A year-long series looking back on the most significant moments of the past 25 years, how they changed our world, and how they will continue to shape the next 25.
Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker whose most recent books include All That Happiness Is: Some Words on What Matters and The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery.
What moment in the past 25 years most altered our history? A case can be made that the turning point in recent American history, at least – and America being the hinge on which so much of the world also swings, a turning point in many other places – occurred on Oct. 7, 2016. That was the date of the release of the Access Hollywood tape, when Donald Trump was caught on a recording boasting, some 10 years or so before, with the TV host one Billy Bush, of his “technique” with women.
“I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it,” he said gallantly of some would-be conquest. “I did try and fuck her. She was married. And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’ ”
The future president continued: “I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there.” Later he added: “You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful – I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
One can easily forget just how callow and absurd his words were, not merely sexist or predatory, but creepy-clinical in their coldness, the lack of even basic human empathy expressed for women as people. (And absurd in the addition of the “furniture shopping” as a form of courtship.) Many men think of women as sexual objects all of the time, and most straight men think of women as sexual objects some of the time, but very few don’t have enough entanglements of emotion to render the expression watered down by human feeling. Donald Trump didn’t and couldn’t.
That afternoon, as I recall, there was a universal belief that Mr. Trump was finished – the remarks seemed to mark a bridge which even his Republican Party supporters could not cross, and one after another his political supporters, even his own vice-presidential running mate Mike Pence, backed away from him. After all, the Republican Party claimed – and to a certain degree truly held – the values of an evangelical base of support that had pilloried, and worse, Bill Clinton for his own sexual entanglements. Mr. Pence himself rose from the Christian ranks. Mr. Trump could be acceptably crude about business, and Democrats, perhaps, but “grab ‘em by the pussy” was a phrase that would no doubt break the coalition.
And for a very brief time – several hours – it seemed it would. But then, by a process that has by now become all too familiar, Mr. Trump’s shamelessness – his flat-out refusal to apologize or even recognize his responsibility for what he had said, combined with his readiness to instantly project his sins unto others – pointed a path toward his “redemption.” Though the accusations against others, absurd on their face – Bill Clinton had said cruder things to him on the golf course? Really? – were irrelevant to what he had said and done, it somehow worked. A comically transparent rationale was put in place, in the same spirit as later rationales – he was joking, he was being sarcastic – and this time it was that this was “locker room talk.” (It didn’t seem to matter that, of course, anyone who actually spoke that way in a locker room would have lost his locker.)
By morning, it was over. The internal opposition collapsed, and at that very moment we entered into the anti-matter universe in which we live still, one in which words and behaviour that millions of decent people would never allow or encourage in their children is accepted and indulged in their leader. An unstoppable inflation of effects – like a nuclear chain reaction – was set off, one which still explodes what remains of America’s democracy. At that moment, we entered into the new world in which the side of decency, cultural conservatism, Christian values and a respect for existing institutions is wholly in thrall to a shameless narcissist who holds all of those values in open and mocking contempt. Everything that has happened after that day has imitated the same grotesque and yet ominous pattern: the retrofitting of the Jan. 6 insurrection followed precisely the same sequence, in slightly more extended time: first, shock, then outrage, then uncertainty, then delay, then acceptance, then amnesia and at last pugnacious reassertion that the “wrong” thing had been right all along.
Pious apology, no matter how obviously insincere, had been until that moment a necessary part of the performance of politics. It was the compliment that vice paid to virtue, an artificial but essential way of shoring up precarious community. I might be a social democrat and you a tax-hating Tory, but together we could accept a common frame of acceptable behaviour, a pretense, if no more, to a certain set of shared pieties, to which we had agreed to pay at least cosmetic allegiance. We did this because the precarious business of pluralist politics could not otherwise survive. Stealing, lying, predating, cultivating violence – these lay outside the realm of the commonly acceptable. I might easily forgive Bill Clinton’s lies on a wholly personal matter as irrelevant to his accomplishments, while you might just as easily excuse Ronald Reagan’s confusion of actual history and old movies as irrelevant to his, but there were certain posts past which we would not drive. The glory of the Watergate saga was that the Republican Party could say, in the end, No, we can’t do this – while such other American moments as Al Gore’s concession speech in 2000, or George W. Bush’s visit to a mosque after 9/11, were intended to affirm political commonality even at the cost of political advantage.
Why had this changed so much by the time of Mr. Trump’s arrival on the political scene? Part of the reason was purely characterological. The shameless man paralyzes the rest of us because nothing in our experience has prepared us for such behaviour. Our paralysis – our cognitive dissonance – means we can’t bear facing what has happened, so we pretend that something else has. Our expected reaction to an outrage might be shock and then distaste and then rejection. But if the shock is large enough and the outrage blatant enough, this doesn’t happen. Instead, though the violator is first met with dismay, the dismay is then seen by certain forces as too typical of the starch and stuffiness of the “elite” – and then elements within an opportunistic part of the elite decide to redefine the violation as amusing, or helpful to their own cause.
If one wants to understand the social psychology of this kind of transformation, the key document – the key artwork of our era – is that prescient political allegory released in 1980: Harold Ramis’s film Caddyshack. In it, you’ll recall, the comedian Rodney Dangerfield – gross, rude and ill-suited in rainbow-striped trousers – invades a stuffy country club and violates every norm and expectation of good behaviour. But instead of meeting a united front against him, he finds that his behaviour further fractures what was already an implicitly divided membership. The suave hero, played by Chevy Chase – and representing, in this allegory after-the-fact, the libertine, Joe Rogan-ish “bro” group – is impatient with the barnacled pieties. Though only casually exploitative of women, rather than aggressively predatory, Chevy Chase’s character is already bored by the stuffiness of the country club president, played huffily by Ted Knight. In that company, isn’t Rodney’s breaking wind a kind of breath of fresh air? The cost of enduring a boor seems small compared to the cost of continuing with a bore. The vulgar outsider is at least honest in his vulgarities, whereas his persecutors are hypocritical in their disapproval. And meanwhile, to complete the allegory, the lovable Bill Murray character – the ethereal working-class caddy – is too beclouded and preoccupied by his own immediate fixations, from the Dalai Lama to the gopher, to pay much attention to the actual politics of the golf club, and sees all of the quarreling elites above him as interchangeable, on the whole exactly the same.
