Even if Trump is gone, will Trumpism remain? This reflection is not about him. It is about us and where we go from here…..

11 min readNov 15, 2020

Most of us understand where Trump is coming from and how he got the way he is. We even understand how he became President of the nation by a non-majority vote through electoral structures established centuries ago by compromise. We understand his TV performance appeal. What we have been confounded by, and seek to understand, is that 30 to 40% of our citizens are his fans not merely as an entertainer, but as a leader of our nation….

After Trump was elected and we saw who he really was and where he was going and that he had a firm base of 30–40% of voting citizens, many of us first turned to studying how our economic system favored the few and was working in fact, if not intent, to leave many people out the developing bounty. Many were the books we consulted through book clubs, courses, and lectures that demonstrated the growing inequalities of the American and global economy without worker and democratic participation in ownership and management.

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And we studied history by reading the plethora of new books and in particular the history of racism in America. With my religious and civic associations, I studied racism and saw how it was built into the economic, cultural, and political systems of our nation — first in the Democratic Party of Jackson with defenders of white supremacy often in league with northern White workers and then in the Party of Lincoln and their “southern strategy” starting first with trading the office of President for ending Reconstruction and allowing Jim Crow.

We met with new immigrants in our neighborhoods and worked with them to understand why they left their native homes and what they were hoping to achieve in seeking to become American citizens and how our differing cultural values resonated. Many of my friends are also community organizers trying to build relationships and non-partisan associations in workplaces like offices, health facilities, and businesses and in living places like rural towns, urban neighborhoods, and multifamily housing apartments. I drew upon their knowledge and wisdom after a lifetime of sometimes successful, and sometimes ineffectual, community building.

All that study helped me understand the 30 to 40% and how and why they have always been here — way before Trump and could be here way after him by taking over a political party and getting ready for a more affable and competent American Firster to make America great — the One we have been waiting for. The One who has taken the red pill, who will command legions of armed angels, who will separate the good guys from the bad guys, and who will lead us through the Apocalypse like a Marvel hero. Though we understand the polarization of today and the relatively stable 30 to 40% supporting populist nationalism and White European ancestry dominance, our strategy for the unity, common ground, and the trust required for democratic governance is far from clear.

Until I worked in Detroit and Chicago blue collar working people neighborhoods segregated Black and White with concentrations of ethnically identified immigrants, I thought that racism and xenophobia were simply learned personal biases that could be overcome by meeting, working, playing, and consorting with one another. The people I met in these neighborhoods were biased, but most had interracial friends at work, at ballgames, and at concerts. They did not hate the “other” as individual persons. They also found issues they could work on together through coalitions and broad-based community organizations.

Community is woven by shared economic interests, cultural values, and political coalitions. Understanding and dealing with the racism, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, and conspiracy mentality that unravel our nation means identifying and confronting the social structures in our economy, culture, and politics that maintain these divisive biases and practices. Together we need to acknowledge the ruts we are all in, the hidden, underlying systems in which we all behave. That takes what C Wright Mills called “the sociological imagination.”

Yes, there are bad apples in the police, lazy workers in government, individuals who cheat, gangbangers in neighborhoods, crooked businesspeople, and they should be corrected. But their behavior is often the result of the systems in which they live, behave, learn, and act: the lending and real-estate system, the education and employment system, the language and symbolic system, the criminal justice system, the undemocratic corporate system, the often outmoded political system.

But more! What I have learned during my study and experiences during the political, health, and economic plagues of the last few years, is that we need to go much deeper. The systems that we need to change through non-violent democratic action are rooted in a social psyche that has been built over four centuries. In other words, there is a spiritual dimension that transcends our economic interests, cultural values, and political powers and calls for what Willie James Jennings calls “the theological imagination.”

I here identify three of these elements in the American psyche that we need to acknowledge, understand, and confront should we really want to change the systems that divide us, that undermine our trust in one another, and that destroy our democracy. Those are the American Caste structure, the American Ideal of Manhood, and American Christian Idolatry.

Each of these blemishes of the American spirit, psyche, or character could have a separate book or treatise written on them — and indeed each has many. I cite Isabel Wilkerson recognizing the roots of racism and xenophobia in the American structure of Caste (Caste: the Origin of our Discontents). I cite James Baldwin for recognizing the roots of misogyny and homophobia in the American Ideal of Manhood (Freaks and The American Ideal of Manhood. I cite John Dewey for identifying the dogmatic error in human thinking that leads to unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, self-righteous absolutism, autocratic nationalism (How We Think, A Common Faith).

And so, so many more. To “redeem the soul of America,” as many new mainly secular theologians are saying, we need to acknowledge how these divisive and destructive elements are attacking our body-politic and prop up our communal immune system to ward off these infections. But not by violence. Violence is the sign and result of these systemic errors or original sins and will further destroy the body-politic. Only by getting to our national soul can we access the institutions, the behavioral habits of a social order, that suffer these cancerous infections.

1. Illusion of the Absolute. Language and Neuroscience experts have indicated that humans use symbols to think and know the world, universe, reality. Symbols are concepts (images, figures of speech, models, propositions) that are verified through human interpersonal experience as fitting the reality as experienced in the world. We express them once verified as beliefs. However, these human products are transient and can be refined, modified, or recontextualized through further inquiry, all of which constitutes the process and progress of thinking. Yet often we humans confuse our means of thinking and communication, e.g. the symbol, as the reality itself. In doing so we confuse the expression with the reality expressed and therefore considered fixed or absolute. This leads to the dogmatic error which is an obstacle to truth. The dogmatic error is the source of narcissistic righteousness, unevidenced claims and conspiracy theories, clinging to beliefs as absolute, guilty verdicts without fair trials, superstitions, closed minds, rejection of scientific method. It is a root cause of our division into warring tribes, uncompromising political parties, vicious slanders, lack of trust in facts tested by observation, and the unwillingness to search for truth together.

