Almost everything you can say about him Donald Trump A return to the presidency has been said so far. The big problem with Trump as a symbol of America’s tragic decline is that he seems quixotic, improbably perfect for the role; The symbolism is painfully obvious, though that does not deprive it of all resonance or meaning.
Every investigation into who is responsible for this unmitigated disaster must begin by looking in the mirror.
I covered Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, which feels like a lifetime ago, as if it were the day before yesterday. (Time! It just didn’t seem to work the way it used to.) One of the songs that was in constant rotation on his endlessly postponed marches that year was “You can’t always get what you want“, until Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ lawyers (or whoever owns the rights to their songwriting catalog) stopped it. It astounded me then, and it astounds me now, because it carries a double meaning: Almost no one got what they wanted out of Trump’s first presidency, but One could argue, at least for a while, that “we” – that is, Americans and the people of the world – got a lesson we needed and deserved.
So what now? With Trump reinstated at the head of an administration of completely submissive sycophants, who appear poised to pursue a dizzying array of unconstitutional, delusional, or ill-advised policies, is it now clear that we need a different, harsher lesson, with potentially irreversible consequences? ? I don’t know; History will judge, and all that. But a different song suggests to me now: the latest single from… Leonard Cohenthe late Canadian Jewish prophet of doom and long-time observer of American foolishness, who never needed a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.
“You Want It Darker” was released in October 2016, less than three weeks before Cohen’s death, at the age of 82, on November 7. Donald Trump was elected president. the next day. This coincidence was certainly notable at the time; I hardly know what to say about it now.
Like Cohen’s best songs, “You Want It Darker” carries an undercurrent of exciting subversion, a sense of expressing forbidden but undeniable ideas. It’s also a song that comments on itself, putting ironic distance from its lyrical ambition, another Cohen trademark. (Hence the almost infinite number of mediocre covers of “Hallelujah,” which haven’t completely ruined it one way or another.)
It certainly wasn’t the first time a Leonard Cohen song seemed to predict events that never happened, or capture a universal state of mind before it fully coalesced. The most famous of them was “the futureissued in 1992 at the moment of the supposed global triumph of liberal democracy, offered dire predictions for a new, rootless century struggling with the loss of existential meaning:
Give me back the Berlin Wall
Give me Stalin and Saint Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima
Well, here we are. Donald Trump certainly doesn’t deserve comparison to Jesus Christ or the atomic bomb — though he’d be happy with either or both — but he certainly represents the collective decision of enough Americans: We want it darker.
To resort to another Trump-era cliché, every investigation into who bears responsibility for this unmitigated disaster must begin by looking in the mirror. I am prepared to support, to varying degrees, the accusations of the wretches Democratic Partyself-torpedo Kamala Harris Arrogance campaign Joe BidenSelf-soothe Mainstream mediapeaceful, “apolitical” voters and outdated myths Merrick Garland. (Especially those, actually.)
But it is difficult to avoid a more inevitable conclusion: we – And by this unacceptable technical term, I really mean that we all – had a crucial opportunity, with Trump’s first election, to grapple with some very big questions about the past and the future. We have been asked to reflect on our history, specifically the frustrating, never-completed project of American democracy, and to think about how we can use it moving forward. In Cohen’s words, exactly how much Stalin and St. Paul were willing to tolerate, or what we were willing to tolerate. We are being asked, so close to the last minute, to confront what may be the greatest crisis in the history of human civilization, and to make choices that will save our descendants a habitable planet, as well as the miraculous abundance of other living things.
Joe Biden gets about half a brownie point for trying to tell us these things, in his unintelligible mumble. We could exhaust ourselves listing our former president’s tragic flaws, but perhaps what’s sadder is that he thought we were big enough, wise and strong enough for now. We weren’t. There is no other conclusion to be drawn.
Sure, you get it: If you’re reading this, you and I can congratulate ourselves for not wanting this outcome, and for doing everything we did to prevent it. Let’s not get upset, okay? It is clear that we have not done enough, and this goes back a long time; It wasn’t about holding more white man zooms for Kamala or convincing your neighbors that inflation isn’t real.
With our boundless narcissism, Americans have always tended to believe that the whole world, all of history, revolves around us being God’s favorite nation or something else. This time it’s at least somewhat true: Our national dance between sex and death, dating back to the early Puritan refugees and the devil-inhabited woods of New England, seems increasingly tilted toward self-destruction. Our previous belief in Manifest Destiny always implied another possibility; Let’s call it the apparent premonition of doom. Even as it gnaws at its entrails, the United States of America remains the greatest economic and military power in world history, and its collapse will affect literally every person in the world.
Want a daily summary of all the news and reviews the salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletterIntensive course.
I suppose there are people who believe Donald Trump’s ridiculous rhetoric as substance, not just performance. As his spiritual predecessor P. T. Barnum noted, there is one born every minute. But I don’t think most Trump voters are stupid or completely disconnected from reality. They don’t believe that he can miraculously lower grocery prices, or that deporting so many prison custodians, dishwashers, and farm workers, along with their entire families, will somehow improve their lives.
Our previous belief in Manifest Destiny always implied another possibility; Let’s call it apparent agony.
They don’t know how much he and his followers can gain from Trump’s alleged agenda (since no one does), and they don’t particularly care. You’ve heard it all before: They feel excluded from America’s promise of global prosperity, and they’re not entirely wrong. (News flash: They’re blaming the wrong people for it.) They’re not interested in abstract concepts like democracy and fascism, and they don’t think we have much democracy anyway. They’re not a million percent wrong about that, and they probably actually have a clearer understanding of this problem than the panicked Democratic-voting bourgeoisie who have convinced themselves that This is not who we are. As one tireless right-wing correspondent who emails Salon several times a day says: “Yikes Lib/Dems! Oh Lib/Democrats!”
I think a large percentage of Trump’s supporters didn’t have a coherent program in mind and just wanted to have sex, in the immortal phrase previously used by anarchists. But whatever motives you want to ascribe to the tens of millions of Americans who voted for the man – and the millions and millions around the world who look at him and say, Oh yes king – They led us to this national turning point. What a stupid phrase! But a minute! We are now facing a recalculation, much stupider and more dangerous than the first, with no guarantee that we will pass the test this time. We wanted it to be darker, and we got it: the situation is both tragic and funny, and the only way through is through both doors. Leonard Cohen died eight years ago, and he couldn’t have seen it coming, but of course he did.
Read more
About the second coming of DJT
