ince its inception as a gauche, reality-TV-worthy lark, Donald Trump’s political career has trafficked—profitably—in spectacle. The risqué language of his rhetoric, the belligerent fervor of the campaign rallies that he holds even two years after the election, the malign charisma that he exudes—all this was in pursuit of a cynical principle that he has organized his life and, now, the nation’s politics around.
Selfless service is no longer the most esteemed virtue of democracy; celebrity is. It’s for this reason that the image of a maga-hatted Kanye West, seated, on Thursday, in front of the Resolute Desk and blacksplaining the evils of the Democratic Party, while Trump nodded along, felt less surreal than it should have. Rather, it seemed a logical turn of events in a cosmos capable of granting Donald Trump three hundred and four votes in the Electoral College. Surrealism only works when there is a stable reference for reality.
As part of a ten-minute logorrhea jaunt in the Oval Office, West oddly admitted that he saw Trump as a reference point for his own masculinity, and that he derived superpowers from his red Make America Great Again hat. To the extent that it matters—and, in the marketplace of spectacle, it does not matter much—West is not a conservative; he’s a contrarian. (The same can be said of Trump.) An actual commitment to conservatism would require more stringently analytical or, at least, consistent thinking than West has demonstrated since he started his maga spree, earlier this year.
It’s not uncommon for men unburdened by rigorous thinking but convinced of the superiority of their intellects to presume that a minority opinion is the most valid one. As they see it, a rarity among men must certainly hold the least common of world views. It is not uncommon for people to support Donald Trump, as the rallies that he presides over indicate. But it is uncommon for black men, eighty-two per cent of whom voted for Hillary Clinton, to support him. It is safe to assume that Trump’s support among middle-aged rappers is at least as meagre. This conflation of élitism with unpopular ideas is a trait that Trump and West share. Trump’s most absurd and wrongheaded ideas, from birtherism to trade protectionism, are connected by the fact that they were thought to be ridiculous by people whom he sees as his intellectual inferiors—not, like him, a genius.
The Trump Presidency is an animate example of what happens when the term “for argument’s sake” becomes an actual political ideology. Trump’s élitist contrarianism has been able to masquerade as conservatism, in part, because it exists explicitly in opposition to everything that the liberal Barack Obama stood for. Trump is not a Republican; he’s whatever is the opposite of a black Democrat who became President.
This is why Trump was no doubt particularly gratified to hear West, a once favored son of Chicago, the city that gave Obama his political foundations, mouthing the right-wing talking point that violencein Chicago is a product of the Democratic Party’s failures. Homicide, West said, is a product of the Democratic welfare state, which destroyed black families. It’s worth pointing out that Trump has consistently drafted black celebrities—not elected officials, scholars, or policy analysts—into his discussions of African-American interests. (The N.F.L.-great-turned-activist Jim Brown accompanied West to the White House for what was supposed to have been a discussion of economic development, policing, and public policy.)
The discussion of Chicago, or, rather, the Chicago that is the fictive jungle of Trump’s pronouncements, illustrates precisely why it is dangerous to substitute impulse and connotation for thought and analysis. For Trump, Chicago exists as a central reference point for black failure. During the 2016 campaign, he politicized the death of Nykea Aldridge, the cousin of the N.B.A. star Dwyane Wade, tweeting that her shooting, on the South Side of Chicago, was further evidence that black people would “vote Trump.” Shortly after taking office, Trump tweeted, “If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible ‘carnage’ going on, . . . I will send in the Feds!”—a threat that connoted less a concern about black lives than the partisan opportunities provided by conspicuous black deaths.
At the Oval Office meeting on Thursday, Trump advocated for the use of stop-and-frisk in Chicago (which, to his credit, West asked him to reconsider), despite the fact that the police department there has been plagued by complaints of excessive use of force, and that, less than a week earlier, the former C.P.D. officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murderin the shooting death of the seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald. Trump’s own Attorney General has opposed the federal consent decree that was designed to address the problems in the department. For Trump, the violence in Chicago serves as the perpetual justification for these kinds of abuses.
The belief that the violence is the product of a single political party is troublesome when expressed by reactionaries, but an outrageous one when expressed by a black Chicagoan who really ought to know better.
The roots of Chicago’s violence are complex and trans-partisan, but they exist in the context of a prolifically armed and exceedingly violent country. (White American violence alone would distinguish the United States from its less volatile Western industrial peers.) There is no way to segregate the six hundred and sixty-four murders that took place in Chicago last year from the more than seventeen thousand that occurred in the rest of the United States. The catalysts for violence in that city predate the “welfare state” and the rise of single-parent black households, in the nineteen-seventies. In the classic 1945 text “Black Metropolis,” the sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton detailed the ways in which discrimination in housing and employment were negatively affecting black migrants. Twenty-three years before that, the ChicagoCommission on Race Relations, formed after a race riot in which thirty-eight people died, found the violence to be a product of the exploding populations in the city’s Black Belt and the poor housing and employment conditions to which the growing number of African-Americans were subjected. (In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois had lamented the ways in which overcrowding, filth, and discrimination, as well as unchecked vice, had spawned violence within the emerging black communities in Philadelphia.)
To understand Chicago, we could turn to Richard Wright, whose early work documented the travails of black migrants there. Or to the photographer Gordon Parks, who began his career depicting the living conditions of African-Americans in Chicago. Or to the artist Charles White, whose early work explored similar themes. Or to the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, whose work provided a window into the lives of black Chicagoans. Or to the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, whose “A Raisin in the Sun” was partly inspired by her own family’s fight against racially restrictive housing covenants in the Chicago area. At one time, it would have been possible to turn to Kanye West for insight into such matters.
But you cannot turn to Donald Trump to understand Chicago, because you would then be trading presumptions instead of ideas, and putting empty placeholders where reflection and analysis belong—a known formula for idiocy. And if, by chance, one finds oneself, like Kanye, engaged in such clownery with the President of the United States, it should be recalled that idiocy is the one exception in life where it is always better to be useless than to be damned by one’s usefulness.
Source: Newyorker
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