The U.S. presidential election of 2016 was perplexing and anxiety-provoking, even confabulating. And like many Americans, I have been racking my mind as well as mining the thoughts of others to uncover the answer as to why Donald Trump was elected the next president of the United States. What forces within the events of the recent present and the near future allowed such an unexpected, unforeseen and bewildering shift in direction of America to transpire?
Sifting through the current cacophony tweets, mails, articles and essays sheds but minimal light. Feeling stymied by the dysphoric contemporary discourse, I yielded to the words of the philosopher George Santayana, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Maybe the persistence of my memory might spawn an answer.
Delving into one's personal and communal past is an amorphous challenge. Dissecting book-learned, historical events such as the philosophical roots of the French Revolution or the written firebrandery of Adolf Hitler; revisiting the empirical experiences of the Vietnam anti-war movement; or wandering through my life as a physician. But my college education, my political education and my medical education yielded nothing.
So I looked to my ideological maturation; to those worldly philosophers from whom I gathered nuggets of real truth that form the framework upon which I measure myself and those around me. Traveling from Marx and Engels, through Freud and Jung, through Reich and Roheim, eventually stopping to rest with Marcuse and Hoffer. It was the germane writings of the longshoreman cum moral and social philosopher Eric Hoffer that brought my journey to an end. Upon leafing through his tome, The True Believer, words filled my head that, for now, satisfied my quest:
"Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope. It matters not whether it be hope of a heavenly kingdom, or of a heaven on earth, of plunder and untold riches, of fabulous achievement or world domination. If the [demagogues] win a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope."
The Meaning of Trump is revealed through the eternal power of "Let's make America great again"; The Meaning of Trump springs from the Reservoir of Hope.