Commentary: Trump's legacy of retribution

Say what you will about President-elect Donald Trump. The man can hold a grudge.

So, too, apparently, do the neo-Nazis who marched on the Ohio state capital this month. Freshly emboldened by Trump’s re-election and competition with a rival white supremacist group in Ohio, they carried Nazi paraphernalia, shouted racist chants, and provoked a lot of criticism from local authorities.

And so it begins.

The thing is, many Americans nurse the racial grievances that Trump has expressed, though not as preternaturally and rabidly, perhaps, as the man who has given voice to their perceived loss of agency and entitlement.

Half of the electorate looked past Trump’s felony convictions, misogyny, un-closeted racism, open disdain for all manner of newcomers and cultural outsiders, and solidarity with people who already had more money than anyone could spend in a lifetime and saw an immediate return from their investment in his candidacy or feared he would come after them if they didn’t support him.

Appeals to better angels and more democratically inspired values missed their intended marks.

Calls for payback and cultural reckoning didn’t.

It remains to be seen how many people and institutions on the enemies list Trump has spent years assembling will be singled out for public censure, repudiation, and punishment along with the policies and programs they helped shape or were responsible for carrying out. Early indications are that the number is going to be large.

No matter how big the number is, the reckoning Trump will push during the first two years of his second administration is bound to be messy, mean, and costly. People’s lives will be damaged. Careers will be lost.

Americans who share Trump’s feelings will applaud his single-minded campaign to force his will on every part of the federal government and publicly demonstrate their resolve.

A great many of us may end up blanching at the bitter fruit Trump harvests with his campaign of retribution. But absolutely no one at that point will be able to feign surprise or blush at anything he tries to undo and everyone who is taken down along the way.

Trump and his most aggressive supporters don’t give two hoots about protecting our reputation as a people united by a constitution based on laws, only in protecting their rights and privileges. In recent years, they’ve done nothing but mock and ignore the time-honored but otherwise unenforceable norms and customs that Sir John Moulton declared more than a century ago keep us doing the right thing when no one is looking over our shoulder.

Expanding that domain for an ever larger and more diverse array of citizens is the central project and most important accomplishment of democracies. Everything Trump and his White Nationalist allies say and do makes clear that their grandest desire and principal goal is to shrink that domain along with the number and variety of people who have the privilege of engaging with it.

That’s the bad news.

Here’s the good news.

Barring some unforeseen catastrophe that provides an excuse for him to distract us further and grab even more power – a war, plague, natural disaster, or meltdown in the global economic system come immediately to mind – he will exact less vengeance than he has in mind to deliver. His successful excesses will come back to haunt him.

These are not the faint hopes of a liberal elitist or academic scaredy cat. They are the words of someone who’s read and written about all the conservative ways people have learned to express their disconsent to know this much.

(Wait for it.)

The campaign to undo all the damage Trump and his supporters intend to do will inspire a more conservative backlash from the American public than they are capable of imagining.

No, you didn’t misread the last sentence.

Trump’s campaign of retribution will be thwarted and come undone by people and institutions whose caretakers will renew our commitment to each other not by adding more new rights and privileges but by restoring the duties and obligations of citizenship that all kinds of people had come to practice and think was part of their birthright. Whether they were born here or not.

Trump’s illiberalism won’t work long enough or on enough of us to strip the whole of us of the democratically inspired habits, customs, and norms that took centuries of trial and error to practice and enshrine in our everyday lives. These values, trials, errors, and accomplishments are “baked” into our culture. They can’t be blowtorched out no matter how hard Trump tries, and they will be successfully called upon in fierce legal and extra-legal challenges to every undemocratic move he makes over the next four years.

The great irony in all the legal challenges that are already in the works and all the extra-legal challenges that will come to the streets of American towns and cities, as I just suggested, is that they will be vastly more conservative in character than the man provoking them pretends to be.

The only conservative part of Trump’s game is the serious attempt to limit the right to play to those of us who look more like him. Newcomers and outsiders aren’t supposed to be able to learn how to play or even be allowed to try. The more liberal parts of the game – finding out how to bend, break, and ignore rules without being held accountable for bending, breaking, and ignoring them – are supposed to remain a mystery to such people. They are no mystery to Trump and his neo-Nazis and White Nationalist allies.

Compelling evidence of black Americans’ principled rejection of such subtleties was plain on Jan. 6, 2021, when they stayed home and tens of thousands of white people attacked the Capitol and tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of the national government. The several thousand white people who were tried and punished for breaking into the Capitol and assaulting police officers trying to protect it are now looking forward to being pardoned by the man who incited them to riot.

Like it or not, we are about to be treated to a master class in discovering the limits of accountability by Americans who will work to restore the duties and obligations of citizenship. Whether already lost – such as women’s reproductive healthcare – or in imminent danger of being further eroded – like voting privileges and birthright citizenship – the use of unrest on behalf of conservative principles and practices is one of those cultural traditions that is too firmly entrenched to deny.

Large numbers of regular Americans – men, women, and children of every color people come in, some pushing wheelchairs and strollers – will confront Capitol rioters, White Nationalists, KKK members, and neo-Nazis who’ll leave their guns at home but won’t be able to resist intimidating and pushing around unarmed people.

We will know how far down the road to illiberalism Americans have slid by the answers to two questions.

Which side will be protected by the National Guardsmen and U.S. servicemen and women Trump sends out to maintain public order?

What party will be in control of the House of Representatives and Senate after the 2024 midterm elections?

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Monti is a professor of sociology at Saint Louis University.

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