How Progressives Can Learn From Trump's Radical Honesty

Yes I know I am losing the plot but doesn't anyone have any better ideas?

For all the shock and horror, for all the moral repugnance, there are lesson for liberals and leftists from Donald Trump's convincing election victory; lessons that have the potential to revolutionise how progressive coalitions are built.

Consider this: Trump is a nakedly racist, sexist and bigoted individual who has managed to transform the Republican Party in his image. His policy offer and his key acolytes are racist, sexist and bigoted. Trump is a divisive man and he has narrowed the Republican platform so that it is little more than corruption, white male backlash and destruction.

Now consider this: Trump managed to assemble a diverse coalition that went way beyond white males. The Republican Hispanic male vote share rose and, even though black women and Jews remained overwhelmingly Democrat, the racism mostly did not reduce minority support by more than a few percentage points. And on top of that, Trump also established a platform attractive to Christian nationalists, atheist tech libertarians and the run-of-the-mill rich alike.

And now consider this: The Democrats, who across their liberal or leftist spectrum at the very least pay lip service to upholding the US as a diverse nation where all can flourish, could not build enough of a coalition to defeat the most divisive political leader in recent US history. Indeed, relations between Harris and the left were strained to breaking point by her stance on the Gaza war. As in the UK Labour Party, controversies over Israel-Palestine and antisemitism magnified existing internecine warfare between liberals and leftists . And for minorities who were long an unquestioned part of the Democrat camp, this election frequently saw the unimaginable happen; most strikingly, Arab-Americans in Michigan preferring a man who sought to ban Muslims from the US over Kamala Harris.

There are many reasons for Trump's coalition triumphing over Harris's and the long and fractious process of accounting for the disaster is well under way. I fear, though, that progressives - and here I mean those on the political spectrum from centrist liberal to the radical left - will be reluctant to draw any lessons that treat Trump as a model to follow. And it's true that there isn't much of a future for progressives in the kind of performative vileness that today's Republicans take such delight in performing. Regardless of the morality, I don't think that progressives are adept enough to compete in the arena of self-degradation. If you are drawn to populist leaders, why wouldn't you go for a right-wing one? They offer a transgressive frisson that leftists can rarely match.

Yet the Trumpian process of coalition building - and particular the achievement of squaring the circle between a narrow agenda and a broad set of followers - may offer insights too important to ignore.

It may seem utterly ridiculous but Trump's victory may tell us that progressives have completely misunderstood what truthfulness and honesty mean. Trump and his key lieutenants, proxies and boosters seem to have absolutely no fidelity to truth; they seem pathologically dishonest. But while this is of course correct, such a judgement relies on a narrow understanding of truthfulness. In other respects, Trump is a deeply honest person. His lust, his greed, his hate, his desire, his incompetence, his ignorance, his grift - all of this is absolutely plain to see. Even though such Trumpian facets are routinely denied, as I have argued elsewhere, such skin-deep denials have the effect of acknowledgment in their sheer ludicrousness.

Trump's honesty is the foundation of his success in coalition-building. You know exactly where you stand with someone so venal and corrupt. Whether you are a Christian nationalist leader or a TV host seeking to cash in on the grifting circuit, it's clear what you need and what he needs. While he may well cheat you in the end, Trump offers the chance of a greater payoff than a conventional politician can ever manage.

Trump offers multiple ways of joining the party, even for the little guy. Even if you are so deluded that you believe Trump to be a morally upright figure, those who inhabit that place of fantasy are going to be extremely difficult to disappoint. He will always satisfy you, regardless of what he actually does.

The same is true for those who joined the coalition out of spite and hate. Whether you are a disillusioned Arab-American from Dearborn, an obsessive incel or a simple troll, support for Trump is a taunt that only works because of the tacit recognition Trump is fundamentally indecent (why would you taunt someone by voting for a morally upright individual?).

The problem that progressives face is that they cannot really offer this kind of honest politics. Actually, I am not sure anyone who acknowledges the existence of truth in the world could ever be this honest. Political action in democracies requires dealing with the knotty realities of differences, conflicts of interest, dilemmas and mutually irreconcilable commitments. That's as true for centrist political action as it is for radical left political action. That inevitably means that any political 'offer' has either to be carefully constructed to elide inconvenient truths, or it has to depart from the world of reality and truth. While lying in politics is routine across the political spectrum, it usually has to be framed within a context that affirms truth. Even Stalinism was locked into a solid framework of scientific truth claims.

So the problem that even some of the most cynical political liars face is that they usually don't have the guts to construct an entire alternate reality where truth claims become irrelevant. That's Trump's spectacular achievement. By dispensing with truth as it is conventionally understood, he has created a new kind of radical honesty. In contrast, when conventional politicians and activists dissemble or outright lie - as they all must sometimes do - it is a risk and a point of vulnerability.

The terrible challenge that progressive coalition-building confronts today is that, given human diversity, truthful movements whose members share values and purpose, are likely to be very small and ineffective movements. Progressive politics is still caught in a political logic in which honest lying is assumed to be shameful and so heterogeneous coalitions will always be vulnerable to the truth of diversity. Social media and online culture have made it extremely difficult to ignore or actively lie about the presence of diverse others in progressive movements. In pro-Palestinian movements, for example, any attempt to strategically ignore the awkward co-presence of LGBT activists and Islamist homophobes at the same protest will always be undermined by opponents' online revelations.

As I say, I don't think progressives could ever produce a leader as adept at honest lying as Trump, leaving aside the morality of building a movement around such a figure. But something has to change and, at the very least, it's time to consider where a more robust and open cynicism might take us, and what a different kind of honesty might look like. I'm not suggesting that we necessarily need to learn how to lie better, but we might want to think about how to be so radically and cynically honest that issues of truth and lies are transcended.

Imagine this: Kamala Harris and Rashida Tlaib sharing a stage together. They join hands and confess their loathing for each other, the incompatibility of their values. They explain why they are nonetheless cooperating together against a greater evil. Then they solemnly intone some kind of prayer, vowing to destroy the other once the greater evil has been dispensed with.

Imagine this: Keir Starmer is asked if Brexit has harmed the British economy and whether he favours rejoining the EU. His response is that of course it has fucking harmed the British economy and of course he's like to rejoin. But, he acknowledges, the tabloids would fucking crucify him so he will only seek to rejoin when the country is really on its fucking knees.

Imagine this: President Kamala Harris spends her election campaign and her presidency insulting criminal 'illegals' and announcing initiative after initiative to deport them. Progressive activists spend their time condemning her but still vote for her and are rewarded with millions in funding to NGOs supporting migrants. Unprecedented deportation figures are announced and concentration camps are opened. But it's all a lie. No one leaves and there are no concentration camps. Everyone is happy.

And then I imagine myself, leading a movement of Jews of every possible variety; Kahanists, Haredim, liberal Zionists and anti-Zionists united to issue a defiant demand to antisemites: 'Give us the opportunity to destroy each other!' We insist that we won't accept antisemitism directed at the kinds of Jews we despise - because it's our job to hate each other, not anyone else’s.

And I imagine myself smiling.