Stuff People Do

At some point between the speech about Mexican rapists and the one about American carnage, an editor from a British publication called to ask if I would use my psychologist skills to explain Donald Trump to the Brits. I told the editor that Trump’s inner workings didn’t interest me enough to think on, let alone write about. Like pornography, I explained, they left far too little to the imagination. I suggested that, with Trump as with porn, a more interesting question was the popularity of something so banal and obvious, and the evident difficulty of looking away despite that. She was not interested, and I did not end up with the assignment.

Three years into Trump’s term, however, the question took on some unexpected urgency. In 2019, I became a politician, although that word is a little bit fancy for the office I held: first selectman, a term originated by our Puritan founders, who, upon their arrival in the New World, decided that their towns should be pure democracies, and almost immediately realized that calling a town meeting every time municipal business has to be conducted is woefully inefficient. So they selected a few men to take care of the day-to-day. These men in turn selected a first among them to oversee the quotidian tasks: road maintenance, church construction, paying the bills, tending the stocks on the Town Green. Connecticut disestablished the Congregational Church in 1818, but in the small town I ran for four years—Scotland, Connecticut, population 1,680—the role still includes one quasi-ecclesiastical duty: winding the Congregational Church clock, which the town somehow owns, and making sure it keeps time and chimes on the hour.

Geographically and socioeconomically speaking, Scotland is diagonally opposite the prosperous towns of Connecticut’s Fairfield County. Politically speaking too: our mostly rural county is a bright red eddy in a deep blue suburban ocean; in both of his elections, Trump prevailed here by landslide margins. How a radical left Jewish knowledge worker managed to get voted into the top office in a Trumpified Yankee farming town makes for an even less interesting story than Trump’s ascent: I ran unopposed, my fellow citizens all too wise to take a thankless and impossible job that might be worth the proverbial bucket of warm spit, and pays about that.

I wish I could tell you that I came away from my four years of running a Trumpy town ready to pronounce upon Trump’s appeal, that I had extended sufficient empathy to grasp why otherwise functional human beings, people with jobs and families and homes and cars and the dreams that go along with them, who see their kids onto the school bus and go unfailingly to their T-ball games, who attend church regularly and tap their feet to the classic rock bands that play on the Green on the third Saturday of every month, why they would want a man such as Donald Trump to run their country, let alone to have his pussy-grabbing hands on the nuclear football. And that the resulting insight into their collective psyche allowed me to have earnest conversations with them, in which they at least listened and considered, if not reconsidered, their fealty to our Orange Julius Caesar, while I was enlightened as to my elitism by the day-to-day struggles of the farmers and mechanics who comprise most of my town, and whose loyalty is driven by their resentment about being left behind. And that if we did not break bread and sing kumbaya together, still the resulting mutual respect allowed me to persuade them to get behind progressive-adjacent policies—wearing masks against Covid-19, say, or encouraging the development of solar power.

But that’s not how it came out. I did manage to sneak a utility-funded electric vehicle charging station into the parking lot at the library, but as soon as the road crew broke up the sidewalk to plant the foundation for the charger, the secret was out and the town rebelled. It was too late to stop the installation, so the complaints focused on my plan to give away the first thousand dollars of electricity. No one bought my argument that relieving range anxiety to combat climate change was worth the $1.30 my largesse would cost each household in town, and although I had the authority to turn on the free juice tap, I deferred to the voice of the people and did not.

It is possible I am exaggerating my ineffectiveness, or underplaying the way that taking care of people with whom I vehemently disagree, and vice-versa, indeed made us all better people. But it is certain that, confusing as it was, I liked most of my neighbors and wondered frequently about how they accounted for their electoral tastes. Sometimes I asked directly, and heard about Trump’s straight talk or his toughness, or about Bidenomics and the woke mob. But more often, answers were built into the conversation. The carpenter who complained about the backup cameras and emission controls and other high-tech doodads that drove the price of his truck to north of $80,000 (and made it impossible for him to service in the bargain) didn’t have to spell it out: the loss of control over his life to the regulators, the usurpation of common sense by the experts, the bloodsucking demands of the administrative state, and all the other pathologies of modern life for which Trump seemed the cure were right there on four wheels. And even without enacting or repealing a single law, his swashbuckling disregard for the usual niceties of political discourse gave them hope. With his inelegant rhetoric, he took a sword to the Gordian tangle of modern life and gained the support of millions.

