Donald Trump and the Academy
Do leaders create history, or does history create leaders? This was a debate between two Victorian titans, Thomas Carlyle and Herbert Spencer. The former argued that history is driven by “great men” who rise above the rest—who create the future by sheer force of will. Carlyle summarized his position in 1840: “In all epochs of the world’s history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his epoch;—the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt. The History of the World [is] the Biography of Great Men.” This would become the nineteenth century’s most popular theory of historical progress. Yet Herbert Spencer, an intellectual of the next generation, offered a different view in 1873: “Before [the great man] can re-make his society, his society must make him. So that all those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations he descended from.”
Is Donald Trump a great man of history—someone who skyrockets onto the world stage and reshapes it? Trump barrels through convention, ignoring all the usual rules of politics. With raw political instinct he gambles with his support, recklessly throwing the dice every few days. For more than half a year he has terrified bigwigs in the Republican Party, his mastery of propaganda leaving them helpless; many are begging him to relent or praying that another candidate can overtake him. Trump has all the markings of the classic great man of Carlyle, who combines luck, guts and skill to forge ahead. We, however, hold with Spencer: Trump is a product of his time. He is a visceral reaction to, and an inversion of, the culture of the American elite. Exeter is a noted part of this elite and, like its sister institutions, has contributed to Donald Trump’s rise.
We speak to you now in friendship, not in malice: as former classmates who are challenging your beliefs at the Harkness table. At Exeter we are asked to put ourselves in another’s place to understand their perspective; better still we are asked to step outside the so-called Exeter bubble. We address no particular race, identity or person, but rather the whole of the elite class of which we are indisputably part. Most importantly, we hope to bring to your attention the consequences of certain behavior and suggest alternatives. Just as Trump could not exist without his supporters, neither could he exist without those who created his supporters. We do not back this man or his policy proposals, but we do hope to show that while his rise cannot be reduced to a single source, elite culture and its disdain for part of America is a major cause of Donald Trump’s explosion into history.
With a good education comes responsibility: that is, the responsibility to remain intellectually honest and confront all positions on an issue.
Imagine you’re a poor white man, about 50 years old, in rural Appalachia. When you were young there were some well-to-do families living in your town, but they have long since moved to the cities or suburbs. You have never attended a university; you may not have not graduated from high school. You have a job in the coal industry, you worry about your income, and every day on the way to work you see idlers who are unemployed. Although many of your friends have been slipping in their church attendance, you do your best to keep up and remain a Christian believer. You don’t know very many people who aren’t white, but you meet some in church or at work and have generally cordial relations. A good portion of the men in your town aren’t married, but you are and you have a child. You have voted for both Democrats and Republicans, don’t feel much of an attachment to either party, and often don’t vote at all. You are, as demographic analyses show, an average Trump voter.
For decades you have been turning on the news (not Fox, Trump has made clear) only to be lectured by those in Washington or New York that you are not only “privileged” but irredeemably racist, that you are a walking, talking microaggression, that your strong faith makes you a bigot, and that your beliefs are generally backward. You and your identity are the butt of daily jokes of young, chic comedians and the rich panelists who giggle along with them. You know that resisting just reinforces the attackers’ impression of you as hopelessly intransigent. You know that you are persona non grata at many of this country’s universities, whose students and professors would laugh at you mercilessly were you to share your views on marriage, immigration or religion. Why, you might ask, is there such a taboo on criticizing the Islamic faith while your own is brutally trashed? Perhaps most importantly, you are not articulate or influential enough to mount a proper defense, leaving you slighted and impotent. When you look at American elites—politicians, media, universities, urbanites, Exonians—you see not public servants and virtuous leaders but a cocooned aristocracy that ferociously insults you and your values, calls you a racist when you object, writes off your worries about America’s changing culture as “living in the past” or the whining of a privileged straight white male afraid of changing demographics and basically behaves as if you would be better off melting into the ground and never showing your face again. Look within yourselves, Exonians. You know you have said these things, day after day.
We do not have a special desire to defend white people. Inner city blacks do not appreciate being stereotyped as criminals, illegal immigrants do not appreciate being called rapists, Muslims do not appreciate being called terrorists, and working class whites do not appreciate being labelled backward and intolerant. Mocking and silencing any group of people will create backlash. Trump’s movement may appeal to whites and may be racially charged, but it is chiefly class-based: specifically, it is a reaction to an upper caste—white and black, gay and straight—that year after year insults millions of Americans, all the while manufacturing speech codes and taboos to prevent any rebuttal. You, Exonians, find hierarchy within the elite; but all our poor straight white Appalachian man finds is a unified fist smashing his face. To him, Donald Trump is not a bigot who indulges the masses’ prejudice but a straight-talking traitor to the court. Our man hears the sermons on diversity, but all he can see is a creeping cultural totalitarianism—with him as the ultimate scapegoat.
