Trump is the Symptom. We are the Illness.

David Brooks, resident conservative(ish) editorialist for the New York Times, used his column a few weeks ago to take Never Trumpers and “The Resistance,” groups with which he associates, to task in the aftermath of the Soleimani killing.

Donald Trump is impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic and intellectually dishonest. So you’d think that those of us in the anti-Trump camp would go out of our way to show we’re not like him — that we are judicious, informed, mature and reasonable…. But the events of the past week have shown that the anti-Trump echo chamber is becoming a mirror image of Trump himself — overwrought, uncalibrated and incapable of having an intelligent conversation about any complex policy problem.

Brooks gets a lot right, and an honest self-assessment by those both Right and Left who place themselves athwart the president would be as illuminating for them as it is unlikely.

But he misses one key point in his argument – a misunderstanding that prevents him or anyone in his intended audience from actually getting to – and fixing – the root of the problem.  The mistake is in the title of the column itself, “Trump is Making Us Stupid.”

American democracy is a consumer-side, not supply-side, industry.  As Jonah Goldberg writes, “Bad followership yields bad leadership, because in a market-based democracy, the customer is always right.” If the one nationally-elected leader we have is “impulse-driven, ignorant, narcissistic and intellectually dishonest,” it is because that is what we the American consumer demands – through our votes, our cable-news viewership, our social-media followership, and our own behavior.

America today is a place where the feelings that comfort us the most are of hatred and outrage; a time of “negative polarization” when the height of the love we feel towards each other is determined in inverse by the depth of the hatred others feel towards others that we hate too. 

Brooks speaks of the “echo chamber” that reflexively erupted at news of Soleimani’s death, and this is because we have self-Balkanized ourselves into echo chambers that confirm what we already believe.  Far from bridging geographic, religious, and social divides, the advent of the internet and cable news has made it far easier for us to isolate ourselves from those who are different than ever before. We can watch entire networks that tell us exactly what we want to hear twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. So too can we friend and follow those who are just like us to the point that those who aren’t are not real people at all, but caricatures and boogeymen constructed from our own worst prejudices.

From this, loathing and outrage become natural and affirming and, since we associate with those who feel exactly like we do, social capital and social cohesion are built through immediate, unthinking expressions of loathing and outrage to greater and greater levels towards those who don’t – expressions which we like and retweet and comment on in like manner.  It’s a mutually-reinforcing and -escalating vortex of sound and fury.

Decades from now historians will puzzle over how a society who lived at literally the best time to be a human being ever could be so discontented and acrimonious with each other that advice columns were needed for family members of different political beliefs to peacefully sit at the same table together on holidays.

As much as we might comfort ourselves otherwise, Donald Trump did not cause this phenomenon – he is the logical result of it. 

For years now, one half of America has increasingly despised the other half and the other half has requited: the Progressive Left viewing people on the Conservative Right, in the words of Barack Obama, as so “bitter” and “frustrated” that they can only “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them.” The Conservative Right, in turn, after years of feeling like their way of life has been dumped upon by cultural elites on the Progressive Left, has been waiting for someone who treats everybody on the Left (and Right) who disagrees with him the same way the Left has treated them. 

Our contempt both drives us apart and brings us together.  No longer can we listen and think beyond what we already know, because to do so might be to admit that those we’ve conditioned ourselves to disdain might actually come from a valid place, or, God forbid, be right about something.

All that was left then was for Donald Trump – a reality tv star who views all attention, good or bad, as good attention; who thrives in controversy and uproar – to walk in a wide-open door at a time when both sides were looking for someone to confirm what they already believed about the other.  Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

Call it “stupid” or whatever term you choose, but Trump did not make us this way. He merely reflects what we had already become.