Not that I needed the carpenter to deduce that. The chief municipal officer of the sixth smallest town in the third richest state in the land regularly finds himself lost in the labyrinth of policy and regulation, in which the simplest endeavors become maddeningly complex and unaffordable, and where resentment of the lawmakers and experts who crafted the maze lurks around every turn. So when that selected man learns that he has violated certain equal opportunity laws by not including their requirements in a bid package, or has to find the money to post municipal ads in two languages instead of one, or discovers that to actually collect the $700,000 earmark so kindly arranged by his congressman to rehabilitate his moldering town hall, he will have to apply for it as if it had not already been awarded, and the application will have to be reviewed by bureaucrats pretending the same, and that this will require environmental reviews and newspaper advertisements and meetings and hearings and lawyers tending to reams of paperwork that cost real money and take up real time, he may well find himself wishing for an Excalibur-wielding savior of his own. And he would be forgiven for thinking he’d witnessed the moment when tragedy tipped over into farce, when the fact that the dense impenetrable thicket of the administrative state, grown from the same soil of love and concern for one another that had inspired the Puritans to found the town, was no longer merely poignant and sad in its inadequacy to a hostile world, but ridiculous, and quite possibly the proof that it is only hubris that makes us mortal fools think we can fashion a life less nasty and brutish than the one given to us.

Which is to say that had the editor’s call come after I had taken the reins, I might have pushed to answer the question I had posed so idly, and in a way more partial to the nasty brute and his minions than I might have wanted. In the meantime, of course, the chattersphere hasn’t exactly shied away from the question of Trump’s staying power. In the last eight years, an army of pundits has spread out across the land, sitting at lunch counters and school board meetings, attending rallies and counter rallies, hanging out with people in MAGA hats, and reporting back in essays and op-eds and books that endeavor to explain the poisonous political culture in which Trump is so firmly rooted.

Many of these are historically informed and plausible accounts of why none of the usual implements—not lawsuits or criminal convictions, not firsthand accounts of his shambolic behavior in office, not his own increasingly cracked and vituperative performances—will cut him down. And they are many. On any given day, the media overflows with analysis of the swollen Trump tide. For instance, as I write this, Robert Kagan is worrying in the Washington Post about the “decline in . . . public virtue” embodied by Trump, and tracing its roots to the earliest days of the Republic, while over at the New York Times, Thomas Edsall is using academic studies to unpack the city/country, working class/elite, rich/poor divides out of which the MAGA kudzu grows. Meanwhile, White Rural Rage is only the latest bestseller whose authors are looking deep into the MAGA heart and finding there nihilism, ignorance, and revanchism, and lighting their own hair on fire to illuminate it.

All of this intellectual firepower might be sledgehammers to flies, and if not, then surely it is useless as anything other than aid and comfort. Because explanation cannot explain why all of that adds up to our parlous state of affairs, any more than an analysis of vectors can tell us why atmospheric pressure and water vapor add up to the fury of a hurricane. More to the point, explication might be superfluous. After all, what is happening is happening in broad daylight, and if it’s marginally more interesting than porn, still it is pretty obvious—and, if the point is to stop the tide, entirely ineffective. For instance, it’s probably fair to say that in the last eight years, more people have heard more historical details about the rise of Nazism in Germany than in the eighty that came before, but if Trump’s clearly stated intention to round up the vermin and squash them doesn’t do the trick any better than his criminal and civil convictions, his self-confessed sexual predation, or his latest outrageous off-the-cuff comment, then the most smartest and most impassioned analysis is unlikely to succeed.

