Donald Trump’s nationalist coalition takes shape
Trump has succeeded in unleashing the crude tribalism that historian Richard Hofstadter once called “the paranoid style.”
Whenever Americans have faced the reshuffling of status and influence—the Great Migration, the end of Jim Crow, and now the end of a white majority—we have succumbed to the anti-democratic politics of absolutism, of a “conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” in which, Hofstadter wrote, “the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.”
This fits Trump perfectly. “I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win,” he wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” As Evan Osnos points out below, Trump has bequeathed a concoction of celebrity, wealth, and alienation more potent than any we’ve seen before in American politics.
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| Illustration by Christoph Niemann |
By Evan Osnos
