8 The New York Review
wires of the world—has often been a
refuge of the powerless. That fits my
friend’s argument, though you’d have
to add that many of the people who be-
lieve in QAnon are at the moment far
from powerless, whatever they might
individually think.
My other guide has been Richard
Hofstadter’s Anti- Intellectualism in
American Life (1963), which among
other things distinguishes between in-
tellectual life and technical expertise
(auto mechanics or even, forgive me, a
knowledge of the tax code). Hofstadter
writes that intellect has customarily
been “resent[ed]... as a challenge to
egalitarianism,” and that very early in
our history feeling right became more
important than being right. Inner con-
viction, gut instinct, the certainty of
faith: call it what you will. Those who
were good—who perceived themselves
as saved, so to speak—didn’t need to
know anything else.
I’d push on that. Nobody’s yet sug-
gested that we leave brake jobs or
root canals to amateurs. But for many
Americans intellectual questions seem
different, and above all those questions
of judgment that carry political conse-
quences. Hofstadter argued that in the
evangelical America of the nineteenth
century, every individual felt free to
take up his own Bible and “reject the
voice of scholarship.” That sentiment
is with us still. I know how to evaluate
evidence in my own field, and I also
know there aren’t many areas in which
I can reliably do so. But suppose you
really believe in the authority of in-
dividual interpretation? Believe you
can have some direct and unmediated
access to truth, no special training re-
quired? If that’s so, then why wouldn’t
you do your own research on the Inter-
net, as one hears people claim to do,
read around about vaccines or climate
change or hidden rings of pizza- loving
pedophiles, and decide that the “ex-
perts” are wrong? If you can do that
with the Bible, of all things, then why
not with any earthly question?
One consequence of that hubris is
the belief that success in one field read-
ily translates into success in another.
People who have made a lot of money
usually think they’re right about ev-
erything else too. Which brings me
to Trump. Considering him in light
of Hofstadter’s analysis suggests just
how odd the kind of business success
he claims now looks. Many of the big
fortunes of our day have been built on
technical skill and innovation, whether
in Silicon Valley or on Wall Street. But
Trump presents himself as a throw-
back to the days when you didn’t have
to know anything, when bluster and a
Barnum- like confidence (not to men-
tion an inheritance) were enough. In
that, as in so many things, he appeals
to those who want and believe in an
earlier and less demanding America. If
there ever was one. Q
Michael Greenberg
People who have lived under the rule of
a charismatic autocrat—caudillo may
be the most precise word—have no
trouble recognizing the nature of Don-
ald Trump’s grip on America’s psyche.
A talented caudillo drives a stake into
his country’s consciousness. He be-
comes inescapable. You walk around
with him in your head, fantasize about
him, rage at him, psychoanalyze him.
He invades your emotional life, colo-
nizing your very way of thinking, and
creating the illusion that he is omni-
present, like an unvanquishable parent.
Chileans used to talk this way about
Augusto Pinochet, who held absolute
power over Chile from 1974 to 1990.
Trump has at his disposal fewer tools
of state terror than Pinochet did, which
makes his success as a caudillo all the
more impressive—an achievement,
in Trump’s case, of personality, mon-
strousness, and bluster. (This is not to
minimize the tools of state terror he
has managed to deploy, such as federal
officers for the suppression of protests,
the Department of Justice as a weapon
against his political rivals, and ICE as a
virtual paramilitary force rounding up
and detaining immigrants.)
A demoralizing aura of invincibility
surrounds the caudillo—until a glimmer
of vulnerability is shown and the aura
evaporates. Trump has been able over
the past three and a half years to drown
out a relatively diffuse opposition and
mesmerize or bully the country into be-
lieving in his potency. Even our outrage
has become a form of submission. He
traps us into repeating his lies, though
we do s o i n ord er t o d ebu n k t hem. When
his opponents ridicule him, his presence
manages to expand, because the ridi-
cule reaffirms his grip on us. And so the
illusion of invincibility grows stronger.
The illusion partly arises from our
fear that the caudillo’s viciousness can-
not be matched: he and his allies will
do anything to retain power, and his
opponents, schooled in the niceties of
institutional democracy, don’t have it in
them to fight dirty enough to stop him.
The caudillo depends on our exagger-
ation of his power. When he says he
will overturn the results of the election
if he loses, we believe him. Historical
knowledge may inoculate some against
demagoguery, but it also provides a
rearview mirror of doom. We know
that democracies collapse and that
built into the US electoral system may
be a pathway to its destruction.
Joe Biden’s job is to break the cau-
dillo’s spell and, as unlikely as it once
seemed, this middle- of- the- road career
politician, not notable for his charisma,
appears to be the perfect candidate
to do so. When he became the Dem-
ocratic nominee, he seemed to many
the weakest possible choice. His lack of
skill at galvanizing constituencies sank
his previous presidential campaigns
and made him appear, at first, a feeble
opponent to Trump. You can see him
struggle with his lifelong stutter when
he speaks. He has a self- sabotaging
habit of interrupting himself mid-
sentence, making his thoughts seem
garbled and unformed. He is elderly,
his eyes water, his gray hair creeps
thinly down the back of his neck. He
offers himself as the kind of caretaker
president in which stable democracies
specialize: an unspectacular manager
with decent intentions whom most cit-
izens have the luxury of not thinking
about for weeks at a time.
