“What the hell just happened?” is the question that people around the world asked when they woke the morning after Election Day. The contributors to this volume offer a wide range of answers to this question. They also specify the conditions that precipitated its asking. In the process, they innovate theoretically and methodologically, suggesting how cultural sociology can explain the peculiar civil society and political processes that allowed Donald Trump to win and which continue to flourish in the Trump age.
Trump’s victory on November 8, 2016, punctured a discursive environment that promised its opposite. In the run-up to Election Day, opinion polls indicated that, though the race was close, Hillary Clinton would likely be the next president of the United States. One of the central themes of Trump’s campaign was his insistence that America’s political, media, and cultural elite were not only out of touch with “the forgotten men and women of America” but that they were sneering as they enriched themselves at the people’s expense. Trump’s victory appeared to perform his message. But did it? Trump won by an historically unimpressive margin, by more electoral votes than George W. Bush had to secure his wins, but by fewer votes than Barrack Obama garnered in his. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, gaining 2.8 million more votes nationwide. Exclude California and New York, however, and Trump won the remaining 48 states by 3 million more votes than Clinton. Beating the odds, Trump’s victory raised the specter of greater disruption to come.
The 2016 election was riddled with contingency, punctuated by frequent and unexpected invocations of illiberal symbols, and fueled by genre shattering performances. Its narrative flow was rapid and disjointed. The campaign season felt interminable, even as the horse race seemed to unfold at breakneck speed. Serious, potentially campaign-ending developments entered the election story at one moment, only to morph into mere distractions, drifting away without resolution the next. During its last four weeks, citizens witnessed the release of the Access Hollywood tape , FBI Director James Comey reopening and reclosing the Clinton email server investigation (just two days before Election Day!), and charges of Russian tampering in the election. If the presidency symbolizes America and its citizenry, does Trump’s victory suggest that a tidal shift in national identity and trajectory is underway?
The chapters in this volume describe core democratic institutions in crisis, their authority having grown deeply unsettled. They describe a fragmenting civil sphere, and they identify the emergence of a politics of rupture that draws its energy from the pleasures of irrationality . Alongside these portrayals of straining institutions, we find representations of culture structures which had receded from the political arena but in 2016 found forceful reanimation. Institutional fracture and symbolic resurgence illuminate the conditions that gave rise to Trumpism, and explain how the Trump campaign sparked new, more dangerous forms of identification and solidarity among a significant portion of the American public.
The defining features of the 2016 election are the extent to which noncivil criteria and anticivil symbolism flooded back into the civil sphere, and the discomfiting combination of adulation, on the one hand, and revulsion, on the other, that the campaigns precipitated among citizen audiences. The chapters in this volume detail a plethora of non- and anticivil narratives, as well as some civil ones, that coursed through the nation’s communicative institutions throughout the campaign season. To be sure, campaigns for public office always contain noncivil dimensions. Sometimes they contain anticivil ones, though in a vibrant civil sphere, these manifestations are met by strong measures of restriction and containment. Democratic politics succeeds to the extent that its noncivil features are invoked and narrated through recourse to the evaluative dimensions of its civil ideals; it succeeds to the extent that a broad and diverse set of constituencies within the civil sphere promptly and resolutely counter intrusions by anticivil discourses, and that these constituencies retain the capacity to unite in steadfast resistance in such instances.
We can better understand these distinctions, as well as how fractures, ruptures, and reanimated culture structures shaped the 2016 election, by turning to theory, in particular to one that explains how political campaigns represent citizens’ efforts to move representatives of their ideal versions of the community from the civil sphere into the state.
