

that he very clearly hates a lot of the social change that has happened. Right. So he does really classically fit the pattern I describe in the book. But it's not because he, unlike someone like, say, Orbán or Narendra Modi in India or Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel,

like all of them, have complex ideological beliefs or runs are mostly for show. By the way, he mostly cares about power, but he's a very sophisticated ideological operator, and Netanyahu and Modi are for real ideologues. They really do believe a lot of what they're saying.

I think that's more what I was speaking to. It's clear that Trump wants power. It's just not clear to me what he really wants to do with it. It's not clear to me. Well, he would never be in service of...

Yeah. I mean, there are two things, right?  Like other than him, I think he does care about... Right. He does believe that we need to get the immigrants out. He really does believe that. It's been true for decades.

And his statements, it's one thing he's been consistent on. And second, he believes that free trade is bad for America. It's a really fixed belief, unchangeable. No amount of evidence could cause him to change his mind on this topic.

The only question is how far he's willing to go in pursuing an anti-trade agenda. And those two things reflect a deeper worldview. I think a sense of the world as a fundamentally zero-sum place where it can't be the case that migrants coming to...

The US is good for native-born citizens, right? Someone has to win, and someone has to lose. It can't be the case that both countries involved in a trading arrangement benefit. Someone has to get the better of the deal being made between the two sides, right?

And so that, that sort of constellation of instincts, the zero-sum nature of it all, filters down into perspectives on different policy issues. But it's not in the same way as somebody who has, you know, a doctrine, right?

A set of, of, like, propositions that they believe about the world, but then apply to different cases. Right? It's just he has sort of feelings about stuff, and those feelings about stuff translate into some relatively stable policy views in some areas.

Where he doesn't really think that much or care that much about it, or, and when he doesn't care, he is willing to be protean in the way that you described, to just change his mind on abortion whenever he feels like it.

And whatever the audience... he isn't saying wildly different, contradictory stuff depending on what feels like in his interest at that moment in time. Yeah, I think it's clear he certainly has instincts. And I think those instincts can be properly called authoritarian.

Yeah. Thank you so much for watching. Like I mentioned earlier, Vox is more than a YouTube channel. We have a website, podcast, newsletters, all of which are devoted to this singular task of explaining the world. And if you enjoyed this,

And of course you did; you're still here. There's a ton more to discover. If you're already a fan of Vox and you want to support the work we do, the best way is to become a Vox member. It'll give you access to some exclusive

podcast newsletters and videos, and more than that, it'll just help us continue to do the work that we do. You can do that by going to Vox.com/memberships. And thanks again.

Trumpism is a movement, not just a moment | The Gray Area

Vox helps you understand our world.

Vox video is Bridgett Henwood, Cath Spangler, Adam Freelander, Joey Sendaydiego, Coleman Lowndes, Christophe Haubursin, Kim Mas, Laura Bult, Ed Vega, Rajaa Elidrissi, and with research support from Melissa Hirsch. 

Become a member today: https://www.vox.com/support-now

Check out our FAQ on permissions and licensing of our videos: https://www.voxmedia.com/pages/licensing

✉️ Write us: voxvideo@vox.com


Sean introduces himself and his podcast, 'The Gray Area'.

He mentions the podcast is one of several at Vox.

The episode features a discussion with Zach Beecham about the recent election and Trump's appeal.

Analyzing Trumpism as a reactionary movement

Discussion on whether Trumpism is a rejection of ruling elites and the professional managerial class.

Points out the need for careful analysis when discussing asset classes and Trumpism.

Importance of specifying what is meant by 'Trumpism' and distinguishing between voters and Trumpists.

Focus on Trump's core supporters and their motivations: racial and social grievances, anger about immigration, and alienation.

Factors contributing to political polarization and instability

Discussion on alienation, lack of political participation, and the impact of social media and media fragmentation.

Many people take liberal democracy for granted and view politics as entertainment.

The importance of voters taking liberal democracy for granted.

When living in a stable political order, fundamental change is hard to envision.

Understanding voter choices and Trump's appeal

Voters choose candidates based on their grievances, anger, or hopes at a given moment.

System-threatening aspects of Trump's appeal may not register with voters.

Trump's appeal is described as silly and absurd.

Trump as a vehicle for ideological reactionaries

Discussion on whether Trump is a vehicle for serious ideological reactionaries.

Trump lacks interest in detailed policy work.

Trump lacks understanding and interest in many aspects of government.

Trump lacks a sincere commitment to anti-democracy.

Trump's lack of commitment and authoritarian tendencies

Trump's political genius lies in being an avatar for various projections.

Illustrative example of Trump prioritizing personal interests over democracy.

Trump's dislike for limitations and admiration for authoritarian leaders.

Trump's authoritarianism is described as gut-level rather than ideological.

Comparison of Trump with other leaders who have complex ideological beliefs.

Trump's consistent beliefs on immigration and free trade.

Trump's zero-sum worldview influences his policy views.

Comparison of Trump's policy views with those based on a coherent doctrine.

Trump's willingness to change his mind on issues he doesn't care about.

Conclusion: Trump's authoritarian instincts.

Call to action to explore more Vox content.