And now he wants to see Trump beat them at their own game: that is, he relishes watching someone return fire with equal ferocity. Many criticize Trump for his vulgar and divisive style, but ask yourself: How is he any more vulgar and divisive than the student who yelled crude expletives at a Yale faculty member because she disagreed with the latter’s opinion on “racially insensitive” Halloween costumes? Trump is condemned as a “schoolyard bully,” but surely he no more fits that description than the professor at the University of Missouri who assaulted a reporter at a protest of racial injustice—on an actual schoolyard, no less. Is Trump more vulgar than those who call Clarence Thomas, Allen West, Michael Steele, Tim Scott or Thomas Sowell “Uncle Toms” because they disagree with other blacks? Or those who sneered that Bobby Jindal (“Uncle Bobby”) tries to scrub off his dark skin in the shower because he rejects race politics? Perhaps you recall the teacher at Exeter, now departed, who expressed her visceral hatred of white children in a prominent online magazine? These are but a few of the thousands of slights that elite society levels against white people, directly or indirectly. To those who cry racism at every available opportunity, whether or not it’s appropriate; to those who admonish others not to generalize about minorities but cheerfully do so about whites—you say Donald Trump has ushered in a new age of incivility. Who’s to say it’s a new age?
Kentucky’s Owsley County, ravaged by globalization and industrial flight, was listed in the 2010 census as America’s poorest. As of 2014 it was 98.4 percent white. People who live there do not like being told by the coastal nobility that they, residing in what has been dubbed the “food stamp capital” of the United States, are recipients of some great social boost on account of their skin. They are tired of double standards justified by sweeping accusations of “white privilege” that have no bearing on their lives. They cannot understand why they are perpetually in the wrong or why they are so often shamed. In this country there are thousands of predominantly white towns that feel utterly left behind, not only by the changing economy but by a (bipartisan) political establishment and upper class that doesn’t care about them and seems to hate them. For so many Donald Trump is less an ideologue and more a boxer who punches back on their behalf. And no shrieks of disgust from pundits at The New York Times nor finger-wagging from cloistered professors can convince them otherwise, because these voices no longer have any credibility with voters who have felt snubbed for decades. Trump may enjoy constant media coverage, but the most revealing statement of his entire campaign, a quiet aside in one of his many speeches, went mostly unnoticed by the press: “A lot of people have laughed at me over the years. Now they’re not laughing so much, I tell you.”
As this man grows ever stronger, it is time for Exeter to reflect on its role in his creation. It is easy and comforting to explain away Donald Trump as a great man of history: a force of nature beyond your control that came into being far from your realm of life. But this is to misunderstand him. Consider instead: are you the generation from which Trump is descended? If he is the proximate initiator of change, are you the chief cause of his rise? Are you the society that made him? No, you are not Trump’s base—but how much have you done to create his base? There’s no question Trump is a divider, but how is what he’s doing any different from what you’ve been doing?
He is a mirror for us all to gaze at. There is still time to make amends, still time to seek friendship where there is division.
In this very newspaper there have recently been calls for “conversations” about race, homophobia, Islamophobia, discrimination against gays and lesbians and virtually every other sensitive issue on the market. But ask yourself: are these really pleas for conversation? Or are they demands for one group to sit still and nod as another group delivers a lecture? Are these “conversations” in fact badges of power, used to rudely interrupt and silence those who disagree, as a moderator did to a student during this year’s MLK Day discourse? Even if you believe in this forced submission, that injustices past and present require white people to “get in line,” think of the consequences of your actions. Through identity politics and culture-bashing you have alienated tens of millions, vast swaths of the United States, who may be beyond the point of reconciliation. Through scorn and contempt you have turned them to a man who preaches scorn and contempt.
With a good education comes responsibility: that is, the responsibility to remain intellectually honest and confront all positions on an issue. So the next time somebody tells you at assembly that you’re a future leader of the world, ask yourself: do I engage regularly with people with whom I have deep cultural disagreements? When I talk of dialogue or bridging gaps, am I actually having a dialogue with the people on the other side of the gap? Have I ever preached diversity while practicing division? Have I ever been too quick to call someone or something bigoted without hearing the full story or giving them a chance to make their case? How much am I doing, as Dr. King wonderfully put it, “to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood”? Have I perhaps lost sight of this mission and retreated into one or another group, raising my hand in accusation rather than friendship? As conservatives, we’re not asking you to change your views. We’re asking you not to shout down other opinions or mock people who don’t share your values. The best leaders are ones who seek unity; above all, the best leaders carry with them humility and graciousness.
Whether or not Donald Trump ultimately attains the presidency is at this point irrelevant. The mark has been made, the warning cast. He is a mirror for us all to gaze at. There is still time to make amends, still time to seek friendship where there is division. Let us rise to the occasion. With that, Exeter, we bid you our common farewell.