Trump Essentials (8): Small Numbers, Mass Society

Solidarity Where You Stand

In a 2023 essay, the philosopher Lorna Finlayson lit into the professoriate as deferential, conformist, servile, self-defeating and sycophantically desperate for the approval of administrative managers.

Finlayson accurately identifies the likely response of many of her academic readers. “I can well imagine that somewhere, an academic (perhaps one of my own colleagues) is reading this and already frothing at the mouth.” That was certainly my reaction as I read through. Perhaps alternating between frothing and applying bandages to myself as the critique left wounds.

But as the essay wound to its close, decrying the “patchy solidarity” among faculty that always bends to individualism, to “getting ahead of the next guy”, I found myself comforted a bit by two successive thoughts. Finlayson was doing what she accused her profession of doing: going it alone because her disgust with faculty everywhere made it impossible to situate herself among them. It’s not getting ahead of the next guy for awards or reputation or compensation, but it’s getting ahead of the next guy in terms of anointing oneself more radically clear-eyed than all the rest.

The second thought was this: you make solidarity with people as you find them. If solidarity is only possible when everybody else catches up to you with the appropriate mindset—and it is in your view a result of their own deep psychological and sociological failing that they are behind—then solidarity is not ever possible. Disgust will not get people to solidarity any faster than patient persuasion will.

Solidarity is made with the people you’re with, not the people you wish for, with the people you’re like. Finlayson is correct that you cannot make solidarity with people whose interests and role are completely antithetical to your own, but if you choose to define yourself as so disappointed by all the people who are roughly like yourself that they’re a bigger enemy than your actual enemy, then you are a perpetual political outsider, nose pressed against the glass, shouting in silence at all the fools inside. In time, such exiles find one another, and often an odd kind of accidental alliance takes shape, a politics of shared frustration that can bind together very small groups against all the sheep who decline to herd properly at the sound of the barking of their would-be guardians.

We live, as the meme goes, in a society. But we, in various configurations of connection and alignment and senses of “we”, are now beset by a multitude of exiles from mass sociality, from belonging to groups, classes, professions, institutions, communities. Many such exiles are playing a long-standing and basically benign role as prophets wandering in a wilderness, as scourges who want us to wake up and shuck off our sheeply guises and become as wolves, as hermits who may dispense wisdom if we find our way to their seclusion. These are the exiles that an open society needs and wants, the margins that keep us honest, generate new perspectives and ways of thinking. These are the people who stand against tanks or keep a lonely watch for dangers that no one else sees coming.

Other exiles, other margins, are not so generative, and that is where Trumpism enters the picture. There is a mass vote for Trump out there which I hope will be smaller than many fear, but whatever its size in this election, it’s still big. Reckoning with it, living with it, is the major sociopolitical challenge of our time. I’ve spent time in the last two weeks identifying different fractions of it, trying to locate the social networks those fractions inhabit, trying to think about what they want and why they think Trump is the man to realize their aspirations.

But Trumpism also leverages the power of small numbers and anonymity in fearsomely effective ways. It may be the most effective political movement yet in world history to do so. Though it is not so clear, perhaps, whether it is Trumpism that leverages small numbers or the small numbers leverage Trumpism.

What do these small-numbered actors do that is so effective? Note to start that I do not say “people”, because it’s not always clear that we are in fact talking about people, let alone which people, or where those people are.

The small numbers are the key to the fear that Trump projects. It may be that if a second Trump presidency—or autocracy—comes to pass that we will see in new ways what Trump can do with large numbers, with crowds and bureaucracies and institutions fully at the command of his inner circle, no longer providing friction against their wishes. But for this last year, when Trump speaks to make people feel fear—fear of others, fear of the world, fear of the future, and fear of him—it’s the small numbers that make it manifest.

How? In anonymous death threats issued, implied, and possible. In menacing asides to officials, boards, community members about their homes, their families, their daily routines. In the stealing of yard signs, in the open carrying of guns. Most of all, in the inflation of sentiments, ideas, movements beyond their actual adherence, to make a comprehensive worldview more pervasive, powerful and threatening than it ought to be in terms of the real numbers of real people involved in it.

In a large enough nation, even small numbers have horrifying potentiality. It only takes one man with a gun who thinks he’s freeing children from a pizza restaurant’s basement dungeon to cause a tragedy. It only takes one publisher constantly insisting that nobody really died at Sandy Hook Elementary School to make the lives of the parents of dead children into an even worse hell. It only takes four or five obsessed people to destroy the ability of individuals or even whole communities to maintain a professionally necessary presence in online platforms.

If today we can block Trump’s path to power, then one of the urgent requirements of the politics to come is how to make small numbers small again, about how to paint bright lines at our margins. We have to separate the prophets from the bandits, to maintain openness to the people who call us to account and read out our shortcomings while closing the channels to bots and trolls, to voices that are leagues away from what anybody wants. We need to stop responding to and magnifying fringe demands, stop being led around or pushed away by freakish demands and darkly hinted kinds of menace. There need to be consistent consequences for slipping death threats under the door and telling parents that they are faking the murders of children who never existed.

The mass heart of Trumpism beats to its own epistemology that is coherent and consistent, which is not to say that it is even remotely good or legitimate. It rests on a brutal conception of power and a sharp sectarian division between people to be protected and people to be ruled, attacked, and expelled. That view is a problem of large numbers. It cannot be grappled with or engaged until the swarms of small-numbered provocateurs and extremists are pushed back out to where they belong, beyond the attention of the society that the rest of us, even Trump’s core supporters, live in together. Solidarity eludes us in part because of the confusion caused by small anonymities. We need solidarity, we need to stand where we live. To do that, we have to know better the difference between the people who live alongside us and the people who are in no way present and accounted for, who have no standing with anyone, who are only the poltergeists who make things go bump in the night. The little monsters flitting around us, mostly through social media, need to go back inside Pandora’s box somehow.