Yet there is an undeniable solidity
about him, a kind of bedrock ethi-
cal sincerity. He has successfully cast
himself as an Everyman whose per-
sonal misfortunes have imbued him
with an uncommon (and occasionally
overwrought) capacity for compassion.
Listening to voters’ tragic stories, he
lowers his head in priestly sympathy. A
minute later he will tear at Trump withcold precision, calling him “a climate
arsonist,” “disgusting,” “unfit,” care-
ful all the while not to shed too much
heat, the temperature Trump thrives
on. Forced to engage a rival who has
managed to focus—and temporar-
ily unify—the vast opposition to him,
Trump seems diminished and exposed.
Even before Trump’s display of
deranged indifference toward the
Covid- 19 pandemic last spring, I had
been recklessly predicting a decisive
Democratic victory in November. I
believed that Americans would recoil
from the caudillo’s brute purveyance of
hatred and that the Republican Party
would feel the fallout for decades.
Recent events have strengthened this
belief. Trump’s dismissal of Covid- 19
has resulted in his contracting the
virus himself. If polls are to be trusted,significant numbers of suburbanites
are abandoning the caudillo, despite
his warning that crazed mobs will be
gunning for their homes if he isn’t re-
elected. To convince voters that the
country’s most gentrified, low- crime
cities—New York, Portland, Seattle,
Minneapolis, San Francisco—will be-
come permanent vectors of anarchy
and insurrection requires magical abil-
ities that the caudillo does not possess.
The nightmare scenarios have been
spun: if he is ahead on election night,
the caudillo will declare victory be-
fore mail- in ballots have been counted
and then, with the support of the Su-
preme Court, disqualify those ballots;
Republican- controlled battleground
states will appoint slates of “faithless”
electors to defy the popular vote; the
caudillo’s attempt to steal the election
will provoke mass protests, in response
to which he will invoke the Insurrec-
tion Act and impose martial law. None
of these scenarios is to be taken lightly.
But Trump’s thin institutional sup-
port, combined with the Democrats’
fortified army of watchdogs and the
Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling
in July against faithless electors, min-
imize the caudillo’s ability to pull off
such a golpe. Allegations of voter fraud
will have to be proven in the courts.
The matter now rests uneasily with
the electorate. Are 80 million Ameri-
cans sufficiently racist, sufficiently in
favor of the curtailment of equal rights,
sufficiently obsessed with culture wars
to ignore their health, the environ-
ment, their employment, and the qual-
ity of their schools? It is far more likely
that the caudillo will depart the White
House on January 20 as an isolated and
despised figure. QLinda Greenhouse
Growing up in the shadow of the
Kennedy administration, I watched in
awe as people half a generation older
headed to the exotic venues of the PeaceCorps or the even more alluring (to me)
Washington, D.C. We understood gov-
ernment then to be an agent of the com-
mon good, the ultimate problem-solver.
Naive? Sure, but still, years later, on a
visit to the Lyndon B. Johnson Presiden-
tial Library in Austin, I was riveted by
a simple list, printed on the walls of an
alcove off the main exhibit hallway, of
laws that LBJ signed: those dealing with
civil rights, voting rights, fair housing,
education, mass transit, the environ-
ment; those establishing Medicare, the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
the National Endowments for the Arts
and Humanities. Defining mid-century
America, this body of laws reflected the
country’s highest aspirations for itself.
The challenge now is to recapture
that belief in government as a force for
good, as worthy of our attention and
our talents, as capable of motivating
and inspiring. It’s been forty years since
Ronald Reagan first uttered his reliable
laugh line: “The most terrifying words
in the English language are: ‘I’m from
the government and I’m here to help.’”
An entire generation has come of age
since Bill Clinton declared, in his 1996
State of the Union address, that “the
era of big government is over.”
Government not as the solution, but
as the problem, as an obstacle to be
dispensed with if at all possible—this
is the image that has seeped into our
national DNA. It shadowed the Obama
administration and has been exploited
with tragic results by Donald Trump.
It will defeat renewed efforts at pro-
gressive change unless President Biden
(words to wish for) can tap into a dif-
ferent vision and remind people—or
instruct them, if they have no personal
memory—of a time when we had a
secretary of education who believed in
public education, a housing secretary
who believed in public housing, envi-
ronmental officials who didn’t owe al-
legiance to the oil and gas industries,
a bureaucrat charged with the welfare
of unaccompanied- minor immigrants
who didn’t see his highest mission as
preventing girls from terminating their
crisis pregnancies. No wonder young
people are cynical about government;
how could they not be? For a start, we
need to reclaim the notion that the job
of those on the public payroll is to carry
out their agency’s mission, not subvert it.
This is a task bigger than the next
president’s alone. We need a Supreme
Court that envisions the Constitution as
Ruth Bader Ginsburg envisioned it, as
an engine of social progress instead of
as a roadblock to structural reform. We
have a Court today that divides rather
than unites in common purpose; that
has reinterpreted the First Amendment
as a potent tool of de regulation; that
devises off-ramps from civil society
for those with religious objections to
following the nondiscrimination prin-
ciples intended to bind us all. We are
overdue for a public conversation about
what the Constitution is for and whose
interests it serves. The left has ceded
constitutional discourse to the right for
so long that conservatives meet little re-
sistance when they claim to be keepers
of the “original meaning.”
As the air rings with the call for ra-
cial justice, the current moment waits
to be seized. Recognition has grown
even in red states, according to some
recent polls, that it was not nature but
government failure that magnified the
harms of the coronavirus pandemic. A
team of Yale researchers in the rural