We’ve never had a major national leader as professionally unprepared, intellectually ill-informed, morally compromised and temperamentally unfit as the man taking the oath on Friday. So let’s not lessen the shock factor that should reverberate across this extraordinary moment.
It took a lot to get us here. It took a once-in-a-century societal challenge — the stresses and strains brought by the global information age — and it took a political system that was too detached and sclerotic to understand and deal with them.
There are many ways to capture this massive failure, but I’d rely on the old sociological distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. All across the world, we have masses of voters who live in a world of gemeinschaft: where relationships are personal, organic and fused by particular affections. These people define their loyalty to community, faith and nation in personal, in-the-gut sort of ways.
But we have a leadership class and an experience of globalization that is from the world of gesellschaft: where systems are impersonal, rule-based, abstract, indirect and formal.
Many people in Europe love their particular country with a vestigial affection that is like family — England, Holland or France. But meritocratic elites of Europe gave them an abstract intellectual construct called the European Union.
[Inauguration Day 2017: Celebration and chaos collide as Trump becomes president]
Many Americans think their families and their neighborhoods are being denuded by the impersonal forces of globalization, finance and technology. All the Republican establishment could offer was abstract paeans to the free market.
All the Democrats could offer was Hillary Clinton, the ultimate cautious, remote, calculating, gesellschaft thinker.
It was the right moment for Trump, the ultimate gemeinschaft man. He is all gut instinct, all blood and soil, all about loyalty over detached reason. His business is a premodern family clan, not an impersonal corporation, and he is staffing his White House as a premodern family monarchy, with his relatives and a few royal retainers.
In his business and political dealings, he simply doesn’t acknowledge the difference between private and public, personal and impersonal. Everything is personal, pulsating outward from his needy core.
The real fear should be that Trump is Capt. Chaos, the ignorant dauphin of disorder. All the standard practices, norms, ways of speaking and interacting will be degraded and shredded. The political system and the economy will grind to a battered crawl.
That’s ultimately why Jan. 20 could turn out to be a pivotal day. For the past few decades our leadership class has been polarized. We’ve wondered if there is some opponent out there that could force us to unite and work together.
Well, that opponent was inaugurated, not in the form of Trump the man, but in the form of the chaos and incompetence that will likely radiate from him, month after month. For America to thrive, people across government will have to cooperate and build arrangements to quarantine and work around the president.
People in the defense, diplomatic and intelligence communities will have to build systems to prevent him from intentionally or unintentionally bumbling into a global crisis. People in his administration and in Congress will have to create systems so his ill-informed verbal spasms don’t derail coherent legislation.
I’ve been rewatching “Yes, Minister” these days. That was a hilarious British sitcom about a permanent government apparatus that contained and overruled a bumbling political master. America will need a beneficent version of that sort of clever cooperation.
With Trump it’s not the ideology, it’s the disorder. Containing that could be the patriotic cause that brings us together.
David Brooks is a columnist for The New York Times.
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