Trump and the Tempests of Hate

My last essay discussed the dehumanization of Donald Trump in the context of Robert F. Kennedy’s Jr.’s endorsement in the 2024 election. I described how the template of dehumanization, of othering, of seeing the world through an us-versus-them lens poses a bigger threat than any particular candidate; how it is a vehicle for civil war and totalitarianism; how it is tearing society apart.

Now I will turn the idea in the other direction. A truly transformative politician must forgo these tactics, not just as a moral imperative but as a strategic necessity. If Donald Trump inhabits a mindset of hate and blame, he will probably lose the election, and he will certainly fail to transform his country. Indeed, to win the election from that mindset and bring it into governance would be a still greater defeat.

A powerful propaganda machine paints Trump and his supporters, along with other populist movements in the West, as bigoted, hateful, unreasonable, ignorant, and deranged. When Trump complies by showcasing the worst of his character, he forecloses any possibility of gaining support beyond his base. He will need that support if he is to win the election in the face of Establishment’s information warfare and various forms of cheating. More importantly, should he win anyway, he will need it in order to effectively govern. Otherwise, the deep state will block his every move. It will engineer civil unrest, economic breakdown, or some other crisis. It will paralyze the bureaucracy. It will mobilize the intelligence agencies against him. It will make the country ungovernable. To actually accomplish significant change, Trump would need an overwhelming popular mandate, something on the level of Roosevelt in 1932. To get that, he has to convert a large portion of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents. He will have to reach within the Establishment itself to woo potential defectors who privately doubt its orthodoxies and chafe at its constraints.

People with the independence and sensitivity to recognize the pathology of the Establishment and the orthodoxies that sustain it are also repulsed by boasting and blaming, grandiosity and pettiness, derision and contempt. We sense a fundamental misalignment between the energy of hate and blame, and the healing path that draws us forward. The true revolution is not to replace the old enemies with new ones. It is to see the world in an entirely different way, no longer through the prism of us-versus-them.

Ultimately, to overthrow the Establishment we have to stop reifying it, stop seeing it as real. To see the task at hand as a matter of defeating a discrete entity that we can name, is already a step down the wrong path.

I’ll discuss that another time. For now it is enough to say that those who would overthrow the Establishment have fallen into a trap. The means and methods (inciting rage and division, casing the opponent into the worst possible light, dehumanizing the other side, etc.) that we have inherited to fight the Establishment end up strengthening it. We feed further the very energies that a totalitarian state will tap to turn a population into the willing accomplice of its own oppression. Usually we lose anyway, unless we use those means so skillfully that we become the Establishment in the very act of defeating it.

Ultimately, we seek not a revolution against the system, but a revolution of the system.

Here I will describe what a political leader must say, do, and become in order to accomplish a revolution of this kind. These six principles are not something to be adopted through a mere effort of will. They must be embodied, and that can normally happen only as part of a profound journey of transformation and healing.

At Trump’s age, such a transformation rarely comes except through the death process. Those who paid attention may have seen a glimmering of that transformation following his close brush with death in July. Although to all appearances he soon defaulted back to how he has always been, I have reason to believe that that bullet affected him deeply. Perhaps the change wouldn’t have been so fleeting, if he’d had mentors, guides, and a community of practice around him to help steady it in a political culture swirling with hate. The bullet that missed his brain is still lodged in his psyche, still working on him, its transformational potential yet to be realized. Perhaps it still will be realized. When and if that will happen is not mine to guess, but I know that anything we do to change “a political culture swirling with hate” makes it more likely, whether for him or another, future, leader. Therefore, I lay out the following suggestions not just for Donald Trump, but for any person who aspires to be a transformative politician, a change agent in the public sphere. Equivalently, I offer them as guidance for how any one of us may help liberate society from the tightening hammerlock of the military-pharmaceutical-intelligence-academic-media-government-financial-NGO-technological-censorship-industrial complex, its strategies of dominance, and its totalizing narratives.

1. Reframe divisive issues in terms of compassion

This isn’t about mere language or messaging. That comes from a habit of seeing, a habit of inquiry. “What is it like to be you?” “What is your story?”

For an anti-Establishment candidate this is especially important, first because it allows him or her to defy the inevitable slanders and smears as hateful, racist, homophobic, and so on; second because it distinguishes the candidate from a system that is fundamentally uncompassionate, that serves human values poorly and sometimes not at all.

Compassion starts with curiosity. “What is it like to be you?” Trump should have some meetings with recent illegal immigrants, African-American educators, pro-choice activists, custodians of tribal lands, and maybe a Palestinian peace activist or two. These meetings will help him win the election—even and especially if they are not public—because they will broaden his compassion.

2. Generously acknowledge the views of all sides

This doesn’t mean you never take a side. But by generously stating the position of the other side, you demonstrate that you have listened, that you respect them, and that your position is not ignorant of theirs.

