Now who’s being naive?

John Ganz has a good piece responding to the same pro-Trump voters Paul responded to earlier today. [Personal to Paul and anyone who hasn’t seen Breaking Bad but is interested: do NOT stop before the end. Trust me, season 5 of The Wire will not be your reference point after you’ve seen “To’hajiilee” and “Ozymandias.”] The critical point — which the mob analogy makes manifest — is that the “swamp” Trump and his supporters want drained is “liberal democracy, especially anything involving equal citizenship”:

Trump talks and acts like a mafioso. He’s not trying to hide it. He has compared himself to Al Capone frequently. The New York Times reported last week, “Trump Leans Into an Outlaw Image as His Criminal Trial Concludes,” This is not all just theater, either. He really comes from the world of the mob. His lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn also served us house counsel to the Gambinos. The deal for the concrete for Trump Plaza was worked out with Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese family, in Cohn’s living room. The Trump family’s political patron in Brooklyn was Democratic boss Meade Esposito, a close associate of Paul Vario, who was the basis for Paul Sorvino’s character in Goodfellas. None of this is terribly exceptional: To do business in New York at that time, particularly in construction, you were gonna have to deal with the mob. That’s just how things worked. And that was Trump’s education in political philosophy, as it were: “This is how things work.” Everything’s a racket: You’re either on the outside, a chump, or on the inside, making it.

Mafias and the like are secret societies. Rackets work for a closely knit group that exploits an out group. But what Trump offers is the clubbiness of the mob for the masses. He offers a big hug and a kiss. He brings you into his “family:” “I’m gonna tell you how it really works and with me you’re gonna be rich and powerful. And fuck everyone else.” He offers protection: as “Jonathan” remarks, he’s “the guy who does bad things but does them on behalf of the people he represents.” He might kick the shit out of the other guy, but to you, the guy on his side, he’s warm, gregarious, and fun: he winks and slaps you on the back.

For these voters, the “system” has failed, so we need Trump. But what is the system? Basically all the universalistic promises of liberal democracy, be they the notions of the rule of law, formal political equality, or market exchange. To Trump those ideas are bullshit, the nice sounding lies of the big shots. In all of those frameworks, individuals are supposed to encounter other individuals as free and equal citizens endowed with the same inalienable rights. A harmonious society supposedly develops from the interplay of their diverse interests. But what if it doesn’t? As Marx once pointed out, in capitalist society, “under [the] “rule of law”, the law of the jungle lives on under a different guise.” To many, life feels more like a continuous struggle for survival rather than a social contract providing for reciprocal rights and obligations. Margaret Thatcher once said, “There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” What Trump says, in effect, is, “There is no such thing as society. There are rackets. And I can help you get in on one.” And, as a corollary, “There are no contracts. There’s what you can get away with.”

This is the key difference between Trumpism and traditional conservatism, which still paid lip service to minimal, formal universal mediums like the rule of law, citizenship, and the market. To Trump those words are just bullshit, the nice sounding lies of the big shots, the pezzonovante as Vito Corleone calls them. In the Trumpanschauung, society is not some meritocracy where there’s sportsmanlike competition and everyone gets a fair crack. No, it’s a nasty, brutish place where sometimes you have to be “not very nice,” as he likes to say. “Racket connotes a society in which individuals have lost the belief that compensation for their individual efforts will result from the mere functioning of impersonal market agencies,” as the Frankfurt School political theorist Otto Kirchheimer once wrote.

Another relevant comparison to Trump is Bernie Madoff, whose most sophisticated investors had to know that his consistently high-but-not-too-high returns irrespective of the direction of the market weren’t on the level, but assumed that they were in on it rather than being the marks. Trump is as fanatically committed to upward wealth distribution as Paul Ryan, but is better at convincing people who stand to lose that he’s actually on their side. In this sense, Rudy Guiliani — still expecting Trump to compensate him for legal services rendered — is the quintessential Trump supporter.