Power Over Principles: the Dual Dangers of Trumpism and Anti-Racism

Donald Trump rode the politics of power and emotion to the White House. If his opponents continue to respond in kind, he might have killed the politics of principle in the process.

In the fall of 2017, Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith wrote a piece in The Atlantic that I regularly returned to this summer amid the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and racial unrest. Goldsmith argued that while the Constitution and the rule of law had proven rather adept at checking President Donald Trump’s worst norm-breaking and law-breaking impulses, many of the institutions he attacked had responded in kind with a worrisome amount of norm-breaking of their own. Institutions, said Goldsmith, withstood President Trump’s attacks but “defied their own norms, and harmed themselves and the nation in the process.” Whether they be federal bureaucrats mounting internal “resistance” or over-zealous judges issuing nationwide injunctions, said Goldsmith, those in President Trump’s crosshairs often betrayed the core values and norms of their own institutions, while trying to protect themselves from what they (often rightly) deemed unlawful, improper executive overreach.

Goldsmith’s argument—that President Trump’s norm-breaking catalyzes norm-breaking on the part of his foes—was a rather specific one, focused on the interactions between the different branches of the federal government under the Trump presidency. Perhaps, though, the argument warrants extension into the wider realm of American culture and politics. It seems that Trumpism is helping propel its fiercest opponents into the same flawed, dangerous modes of argumentation that make Trumpism so contemptible to begin with. Perhaps Trumpism and, say, anti-racism are birds of a feather—two separate, competing bundles of oversimplified historical narrative and political argumentation, each of whose logical conclusions point towards a future of deep division, widespread contempt, and even violence in the United States of America.

The animating force behind both Trumpism and anti-racism is not principle; it is power—it is a desire to correct what their respective adherents perceive as a wrongful power disparity. This is an inherently divisive, Schmittian vision of politics, as it is focused on re-orienting group-based hierarchies rather than pushing the entirety of the polity towards a common goal or set of goals (think “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” for example). If either version of power politics—Trumpism or anti-racism—gains dominant, entrenched cultural and political power in the decades to come, the results for Americans could be disastrous.