The Civil Sphere, Democratic Elections, and “Civilship”
A highly differentiated, late-modern democracy like the contemporary United States is an amalgam of multiple social spheres, Jeffrey Alexander (2006) theorizes in The Civil Sphere. Formed over time, social spheres cohere due to their members sharing particular interests, identities, or relations. Each of these spheres operates according to its own functional exigencies and in pursuit of its own goals. The spheres produce their own dimensions of inequality and power differentials, and they generate their own rules and norms for legitimating each. The state, political parties, the economy, family, on the one hand, and communities formed based on religion, race, ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, on the other—these are examples of noncivil spheres . The civil sphere is one independent sphere within this greater arena of spheres. It differs from the noncivil spheres in that its criteria for inclusion are derived not from the particularities (identities and interests) that define membership in the other spheres but instead from collective imaginings of abstract, universalistic characteristics, and civil capacities, ones that are believed to comprise the civil-good. We will return to this shortly.
In the contemporary United States, all of these spheres, civil and noncivil alike, are in motion in the sense that their boundaries are always shifting and the relations between them are in constant flux. Americans belong to and participate in a variety of noncivil spheres. They develop feelings of solidarity with members of the spheres they inhabit, and they peg part of their identities to the totems and codes these spheres manifest; for example, these shape how one signals or performs one’s gender, sexuality, or religious identity in public, for instance, or how closely one identifies with one’s work, or with a political party. Contemporary citizens are always composites of elements from multiple spheres, and they continue to embody these multiple elements as they navigate through the social arena.
As mentioned above, what makes the civil sphere unique is its criteria for inclusion. Access to and membership in the civil sphere are based on shared notions of the ideal citizen, and on characteristics that, in theory, any human is capable of embodying. This is one of the civil sphere’s most important features: its criteria for inclusion transcend the particularities that specify membership in noncivil spheres, such as those of gender, race, religion or ethnicity, or class, status, or party affiliation. In this sense, the civil sphere’s criteria are based on utopian representations of capacities for democratic participation; for example, on understandings that one is rational and reasonable, under control and not excitable, open and honest, and not secretive or deceptive. This does not lead to the conclusion that any and all people are welcome, however. In establishing criteria for inclusion, civil spheres simultaneously specify qualities that represent grounds for exclusion. These are, namely, the traits that are opposite of those that constitute the good citizen. The binary cultural code dictates that people who are characterized by irrationality , deceitfulness, and excitability, make for bad citizens. These too are characteristics that, in theory, any human is capable of embodying. Granting people who routinely manifest them access to the civil sphere could be devastating indeed.
As these criteria for inclusion and exclusion are based on an ideal, they are not and never will be fully realized in any empirical sense. The status of embodying the criteria—for any single person, group of people, and for the community more generally—is contingent and open to ongoing critique. This produces two consequences: (a) it creates a tension between the ideal and the real, which serves as a wellspring for ceaseless efforts aimed at renewal and repair, and (b) it means that membership and fitness for inclusion are not a matter of fact but one of social construction. Facts may be arrived at through presentation of evidence, examination, and debate, or what Habermas seemed to be getting at with his theory of communicative reason. But the codes of civil society are social and cultural characteristics and not phenomena that can be easily discerned, assessed, and verified. Matters of construction may demonstrate some processes of rational deliberation but foremost they involve performatives and social performance.
In real civil societies, members of core- and in-groups are alleged to be imbued with the positive, civil characteristics, and their primordial characteristics can become conflated with the abstract civil ideal. To put this in another way, one that resembles the meaning and experience of possessing citizenship, core -group members are attributed “civilship.” Members of out-groups, on the other hand, are deemed to be possessed with the opposite, uncivil qualities. As a consequence, core - and in-groups populate the civil sphere, and may actively work to dominate it, while out-groups or subalterns have only partial or severely restricted access.
