Philosopher Simon Critchley invoked the underlying civic angst post-Brexit as a conceptual affliction he termed Brexistentialism. The thought of Trump winning support from an extensive stratum of the electorate revealed an analogous subterranean discomfort. A painful rift materialises within the demos: apparently, we do not share the same value system as millions of others constructed as fellow citizens under a symbolic body politic. Brexistentialism had all the ingredients to be transformed into fully-fledged elexistential dread across the pond.
When the dust settled, reality had been inverted one final time: truth-adverse, scandal-ridden, jingoistic trumpery had coolly dismantled the well-oiled, scandal-ridden, Clintonite machinery. Hillary possessed the finances, the ground game, the media, Hollywood endorsements, and Wall Street. Trump’s poujadist campaign, rife as it was with a cornucopia of racist dog whistles, braggadocious masculinity, flagrant misogyny and copious sexcapades, effectively mainstreamed bigotry and ran amok all the way to the oval office.
Trump mobilised a dark underbelly of America that has always lurked informally in the hinterlands of the Republic. The maintenance of a liberal consensus was a brief idyll, if not an ideological construction. Rick Perlstein duly castigates liberal pietism in recalling “that millions of Americans have harboured dark reactionary rage during every period of our history – and yet pundits are always surprised every time it bursts into the political foreground.”
