Real social change

What can we expect from a second Trump presidency?

On November 6th I was asked by Das Goetheanum, a Swiss publication connected to Rudolf Steiner’s work, to write a short piece (5000 characters) on the US election. I wasn’t planning to write on this topic, and didn’t want to — it’s just too contentious, too heated. But once asked, I felt I should try to share my view. The article below is the result. Because it’s so short, I want to say one thing at the start.

I know some will read this and say I support Harris, while others will read it and say I support Trump. Still others will say that I think they’re basically the same. Those folks will accuse me of “false equivalence,” something I’m used to by now.

But I don’t think they’re the same. I don’t think they’re “equal.” They present very different, and very specific, dangers and opportunities for society. I think we need to pay close attention to those dangers and opportunities, and I think the biggest obstacle to paying attention — the biggest distraction — is all the hype, all the hatred and hero worship.

Regardless of who is president, politics is heading in the wrong direction — quickly downwards, towards collapse. To change course, we’ll need to take seriously that our system is broken, diseased. That’s easy enough to say, but what’s far more difficult is understanding what would heal it. We want quick, easy, solutions, but reality isn’t quick and easy. It’s deep. It’s solid and slow to move. It’s real. And it will take real ideas, real discernment, to turn things around. This article tries to point out what such ideas look like.

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Trump is loud. But it’s not just Trump. It’s our feelings about Trump. They’re all shouts of anxiety, hatred, hope, exultation. It makes discussing politics like trying to hold a study group at a heavy metal concert. “Excuse me! Can you turn down the volume just a hair?” No, that won’t work. We have to turn it down in ourselves.

If we do, we might find Trump’s story isn’t all that new. It’s the same one we tell every political season: the system is broken, we need change, we need someone to fix it (“Trump will fix it”).

This season, it’s Trump who is the “candidate of change.” This is the mantle that Obama wore before him (“Change we can believe in”), and really that every president has worn.

It’s also the mantle Kamala Harris largely refused. When asked on The View, “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the last four years?” she famously replied, “There’s not a thing that comes to mind.”

While Trump’s story isn’t new, the sheer loudness of it is. The fever pitch. How we blast it from all sides — across newspapers, billboards, lawn signs. This is life or death! It’s now or never! We’ll either keep our democracy or lose it! We’ll either elect a tyrant or a savior!

How can one live amidst such simmering hysteria? How can one go on with life the day after?

We were told that Harris called and congratulated Trump the day after the election and that “both leaders agreed on the importance of unifying the country.” But what does that even mean? For so long we were told Trump is a fascist who will destroy America. Is Harris now saying we should unite under a fascist leader?

Moving forward, there is a real danger that our hysteria becomes exhaustion — when the alarms never stop ringing, you might as well go back to sleep. Another danger is that the hysteria becomes violence — the alarms never stop ringing, people hit the streets, protesters clash with counter protesters, the National Guard is called in. Either might lead us down the road to fascism. If they do, the hysteria will have driven us there.

These are real possibilities under a second Trump presidency. But what’s not possible is real change. Why? Because Trump lacks real ideas. He lacks an understanding of what the social and spiritual scientist Rudolf Steiner called “archetypal” ideas — the basic realities, or “primary matters,” that are the cause of our unrest. As Steiner put it:

Something else is connected with the social understanding that we need: our capacity to delve back into fundamental, primary matters and not hang our social insight upon secondary or tertiary things, which are only an after-effect.¹

As the old saying goes, Trump is just “moving chairs on the deck of the Titanic.” Tariffs and tax breaks won’t make things better. Deporting immigrants won’t heal our sick society.

For a moment during his 2016 campaign, Trump did actually stumble upon a real idea. He found that he got a strong response when he talked about the rot of Washington — how politicians are captured by big business, how they’re bought and sold by billionaires. And so he railed against it. The call rang out at his rallies: “DRAIN THE SWAMP!”

This is indeed a primary cause of our unrest — we need a clear separation between business and government. It’s also something that could have actually unified the country, it’s something almost all Americans care about. But did Trump do anything about it as president? Of course not. And he won’t in his second term either. Washington will remain a swamp.

Another example: The culture wars are the white-hot center of all this hysteria, and the culture wars are fundamentally clashes over belief. At this point the right and left despise each other’s beliefs. But how can we de-escalate these wars, how can we sooth this rage? Do we all just have to believe the same thing?

That will never happen, but we could end the wars tomorrow if we really understood America’s first and best idea, the one embodied in our first amendment — the idea of freedom of belief.

We could end the wars tomorrow if we didn’t try to force our beliefs down our enemy’s throats. If we didn’t tell them what to do with their bodies, what they can say online, what their children will be taught at school. Because all these things are experienced as a visceral attack on the very core of who we are.

Trump is not a peacemaker in this war, he’s one of its most belligerent generals. And Harris is no different.

Trump and Harris, and those who come after, will never understand such ideas if we don’t understand them ourselves. If we can’t clearly recognize the healthy limits of government, they won’t either. It will never dawn on them that the government shouldn’t have a hand in education or medicine or academic research. They’ll never see why we need new forms of economic cooperation if we want to meet everyone’s needs while still living within the earth’s bounds.

But there’s hopefully still time for us to understand such archetypal ideas. And there are giants like Rudolf Steiner who have gone before and described them to us. It’s time we listened.

1. Rudolf Steiner, Dornach, 2/16/1919 (from Conscious Society, p. 21).