The civil sphere is manifest in places and social spaces, but more so it is a structure of meaning and a feeling of membership and belonging. Civilship is about feeling respected as an individual member of the civil sphere, and it is about bestowing respect to others, even to those one does not know personally, simply because of their membership in the same idealized version of a greater community. While civilship refers to access to the civil sphere, full civilship means having an intuitive sense that one belongs, and a feeling that one is respected, and that these understandings are experienced in full and uninhibited ways. It means being free from hesitation or doubt that one might fail to embody the sphere’s criteria for inclusion in some absolute and perfect sense. A full member of a civil sphere feels free to speak, to advocate, and to criticize. Yet, to put it in de Saussure’s famous distinction, the experience of feeling like a member of the civil sphere is less about parole than it about langue; it is less about speech acts than it is about identifying with a discursive structure of meaning, one that a full member of the civil sphere comes to regard as representing common-sense principles that make good democratic citizens and institutions.
The civil sphere exists at a complex intersection. In social space, it is embedded within the conglomeration of noncivil spheres that are its contemporaries. Temporally, it carries within it the history of its development. Through this run its utopian and universalizing ideals, and the unachievable promise of its future perfection based thereon. From each of these emanate forces—be they material, institutional or symbolic—that produce at the site of intersection tensions, distortions, and contradictions, or, as in the case of the 2016 presidential election, fractures, ruptures, and reanimated culture structures.
Elections and “Civilship”
Contemporary democratic elections precipitate interactions between powerful social arenas, each organized by their own logics and interests. They mobilize state institutions to stage them, and civic organizations and legal institutions to guide, police, and, if need be, contest them. They activate donor networks. And they provoke a rapidly expanding and increasingly complex network of media organizations into action, which situate themselves between the campaigns and the public as hosts, critics, and narrators. Elections’ final acts are played by the campaigns’ target audiences, namely, by citizen voters themselves. The results determine the allocation of varieties of power and resources. Yet in a democracy, accumulating state power and controlling public resources are not considered legitimate ends in themselves, and typically they cannot be the expressed motives for pursuit of office. While elections do confer power and resources to the victors, people vote for one figure rather than another because they believe their chosen candidate will put the winnings to use translating into reality their particular expressed vision of the public good. Seen in this light, political campaigns crystallize shared expressions of the good life and imaginaries of an ideal community of citizens.
Over the long course of an American presidential campaign season, candidates become symbolic repositories of the community’s more compelling visions of its ideal self. A few candidates will appear to embody these visions, and to represent vehicles capable of carrying their supporters to their more perfect futures. The two candidates who win a major party nomination, and thus make it to the final round to compete in the general election, become something akin to symbolic captains, or figures who would skipper the ship of state and polity toward one of two promised lands. The general election establishes a winner and a loser, and in so doing, it grants one of these figures enormous power over the ship and its crew. Elections move the victor and her or his vision from the civil sphere into the state, centrally.
The 2016 US presidential election was a contest over ideal visions of civilship. The contest between these visions was waged through performances. Under the banner, “Stronger Together,” one vision championed diversity. It argued that solidarity could be built upon the recognition of difference, and it encouraged Americans to expand the boundaries of civil society in order to facilitate greater degrees of inclusion. Rather than eroding collective identity or weakening community ties, opening civil society to greater diversity would enjoin a wider variety of identities to contribute to the collective effort of strengthening and perfecting the American project. The Hillary Clinton campaign performed a vision of continuing and expanding upon the historically young but ascendant model of multicultural civilship.
A counter-performance, too, argued that it would strengthen and perfect the American project. It, however, championed a vision of restoration, and prescribed a pathway of restriction. This performance argued that in its march to ascendance, the multicultural vision had erected barriers to freedom of thought and speech, cultivated weakness, and inflamed social cleavages among the people. The national community had been reduced in strength and stature, and as a result, it faced a mortal threat to its very being. To restore the citizenry to health and vibrancy, to “Make America Great Again,” voters must choose to return to a model of civilship that, this vision insisted, was based on real and natural qualities, ones that governed the community’s rules of inclusion during prior, more prosperous and victorious times. The Donald Trump campaign performed an urgent call for Americans to return to a restrictive conception of American identity, one predicated on an assimilative model of civilship.
When asked over the course of primary season why they preferred Donald Trump to the other Republicans, the candidate’s supporters responded that he “tells it like it is,” he “says what everyo...