Because even if explanation can discern causes, it only makes a difference to people who have agreed to let reason sort out their differences. That’s the bet baked into the Constitution on which the Republic stands: it assumes that people will use facts to inform their sentiments with reason, and, given the opportunity and the freedom to make that consideration, will then agree to do the right thing. That must have seemed like a good idea at the time; it was certainly in the air in the eighteenth century, when philosophers were taken with our capacity to understand and act on the world. I confess that it still seems like a good idea to me, and I suspect to the eighty million of my fellow voting citizens who are also likely to be appalled by Donald Trump.

But it is not of much value to the rest of us. I don’t think they are deplorable for this, any more than I think my friend with the newfangled pickup truck is, and I am more than willing, especially now that I am out of office and don’t have to enable them, to extend my compassion to them and even resonate with their disappointment with the way things seem to be working out. Really, it’s not much of a stretch. It’s not all that hard to see that the idea that the Puritans wasted no time in establishing in their towns and the Founders in their country—that a self-governing people who meet together to restrain their lesser angels and empower their better ones in order to build a good world—is fading away before our very eyes, and if anything is going to bring it back, it’s probably not a resurgence of reason.

I have no illusion that Trump knows whose eye he is sticking with his thumb, or understands that he is rebuking the hubris that led our political and philosophical forebears to think we could manage the wild world with reason. But he doesn’t have to know what he means; indeed, his epic ignorance is one of his superpowers. Chief among the things he does not know is that he’s being blown along on the same tornado that is right now careening down the avenues of the Enlightenment, blasting away our ideas about how we are to live together as surely as natural selection blasts out of the biosphere anything unfit to reproduce. And maybe that’s the mistake we make now in thinking that these explanations matter, or at least that they can derail us from the course on which we find ourselves, despite heartfelt and even plaintive calls for the end to our polarization and paralysis.

All of which makes me think about Leo Tolstoy, who accused historians of focusing on human-scale causes to account for catastrophes like war, and thus counting too much on free will and other attributes of the reasoning person to make things better. He proposed widening the scope of analysis to encompass as much as possible of everything that has led up to a given day, and to use it as data to derive the calculus by which events happen. No one has succeeded in unveiling the equations of history, and even if they had, it’s not clear that even Tolstoy thought they would give us much more than a way to limn the laws that get us to where we are, regardless of what we might want. This view doesn’t place individuals at the apex of events, which may comfort those of us who recoil at Trump’s grandiosity and wish for his comeuppance. Beyond that, however, it only serves to remind us of something very hard to stomach: that the wheel of history is huge and implacable and has a mind of its own, or maybe no mind at all.

Of course, we don’t need differential calculus to understand the past. Historians have been doing that for thousands of years, and if we don’t manage to bring human history to a halt, they will continue to shape our collective life into stories. How they will judge people who so flagrantly squandered their gifts—or so sorely overestimated them—remains to be seen. But they might be interested in what my carpenter friend said. He’d come to the town hall to do a little job, and after he’d complained about his truck, and a little bit about vaccines and masks, I asked if he wanted to leave a bill. He said he wasn’t going to charge for the work. “It’s the least I can do for my neighbors,” he told me. He didn’t explain further, but I was pretty sure that he was thinking about their tax dollars, every one of them, in his view, extracted unjustly and used unwisely, and seeking to protect them from the evil they represented. It was the least he could do.

After I walked him to the door, I thought of something Jim Casy says to Tom Joad at the outset of Grapes of Wrath. “Maybe we been whippin’ the hell out of ourselves for nothing. . . . There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.” I watched him head down the front steps and looked past him to the Town Green, to the Congregational Church and the post office and the old houses and all the other ancient marks of our presence on this miniscule sliver of this tiny rock, and took note, not for the first time, about the way the Puritans had arranged the village: the buildings huddled around the Green, facing inward, their backs to the outside world like covered wagons circled up against the prairie night. The carpenter and I might disagree on the particular evil that confronts us, but not on the fact that one does. We might disagree about what ought to be done to stave it off, but not on the necessity that something must. What unites us, whether we know it or not, and whether or not we want to admit it, is our mutual wish that there is more than just stuff people do, and our mutual terror at the possibility that there is not.