In religious terms, it is called idolatry where we worship our human products (idols) rather than the reality to which we aspire. Iconoclasm, e.g. when we destroy other persons sacred expressions, is another face of idolatry since it claims that our ways of expressions are the ultimate ways of expression. Think of when the Taliban in the name of Islam, whose central principle is against idolatry, tore down priceless Buddhist artifacts in Afghanistan.

Fundamentalist religions, including many American Christian religions, which claim supremacy or as possessing the last or only word often assert their doctrines and make them a basis or even part of public law in opposition to other religions and non-religionists and to well-established science and in contradiction to the freedom-of-and-from religion right that is a hallmark of American democracy. As Dewey argues, there is a common faith which is an openness to the future, a willingness to self-correct, a care for the world and future generations which drives further inquiry. Faith is not to be confused with the beliefs by which we express it which can always be improved upon. The original settlers and colonialists were Christians often fleeing religious persecution with their firm beliefs. Many were willing to maintain their beliefs in the private sector for the good of a public sector without an established religion. However, idolatrous Christian religion maintaining the ultimacy of their beliefs to forgo new inquiry remains a force challenging to the American psyche. They claim that the US is a Christian nation and would have Sacred Scriptural sayings, Church dogmas, clerical judgments as basis of law even in the understanding of the constitution which is another sacred scripture revealed by God and so interpreted only by the elect. They would make the symbols of our nation holy and never to be defiled.

2. The Masculine Mystique. Patriarchy has been embedded in our language, religion, economy, and politics since ancient times. Thanks to women pushing back through the abolition and suffrage movement, to the women’s and now “me too” revolts, and to working women speaking and acting for equal rights, the light has been shone on the systems in economy, politics, and culture which not only has oppressed women but men as well. At root is the American Ideal of Manliness.

There are studies of the American masculine architypes that developed from gentleman slave masters (gentile patriarch) to frontier providers and defenders of women and children in the frontier killing Indians and bandits (heroic artisan) to Individual achievers (self-made captain of industry). In all three architypes the man is clearly dominant over women and children. He needs to prove his manliness in social situations. He is in competition with other men and admires and sides with the Alpha male as a way to achieve his masculinity. Machismo has been studied as the Latino ideal of masculinity which, like other cultural ideals of manhood, contribute to the American ideal. And this ideal reflects an ideal of the feminine, e.g. marianismo, the second, dependent sex.

Real men don’t wear masks — unless they are the Lone Ranger carrying his six-shooter to ward off hostile Indians and shoot silver bullets at bad guys. Cowboys not only wear guns; they win fist fights and join militias. Think of John Wayne and the Magnificent Seven. Real men know how to handle women as objects of desire; and know how to give them sexual pleasure. They are the police officers who know how to skirt the rules and force confessions. Think of the characters Clint Eastwood plays. They are the warriors who speak tough while carrying the big stick. They know how to use violence and the tools of violence. Think of generals Patton and McArthur. They are the toughest footballers, the enforcers who command the most fear in the game of physical might. They are the great capitalists like John D. Rockefeller and Daniel Plainview, the rugged individualists, who will use any means to build their fortunes. They learned at their father’s knees, like mafia sons and bosses how to manipulate others, how to make the deals by which they gain in a win-lose game, how to dominate the social and political order, how to enable sycophants, longing to be on the winning team, to do their bidding.

3. American Caste.I thought I knew all about American racism and what to do about it until I read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste. I knew racism not just through study, but long years of confronting it entrenched in policies and laws while living and working with those who suffered it most directly. What Wilkerson did was drive me to a new deeper level with the concept of caste and comparing the American caste structure to the India of Gandhi and now Modi and to the Nazi attempt to build a caste theology by studying America’s treatment of Native and African Americans. What is the definition of caste? Caste is a divinely sanctioned, naturally inherited, enforced order in society that assigns all people a place in a hierarchy that divides labor, and maintains purity and order by separating superior and dominant humans by birth from lesser human beings.

At first, I was disappointed with Wilkerson’s prescription to cure this blight on the psyche of America. She advocates “radical empathy” and that seemed to me to go back to tired and tried race relations. “I have friends who are Black” or “guess who is coming to dinner” or “let’s have diversity training.” Which is all fine and good. And important. Familiarity does change attitudes. But it doesn’t get to the hidden systems that operate in the American society. I now choose to read Wilkerson as pushing to the system of systems that is operating as and defines the national character. I think that is why she calls for radical empathy.

I believe we need to go much further by showing the relationship between critical thinking and action. Radical empathy with refugees, the poor, children, the left out, women, slaves, and other oppressed persons will only occur when we act with (not on and over) them. This is why I believe that Wilkerson’s insight into Caste needs to be connected to Ibram X Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist and others’ prescription of action against racism. Radical empathy is a fruit of radical action.

Here then is my thesis:

Aided by many mentors, I am suggesting that there is a spiritual dimension to our many discontents. Under, behind, and above our values, attitudes, behaviors, and institutions are false gods and religions of our making: Structure of Caste, Ideal of Manhood, Illusion of Absolute that ultimately need to be confronted by virtues of compassion for others, strength through understanding, and humility in knowing — and thousands of ways to articulate faith, hope, and love.

Even if Trump is gone, will Trumpism remain? This reflection is not about him. It is about us and where we go from here…..

Written by jack wilson