Most people I know are horrified to see elected as their President someone of the unabashed mendacity, racism, xenophobia and misogyny of Donald Trump. How could the mentality that produced him exist in this country at all, let alone be so strong?
One common answer is that America contains a realm of rural and uneducated whites, which we didn’t even know was out there. We thought the racists and misogynists were not a powerful realm, merely a moribund fringe. But now it seems that the country contains two very different and very powerful mentalities. Trump represents an invasion from that other realm. Though he himself has a privileged background, his values are from the far backwoods.
But Trump’s very existence suggests that the line between these realms may be fuzzy. Even the most educated of precincts— academia itself —has more than its share of race baiters and p***y grabbers (as we philosophers know all too well). But such people, we like to think, don’t belong here. They are, like Trump, invaders from some Other and darker place.
This, alas, is false. The line between Us, the civilized academicians and Them, the unwashed outsiders, is not only fuzzy. If you go down one level–i.e., look not at the explicit racism and misogyny but at the underlying mentality that enables them– it doesn’t exist at all.
Cold War philosophy has (so far) had two main stages. The first, treated in Philosophy Scare, saw rational choice theory imported into philosophy, elevating a highly mathematized but at bottom empirical theory of market and voting behavior into a universal philosophy applicable to the human mind itself (think early Rawls). The second phase, which came later, saw this happen with game theory (think David Lewis). Game theory, too, was elevated into a set of universal doctrines which could not be established empirically and so counted as philosophical: as Cold War philosophy.
In her new book, Prisoners of Reason (Cambridge 2016), S.M. Amadae asks the crucial question:
How did strategic rationality, which typically assumes consequentialism (only outcomes matter), realism (values exist prior to social relations) and hyper-individualism (“other-regarding” signifies viewing others as strategic maximizers like oneself) come to be the only approach to coherent action available to individuals throughout their lives? (p. 147)
Amadae’s question implies that game theory, when elevated into universality (into “the only approach to coherent action”) retains three of its original traits. First, if only outcomes matter then any means are acceptable—even, as Amadae shows elsewhere, promise breaking and lying. Second, the gifts of sociability—trust, fellowship, security of possession and so forth—have no value: value arises only from presocial desires (“preferences”), meaning that anything can be desired irrespective of its social consequences. Third, all human beings, in their social relations, seek only to maximize their own interest: the only reason for engaging with another human being is to persuade or coerce that person to help me achieve my interests—in other words, to dominate that person.
These three principles underlie much of American philosophy and social science today. One place they are explicitly taught, as universal and so philosophical truths, is business schools. They are also the basic principles by which Donald Trump, who went to Wharton, operates. He lies freely, as if he sees nothing wrong in it, and already seems about to break many of his campaign promises. The things he values—mainly, his own ego and p***y—shape his social relations, without being shaped by them in turn—so they preexist them. And his only interpersonal concern, as Josh Marshall has repeatedly noted at Talking Points Memo (http://talkingpointsmemo.com), is to dominate those around him.
In short, my fellow academics, on this level Donald Trump is not one of Them; he is one of Us.