A 1995 Novel Predicted Drumpf’s America

Trying to lift my gaze to the moon and the vacuum of space, only to be brought back to the vacuum of Drumpf's America. I met William Gass years before he wrote this.

...His narrator’s memories begin with his bigoted father, who scorned the ideas — “free trade, for instance” — that his son learned at school, while dismissing immigrants as “parasites, scabs, seducers” and ranting against “those who let these people into the country in the first place, when there were few enough jobs.” Gass methodically depicts what he elsewhere called the “fascism of the breakfast table,” as domestic combatants “crow over every victory as if each were the conquest of a continent, grudge every defeat as if it were the most meanly contrived and ill-deserved bad luck a good sport ever suffered,” in performances that can expand outward to define an entire culture. He also devotes many pages to the small towns over which “sunsets were displayed in the deepest colors of catastrophe, the dark discordant tones of the Last Drumpf.”

As Kohler recalls the resentments of his father’s generation — “They were America, damn it, and Americans should come first” — he offers a word of advice to those who have been abandoned by history: “Don’t invest in a future you will never see, a future which will despise you anyway, a future which will find you useless. Pay for your own burial plot. Get the golf clubs out. Die with a tan your daughter’s thighs would envy.” This sense of betrayal, which can shade into vengefulness, leads to a radical strain of politics that Gass later described in an interview: “Fascism is a tyranny which enshrines the values of the lower middle class, even though the lower middle class doesn’t get to rule. It just gets to feel satisfied that the world is well-run. It likes symbols of authority and it likes to dress up. It likes patriotic parades.”

In the novel’s most prophetic passages, Kohler fantasizes about forming a movement called the “Party of the Disappointed People.” He draws pictures of its insignia and merchandise (including special caps) and explains: “What the other parties avoid, we shall embrace. We shall be the ones with the handshakes like the Shriners, the symbols, the slogans as if we were selling something, the shirts, the salutes and the flags.” By definition, its constituents feel disenfranchised by life, so they need powerful collaborators: “If we were to recover a bit of pride, we might be able to make ourselves into harassing gangs. So we shall make our pitch to the huddled elites, the ins who are on the outs.”

...After “The Tunnel” was published, Gass made its true subject clear: “I’m not talking about Germany, I’m talking about the United States.” The novel ends without a solution, but Gass had once hinted at a potential way out. In his 1968 novella “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” he evokes a Midwestern town in which tribalism transcends mere selfishness or greed: “I have known men, for instance, who for years have voted squarely against their interests.” Politics is treated as a sporting event, with voters lined up on opposing sides, and their need to see themselves as winners may turn out to be their unlikely salvation: “They tend to back their country like they back their local team: They have a fanatical desire to win; yelling is their forte; and if things go badly, they are inclined to sack the coach.”