This is, more or less, the history of recent American life.
More to the point, the communal consensus of the country club – its “normative” character – had already broken down, though no one knew it until Rodney showed up in multicoloured pants. Norms grow up around laws but, as generations of conservative philosophers have insisted, against the emptiness of liberal legalism, in a real sense the norm is the law: The law is empty without a communal consensus to honour it. And clearly by 2016, the norms had gone.
Here again, ironically, conservative wisdom, long looked on unkindly by educated liberals, contains a persuasive truth. A kind of broken windows cycle takes hold: At a certain point, when everything has been reduced to a spectacle, and anyone can say anything – when a “shock jock” is entertaining, not out of order – anything really does go. Future generations of social historians, if any such can survive the apocalypse, will see how much Mr. Trump’s behaviour derives from and was, so to speak, justified in advance by the insult comics, whose manner he imitates. This does not make Sam Kinison or for that matter Howard Stern responsible for what has happened in the years since Mr. Trump was first elected; but it does suggest the social pattern. When Rodney breaks in, the lock on the clubhouse door has already been picked.
More than anything though, what distinguishes the allegorical version from the actual version – makes it not a comedy of manners but an avalanche of nihilism – was the governing conviction, which activated the retreat and eventual collapse, that the other side was not, as in the Caddyshack case, merely tiresome but was actively evil. And this was the second shocking and permanent feature of the case – the adherence to the so-called “Flight 93″ election that however bad Mr. Trump was, his opponents were so much worse that they were unimaginable in power. How anyone could have found a cautiously centrist and establishment figure like Hillary Clinton remotely to be such a figure is bewildering, but it was so.
And so, the really remarkable story is the collapse of any kind of reasoned opposition into pure apology, in which the speakers – as I know from private conversations – are both deeply ashamed and wildly belligerent. Knowing exactly who Mr. Trump is and what he’s worth, they feel (these very words occur again and again) that they “have no choice,” or are “left with no choice” but to support him. The cycle of behaviour that happened upon the release of the Access Hollywood tape on Oct. 7 left them free to know the truth and still tell a lie about it and not feel frightened of the consequences either for their country or their own conscience. Mr. Trump’s supporters don’t and can’t make rational cases for Mr. Trump. They argue exclusively from their fear and hatred of the other side, whom they inflate from the, at worst, ineffectual liberal politicians they are into demonic spectres of “wokeness” – an evil, as such evils tend to be, so awesome as to be indefinable. No historic parallel is absolute, but as students of authoritarianism, from Timothy Snyder to Anne Applebaum, have pointed out, this process of demonization and apology is universal in the rise of the authoritarian. It is, yes, what happened at Vichy. You eventually come to a point of nihilism when you can no longer distinguish between Adolf Hitler and Léon Blum – between what is vile and what is at worst merely vapid. The Vichy intellectuals came to that point by the same process of tumbling apologetics that Mr. Trump’s apologists follow and will live in shame forever as a consequence.
For the great and single lesson of the 20th century was that one could retain one’s self-respect only by being equally hard on the totalitarian temptations of the left and the authoritarian appetites of the right – and as unwilling to sponsor lies and depredations on behalf of “your” side as another, however perilously easy it always is to do so. Camus did, and Orwell did, and that is why we respect them still.
Even if American democracy somehow survives a second Trump term – and the test, of course, isn’t just whether we have another more or less free and fair election but whether the pluralist, liberal institutions of an open society persist‚ more or less unintimidated – the events of Oct. 7, 2016, have guaranteed the death of something fundamental yet hard to defend. The notion that there’s a certain inherent dignity to the democratic process – one that belongs not to politicians, who may demean it, but to the rest of us – is gone for good. We watch its further degradation every day. While authoritarians show that anything goes, liberals and defenders of democracy are left, it seems, very often defending mere “norms” and cultural regularities that in turn seem to many, including many younger citizens, as no more than stuffy country club preoccupations. We so easily expect the actual foundations of a free society to stand that we act out a game of undermining them in large part because we have no experience of what will happen when they are actually gone. And so democracy defenders look timid and conventional, while the radicals look comically courageous, even stylish. And, since all of us like to see conventional institutions undermined, as part of a deep human need for carnival and comedy, we have a much harder time seeing – and this again has been part of the ascent of authoritarianism everywhere from Argentina to Germany – that the mere norms and customs that get destroyed along the way in fact embodied values whose loss a free society cannot sustain.
Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it? Rather, those who are condemned, as we are now, to repeat history may yet learn from it. This is the lesson from another terrific Harold Ramis movie, Groundhog Day, in which the hero is condemned to repeat exactly the same day with exactly the same moments, over and over and over, as it seems we will now. He learns at the end – this is what gives him some power and gives us some hope – that you can navigate the repeated day more nimbly through its recurrences. Grace descends through repetition – or more precisely, through learning that life is always repetition‚ and intelligence lies in navigating it ever more vigilantly even as the same circumstances endlessly recur. Or as Bill Murray’s character recounts in Caddyshack apropos being stiffed for a tip by the Dalai Lama after a round of golf: “ ‘There won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’ So I got that going for me.”
Total consciousness in the aftermath of suffering is a small consolation, but real.