The Most Vile
When civic culture decays, people elect dangerous fools.
When you have said and done as many outrageous, cruel, sordid, bigoted, and misogynistic things as Donald Trump has since 2015, it’s hard to find a new low. But in his attack on Rob Reiner, after he and his wife, photographer Michele Singer, were found murdered in their Los Angeles home, President Trump has stirred strong revulsion from the public and even some on the right. As The New Republic pointed out, not even Fox News could defend President Trump’s scurrilous, gutter attack.
A kind, empathetic man – considered by nearly all who knew him to be a mensch – Rob Reiner was everything Trump is not. Reiner and Trump once met in Atlantic City. Reiner’s reaction: “Wow, he only talks about himself!”
Two reasons stand out for why Republicans chose Trump as their standard bearer and Trump won the national popular vote in 2024: the Democratic Party’s misguided commitment to neo-liberal economics and abandonment of the working class and the collapse of civic education and widespread political participation.
First, over the course of three decades the Democrats lost the white working class. Both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama accepted too much of the right’s critique of the New Deal and pursued economic policies that amounted to Reagan Lite. True, the Democrats still did more for blue-collar families than Republicans but not enough to stanch the bleeding from the offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Clinton championed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Obama saved Wall Street during the Great Recession while letting Main Street fend for itself. Yes, Obama passed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) but both he and Clinton chose Wall Street insiders to run the economy. The result: the upper middle class, the wealthy and the new billionaires did extremely well; the bottom 70 percent struggled to stay afloat.
Neo-liberalism opened the door for Trump and MAGA. Former Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown understood that blue-collar working people need to remain the core Democratic constituency. Most elected Democrats conveniently forgot and somehow thought you could have a majority party of minorities and college educated professionals.
When we dig one layer deeper, we get to the decay of civic education and collapse of civic culture. In our celebration of consumer culture and the necessity of making a living in a highly competitive economy while raising our children and enjoying our friends, most Americans have little time or energy for civic involvement and see it as a sideshow.
However, when politics becomes an ancillary branch of corporate capitalism, driven by big money, technology, and content produced for information channels, democracy slowly dies. It becomes corrupt, not in the sense of politicians taking bribes or looking out only for their career, but rather in people losing a collective sense of civic identity and purpose. Some of us gravitate to politics, but the great majority of Americans have a thin understanding of government and rarely engage in debate and share ideas with others outside their family about how to build a better future.
Something profound and magical is lost when the power to vote the bums out once every four years becomes the essence of politics. In On Revolution, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt notes that in the first draft of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson saw the distinguishing characteristic of real democracy as “public happiness.” By this Jefferson meant the shared energy and enjoyment that people have when as equal citizens they come together as a community and a conscious public. Public happiness does not exist under a king, dictator, or autocrat, and it atrophies mightily in a constitutional democracy dominated by corporate conglomerates and billionaires.
Similar to Martin Luther King writing the notes for his brilliant “Letter from Birmingham Jail” while imprisoned by Bull Conner’s henchmen, the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci composed the Prison Notebooks after his 1926 arrest and imprisonment by Mussolini. Dying a slow death in prison, Gramsci developed the concept of hegemony, the idea that the wealthy dominate a society not just economically as Marx held, but by shaping a culture in which the lower classes admire and imitate the rich and powerful and unconsciously accept the dominant values of the society.
Because there is not a dollar sign connected to political participation and reflective intellectual debate by normal people, civic participation is not a central part of life. When we fail to teach history, politics, and ethics in middle and high school, should we be surprised that civic literacy is woefully low in the United States for everyone outside of the most politically active?
In his classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman saw the dumbing down of American politics and its replacement by entertainment. That a person with the severe character flaws of Donald Trump could garner the presidential votes of 63 million people in 2016, 74.2 million in 2020, and 77.3 million in 2024 (nearly 80 million American adults after Jan. 6 and after his horrible management of the Covid pandemic resulted in 1,228,289 confirmed deaths, the most of any country) is stunning. Trump is a highly talented demagogue, but his success builds upon a political culture rotten and severely decayed.
Talk radio and the Internet brought us the politics of “us vs. them.” In the post-Gingrich era, politics became increasingly mean and zero-sum, and more a spectator sport with people listening for hours to strident rhetoric on talk radio or Fox (or MSNBC) without actually interacting with others in the physical world.
In 2017, Rich Lowry, editor-in-chief of the National Review explained Trump’s appeal in terms of Republican activists actively searching for someone who – to put it in the vernacular – “would give a big middle finger to their liberal enemies.”
The problem with our politics is not Donald Trump; it’s the ethical bankruptcy and political illiteracy of the many who support him. The lesson of the Trump era: When civic culture collapses, millions of people can be persuaded to cast a presidential vote for a grifter from whom they would not buy a used car nor elect to the local school board.
In this second administration, President Trump and his cronies have done incredible damage to both the nation and the world (Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols has calculated that the destruction of USAID alone has caused the death of nearly 700,000 people around the globe, two-thirds of them children). These serial catastrophes did not have to happen. In November 2024, a majority of voters looked at Donald Trump and said “I’ll vote for more of that.”
People who believe in democracy and oppose Trump’s authoritarian designs have to do more than win the midterms in 2026. In the months and years ahead, we must invest time and energy to build a civic culture where the values at the core of Rob Reiner’s amazing life – decency, honesty, compassion, and humanity – are pillars of politics and bad apples – arrogant, mean-spirited, serial liars such as Trump – are disdained and quickly rejected.