What happens to your ideology when you actually listen, openly listen, to the stories of the people you had dismissed? Usually it crumbles. The dehumanizing narratives that circulate, on both the Left and the Right, about illegal immigrants or welfare moms or pro-life activists or Planned Parenthood workers or anti-vaccine parents or corporate executives or white people or black people or trans people or anyone else dissolve into complexity.

Anyone practicing these first two guidelines will dissolve the simplifying narratives that each side wields for partisan advantage, but which abort the journey into not-knowing that must precede any genuinely new and unifying policy. They are the prerequisite for the third guideline:

3. Find the transcendent center

The transcendent center refers to ideas and policies that integrate and transcend existing polarities, sourced from the underlying truths and values shared by both sides of a divisive issue.

The transcendent center is not a compromising middle point between two poles; it is outside them altogether. For example, on the abortion issue, in the Kennedy campaign we named our policy “More choices, more life.” It acknowledged and took seriously competing moral values (the sacred life of the unborn, and the sovereignty of a woman over her own body) and built a policy that would serve both of them. The idea was to create conditions more supportive of raising families, so that women would be under less economic pressure to end their pregnancies. The policy was both pro-choice and pro-life.

People who are sick of venomous, hateful political rhetoric breathe a sigh of relief when they hear someone articulate the transcendent center. Not only does it release the tension of division; it also stirs a breeze of hope—there might be a solution after all. It is in fact the only hope, because anger, hate, and blame are blind to the complex causes of our predicament that we must see if we are to resolve it.

4. Focus on systems not individuals

While there are many corrupt individuals in positions of power, the real problem is a system that breeds corruption in individuals and that is itself corrupt. A transformative leader recognizes that office-holders in corporations and government agencies are trapped in a system that probably conflicts with their own values, though they be only dimly aware of it. They are not the enemy and should not be made the enemy. In fact, they are potentially allies, because many, if not most, people have evolved past the consciousness of their organizations.

When the rules and incentives that govern an organization change, the people within it change too. When the ambient narratives of a system or a culture change, the beliefs that people hold within them change as well. Let us not freeze people in the story of who they have been. People will sense your respect or they will sense your disdain. Either will radiate out through your words and attract or repel them from your cause.

5. Amnesty not vengeance, redemption not punishment

One of the caricatures projected onto populist insurgents is that of the fascist strongman who will imprison his opponents and end democracy. This projection becomes very real in the minds of their opponents. To reach across the divide, the insurgent must adopt a posture that defies that caricature. He must eschew vengeance and vow not to weaponize federal agencies or the courts against his opponents. He must create the “narrative space” for some portion of the bureaucracy to join his cause, instead of reacting defensively to a threat.

By offering amnesty to officials who disclose the crimes, coverups, and secrets that the government has maintained for the last 80 years, a leader can pull back the veil of secrecy that allows corrupt power to operate. This does not mean to “move on” on forget the crimes ever happened, nor to allow the perpetrators to remain in positions of public trust. But it is transparency, that starts with disclosure, that banishes evil from the shadows where it thrives. The foundation of the Establishment’s power is neither guns nor money; it is lies, it is secrets, it is the control of information and narratives. These will dissolve with transparency.

6. Stand consistently for peace

The Establishment is addicted to war, not only economically, but also because it requires an enemy to justify its power. Rooted in an us-versus-them mentality, it generates an endless array of enemies. An alternative candidate must clearly stand distinct from war mentality in order to coalesce the popular movement necessary for radical change.

War, ecocide, medical tyranny, the censorship-surveillance state, economic exploitation, racial hate, political repression… all come from the same source. Those who see through any of these will eventually see through the others. A candidate who crusades to change some of these while remaining loyal to the rest will stir only a portion of the movement necessary to transform society.

The preceding guidelines are all examples of peace consciousness. They will swiftly rot into slogans if one is not consistent in standing for peace, at home and abroad.

* * *

I do not expect anyone, let alone Donald Trump, to embody these six principles perfectly. I myself forget them quite often. With each step towards them, however, we enter more deeply into the territory of political healing.

They coalesce a movement by tapping a force deeper even than the tribalism and in-group psychology of Establishment conformity. They invoke a deep yearning for unity, forgiveness, healing, and love. Speaking from that place, one may defy the slanders and calumnies that vilify the outsider, and call people into a larger belonging.

One might ask, why not offer these six principles to Kamala Harris as well as Donald Trump? Of course, I recommend them to anybody. However, an Establishment candidate can apply them only in facsimile, otherwise she will not remain part of the Establishment. She can campaign in the name of compassion, extending it to favored groups, unaware of what dominant narratives conceal as they maintain and advance a global system of enormous injustice and suffering. The six principles unravel those narratives. Their practice transforms us into agents of a revolution of and not against the system. And we quiet the tempest of hate that threatens to tear society apart.