What Trump teaches us. A cultural diagnosis. Trump’s stunning victory is a potentially worldview-shattering event, while heralding a new era.
You can find my analysis on Substack (8 min read), where I discuss how Trump’s election is calling into question our worldviews, challenging our sense of who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going.
I explore the role of Trump’s narcissism, what it’s telling us about the state of our culture, and how this relates to what I call ‘essential democratic capabilities’ – the long taken for granted ‘soft skills’ democracies depend upon. These soft skills, so it turns out, are just as important as democracies’ hard rules.
Ultimately, I argue, Trump is teaching us something profound about what it means to be human…
“While performing his show in the theater of global politics, Trump teaches us what it means to be human by demonstrating what it looks like when that very humanness is lacking. That is, we may learn more about what day means by experiencing the night. Likewise, we may only truly understand humanity by experiencing the inhumane.”