It would be unfair to blame the troubling appeal of Donald Trump on the very people most alarmed by him – unfair, as well as too vague, since Trump’s critics range from right-of-centre commentators like David Frum and David Brooks to millions of progressives and moderates too.  A lot of people are dismayed by Trump, and the prospect of his second presidency.  But among all the explanations offered for his popularity, no one has acknowledged that Trump’s supporters may be acting out a role scripted for them by his most demeaning detractors.

While there’s little doubt that Trump attracts an element of racist whites, or that he openly preaches hostility to Muslims and Mexicans, a general attitude of bigotry has been ascribed to conservative campaigners for years.  The GOP has dominated the American rural south since the 1960s, to the moral contempt of northern urban Democrats:  Trump’s followers have simply stopped apologizing for themselves.  Indeed, even when conservatives have made gestures of social conciliation, they’ve been accused of using “code words” or of playing “dog whistle politics,” using subtle rather than overt signals of racial bias.  Yet “code words” itself has become a kind of code, insinuating that while the politicians who are said to speak them may not have actually uttered any ethnic slurs or inflammatory jokes, they are nevertheless guilty (deem the liberal pundits who alone are qualified to judge) of thinking them.  This is why Trump has won so much mileage out of his sneers at “the woke left” and “political correctness.”  If even civil, sensitive figures are labeled as rednecks, just for questioning immigration levels or welfare payments, then there’s little point in being civil at all.

In Stephen King’s The Shining, the embittered and frustrated recovering alcoholic Jack Torrance develops a homicidal grudge against his wife’s suspicions:

…if a man reforms, doesn’t he deserve to have his reformation credited sooner or later?  And if he doesn’t get it, doesn’t he deserve the game to go with the name?  If a father constantly accuses his virginal daughter of screwing every boy in junior high, must she not at last grow weary (enough) of it to earn her scoldings?

Perhaps a parallel grudge has arisen in the embittered and frustrated lumpenproles now backing Donald Trump.  After all, many Republican leaders of the last fifty years have been characterized as right-wing extremists:  Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney were all frightening quasi-fascists, according to orthodox thinkers on the left.  Now that a truly frightening quasi-fascist is in line for the US presidency, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, McCain and Romney seem both reasonable and responsible, but orthodox thinkers have already exhausted their vocabulary of condemnation.  Even conservative Canadian politicians like Stephen Harper, Stockwell Day, and Preston Manning – Preston Manning, whose mild demeanor is that of a nerdy high school science teacher’s – were supposedly incipient Hitlers, in the dutifully smug dinner conversation of Canadian liberals. Just as Trump is currently excused by evangelists and libertarian intellectuals who should know better, his GOP predecessors were disparaged by the chattering classes, who should have known better themselves. Is it any wonder that right-leaning voters, patronizingly warned about their preferred candidates for so long, have finally picked someone worth warning about?

Of course, it takes two to polarize.  Anyone who dares to contradict Donald Trump is vilified by him and his MAGA minions, while political culture in many societies, not just American, has been depicted as a binary, almost Manichean conflict between mutually antagonistic sides for a long time.  Contemporary media platforms have devolved into for-profit “angertainment” that encourage endless “doomscrolling” by their consumers, while surveys show an increasing personal estrangement between people with opposing political opinions.  Elections are regularly framed as crusades to “take back” the nation from those who’ve somehow stolen it, and electoral victories are more and more deemed underhanded or illegitimate by the losers. Campaigns are artificially whipped up by editorialists and TV talking heads into existential contests for the national destiny, with hour-by-hour tracking of polls, photo ops, gaffes, and gotchas. Canadian Conservative leader (and very possibly next Prime Minister) Pierre Polievre, though certainly no Trump, is another figure who portrays members of rival parties as dangerous and possibly treasonous enemies, rather than fellow politicians with different notions of the public good – just as Polievre’s most strident critics say the same about him. Like Trump, the more Polievre is demonized by outsiders, the more loyal his base becomes. Over the decades, all this hyperbole has amounted to a vast exercise in crying wolf. And now the wolf really is at the door.  

Whatever the results of Tuesday’s US election, it seems likely that a climate of distrust will continue to deepen across the political spectrum, crippling the orderly workings of governments, fracturing the collective commitments of citizens, and degrading the fundamental ideals of democracy.