In the months since Nov. 5, there have been many long-winded, soul-searching explanations for the staying power of Donald Trump. It’s a tired genre and many of these pieces were not very good. But one — by John Ganz, author of “When the Clock Broke” and the Substack newsletter Unpopular Front — stuck out to me, both at the time and in the months since.
Ganz wrote in The Nation that Trump’s core appeal is “gangster Gemeinschaft.” Gemeinschaft is a German word that roughly translates to “community” — as opposed to Gesellschaft, or civil society. While Democrats scold and preach from above, the GOP offers the perverse “warmth” of belonging to something like a criminal organization. This mobbed-up version of the Republican Party, bred in the petri dish of 1980’s New York real estate, isn’t exactly welcoming. But it has a story to tell about itself. You can be one of us. You might not be a “made man,” as Ganz writes; it won’t always be pretty; and the guys on top will keep all the money. But Trump isn’t hiding anything. He invites you into the “clubhouse where the deals go down,” as Ganz puts it, or “the room where it happens” if you prefer “Hamilton.” It works because the alternative is, to many, even less appealing.
If Trump’s party is the force of Gemeinschaft in the United States, the Democrats are the instrument of American Gesellschaft. Civil society — nonprofits, writers, academia — lines up almost entirely behind the party of technocratic rationality. Democrats trust the science. They write better policy papers. They govern better. Yet only 35 percent of voters believe the Democratic Party is “in touch,” according to recent polling by the Progressive Policy Institute. That number represents an absolute failure to connect with Americans of all stripes. Kamala & Co. would be well served by appealing to a Gemeinschaft of their own.
It seems like the central problem of American politics is to create belonging apart from Trumpworld’s reactionary clown show and to harness the power of liberal policy-making without the accompanying atomization and sterility. How do you get the virtues of both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft? How do you encourage people to feel a sense of local belonging while living in a vast and plural society? David Brooks wrote recently about the importance of civic and moral education. Another answer might be a new approach to American history, as I wrote in November.
It’s also possible that the answer lies close to home, on college campuses like Yale’s. Thousands of strangers are brought to New Haven every year by the vaguely meritocratic admissions machine. The college admissions process is about as atomizing as it gets. But these thousands soon develop close, heartfelt relationships and a collective identity — just by living and learning alongside each other. Americans spend increasing amounts of time in our increasingly comfortable homes and invite fewer and fewer friends over. We’re getting physically farther from each other, helped out by regulation that makes it hard or even impossible to build dense housing. Fixing our zoning codes and bringing Americans back together might facilitate the kind of socialization possible in dorms and once widely available on front porches, stoops and balconies across the country.
Trump’s gangster Gemeinschaft is only appealing in the absence of other, more powerful forms of belonging. Many readers will know “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam’s investigation of the declining social institutions of 20th-century America. His thesis was that Americans were watching more television and participating less in communal activities like local bowling leagues. But since the book’s publication in 2000, we’ve stopped bowling entirely. Derek Thompson writes in a piece for The Atlantic that American kids hang out with each other far less than previous generations, that restaurants across the country are closing their bars because adults prefer takeout, and that we simply spend less and less time talking face-to-face — a trend that, interestingly, especially devastates the young, the poor and the uneducated. We don’t have a culture that places a premium on togetherness. If that could change, through government investment in public spaces or hard age limits on social media, mafia-don politics wouldn’t have the same draw. Americans might find themselves instead drawn to humanity’s traditional sources of community: friends and family, neighbors and colleagues.
Those last two solutions are top-down interventions — but we’ll also need to convince people from the bottom up. The classic stoner movie “The Big Lebowski” has a line that I think is telling. Sitting at the bar in a bowling alley, Vietnam veteran Walter decries the German nihilists hunting the Dude: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.” Say what you want about MAGA, but at least it’s an ethos. A political movement needs a story to tell about itself and the one Kamala Harris told wasn’t particularly moving. Winning back the seats of power in Washington will require a story that appeals to ordinary Americans — and, above all, an ethos.
TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. His biweekly column “The American Crisis” explores history, politics and current events in America and at Yale. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.