Just caught up with this from Jedediah Purdy and haven’t even read it all yet, but it seems potentially useful as a critique of Andrew Sullivan’s discourse on how “the excesses of democracy” — as the nation’s founders did indeed put it — have brought us Trump.
In at The End of The World 
Thanks for the link, Mr. Jones. Love Andrew Sullivan and miss The Daily Dish, but his argument that Trump was a product of too much democracy never felt right. And, having to go all the way back to Plato to explain why millions of “the people” who fear for their economic futures are voting for a demagogue is almost making Trump’s arguments for him.
Both Purdy and Sullivan remind me that I’m in no way even an amateur political philosopher, not that anyone’s ever mistaken me for one. But, one of the things I’ve been struggling with is trying to place Trump into any kind of historical context. Not to justify him or normalize him, but just to understand, at least a little bit.
The more I think about it, Sullivan’s position becomes less tenable. In what way have we become more democratic? Have we extended the franchise to people who couldn’t previously vote? Quite, the opposite, Republicans are doing all they can to stop core Democratic voters from voting. And, yeah, social media and all, but between cable news and online media, there are plenty of elite opinion shapers exerting their influence.
Democracy tends to reveal us for who we are, and we may not like it. Again, trying to reconcile the fact that a system we fundamentally believe in, democracy, might produce an outcome that we deplore. Has this happened before? I mean, beyond the usual anger when your candidate doesn’t win. Has the United States ever produced something as ruinous as Trump?
This might take a summer’s worth of reading to figure out. Which will cut into the beach volleyball and Rum Jumbies in Sea Bright.
I’m thinking maybe Andrew Jackson? A time of great economic change and dislocation. A time when democracy really was expanded beyond the elites. A president who was a strong man, who railed against the last-gasp effete Federalist Quincy Adams, who stole the 1828 election via a rigged system.
A president who had a pretty bad record on minority rights (not suggesting that Trump in regards Mexican and Muslims is morally equivalent to Jackson’s Native American policies, but he did say he wanted to deport 11 million Mexicans so, assuming that he’s serious about anything he says (which he isn’t), you can imagine some kind of Greyhound, boxed-lunch version of The Trail of Tears).
A president whose ignorance of then-modern finance caused a five-year depression and prevented the U.S. from having any kind of central bank between 1836 and 1917. How different is that from Trump suggesting that Treasury Bond owners might have to take a “hair cut” on their investments?
Yep, 1836, here I come. I’m still making time for beach volley ball, though.
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I’m no Jackson fan — slavocrat and Indian remover, fatally tying American populism to racism and weird ideas about money — but still, he was a politico, had served in Congress, knew a lot of people, got his hands dirty, encouraged state banks (where he had cronies), played at least an interesting role. Trump is as you said somewhere else beyond politics. That might be uniquely bad. But also short-lived?
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Finally got around to reading the Purdy piece – very helpful to have someone place Trump somewhere outside of Sullivan’s Platonic reach, and within the realms of the more recognizable expression of decades of frustration with their lots in life, with the need for a set of enemies to make it into a coherent narrative. Blaming the great unwashed comes from liberal commentators’ blind spot, and here I let my leftist freak flag fly, that the same great unwashed haven’t had democratic representation for decades.
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