Howard Rhodes: Despair, Democratic Hope, and Donald Trump
In the months leading up to the election of Donald Trump, articles in the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and the New York Times called attention to the rising rates of suicide, alcohol and drug abuse, poor health, and early death among poor and working-class whites. Recently, Sarah Sloat, writing in Inverse, highlighted a correlation between the rural areas that voted overwhelmingly for Trump and areas with high rates of “despair deaths” related to opioid addiction. The evidence is increasingly clear that poor white Americans, especially in the great swaths of rural and former manufacturing sectors of this country, have a despair problem.
While there is no simple connection between white despair and Trump’s victory, the relationship should not be ignored. By any account, Trump’s election is a breathtaking indictment of our government and society’s failure to respond to the real or perceived needs of many citizens. It draws attention to genuine anger over how a half-century of economic policy has depleted opportunity and hope among working-class citizens.
Yet Trump’s success was also a largely negative gesture—a resounding “No!” to things as they are and to what many white Americans fear they will one day be. Poor white Americans did not stand up to support a reasonable set of policy alternatives within the scope of American democratic politics. At best, they supported a candidate who, precisely because he knew so little, might devise a new way of cultivating the American future. In large numbers, they stood up and abandoned all pretense of supporting a political society dedicated to piety, hope, and generosity and threw their votes behind a candidate who scapegoated the most vulnerable and gave the most comfortable—those with whom poor whites have the least in common and from whom they have the most to fear—every assurance in the world.
The emerging picture of the social and spiritual condition of rural whites suggests a growing sense of hopelessness and resentment that goes beyond a mere feeling of declining fortunes. To describe this condition as despair is apt, especially in the wake of many white citizens’ willingness to countenance outright racism, xenophobia, and misogyny during this election. Such behavior suggests that many citizens have given up on the difficult work of protecting and promoting social goods that have shaped our history since the civil rights struggles of the last century.
The despair at issue cannot be understood simply as a malady suffered by individuals enduring private nightmares. It is not simply a condition where, in the words of the great Leonard Cohen, “Everybody got this broken feeling like their father or their dog just died.” For no less an historical authority as Thomas Aquinas, despair was the vice opposed to the virtue of hope. For Aquinas and his heirs in the Christian tradition, hope is a gift of God given to sustain God’s people through the grim realities of earthly life in the expectation of God’s glory. For this reason, despair is the most grievous sin because it involves turning away from God. In Aquinas’s words, “hope withdraws us from evils and induces us to seek for good things, so that when hope is given up, men rush headlong into sin, and are drawn away from good works.”
Secular democrats take a page from the long tradition of Christian virtue and construe despair in a similar manner. As Jeffrey Stout argued in his insightful book Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America, despair is a temptation that leads democratic citizens away from their commitment to important virtues like liberty and justice. Like Aquinas, Stout conceives despair as a vice, a deformation of character fostered within specific social, political, and economic circumstances. It is the contrary of a hope that makes us willing to share the fortunes of democracy with those different from ourselves. It is the temptation to believe that the only way our kith and kin can get a fair deal is by dominating other people.
For Stout and other democratic thinkers like Cornel West, the temptation to despair is both understandable and, in our present conditions, inevitable. The white poor and working-class citizens of this country are poorly organized, disengaged from the democratic institutions that govern them, and frequently learn to consider their fellow citizens only through a distorting prism controlled by conservative elites. Because, for so many citizens, democratic citizenship has been reduced to listening to talk radio or watching opinion programs and then voting every 4 years, most people in this country have few opportunities to engage with other citizens in activities that cultivate the virtues upon which democracy depends.
If despair is a vice contrary to democratic virtue, so too is contempt. For citizens who rightly regard Trump’s victory as an embarrassment to the country’s traditions, the temptation is strong to regard his supporters with contempt. Contempt, however, tempts one to regard one’s fellow citizens as unworthy or incapable of democratic cooperation and to treat them accordingly. It is worth noting, then, that a despairing people is an aggrieved people, stuck between what they regard as an intolerable present and an impossible future. Many of the poor and working-class whites who supported Trump already regard themselves, rightly and wrongly, as the objects of other people’s scorn.
Avoiding contempt, however, is no easier than avoiding despair. When a people who should know better actively supports or countenances the kinds of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and scapegoating that characterized Trump’s campaign, contempt for them is often an appropriate response by people who care about the virtues. Yet this is where the tradition of American democracy adopts another Christian twist on the tradition of the virtues. Just as the neighbor does not stop being the neighbor by falling into error, so too our fellow citizens continue to deserve treatment as equal citizens.
The enduring significance of Trump’s victory will not be how he governs in fact, but how this society responds to the forces of despair he unleashed. Trump, it is already clear, is not the strong man many hoped he would be. But while the route to the present situation does not provide grounds for optimism about the future, it does provide grounds for the hope that, properly organized, ordinary citizens can still make a difference for the better. In the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, we still have reason to sustain “a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.”
Howard Rhodes practices law in Durham, North Carolina. Before receiving his law degree from Duke University School of Law, he taught First Amendment religion clause jurisprudence and the law of armed conflict at the University of Iowa College of Law.
