I've been thinking recently about Trump's obvious difficulty with the democratic process. There's been a lot of talk about the fact that he hasn't fulfilled his campaign promises and that his main policy accomplishments have involved executive orders and/or appointing extreme right-wing capitalists as advisors or cabinet members (often, in the case of advisors, to positions that don't involve Senate approval). It's pretty obvious that he didn't expect the presidency to be this hard because he expected it to be a lot like what he already did, which was to be the CEO of a business empire. That's essentially an autocratic position--CEOs can and do make unilateral decisions based on whatever it is that they think or feel, and have them carried out.  That's what Trump's been used to, and even in its most degraded form, being the president is not like that. You have to negotiate with Congress, you have to take advice, you have to pay at least lip service to the idea that other government forces are intended to be a counter-balance to your power. Trump clearly didn't realize this ahead of time, and part of me thinks that's why he made all those campaign promises. Put up a wall? Sure, he could put up a wall! Easy peasy! Just tell people to build one! But it turns out that the money involved requires other people's approval. He seems to react to each such discovery with a kind of peeved astonishment--how could this be? How can a judge deny the president's orders? How can Congress ignore what he clearly stated was going to happen?

It's made me think a lot, weirdly, about pre-existing conditions and what individuals presume about the levels of control people have or should have over the circumstances of their lives. Trump, because he has always been rich, has assumed that he should be able to unilaterally change the circumstances of his life just based on what he wants. I think this view plays heavily into the Republican argument about healthcare--yes, there's a big chunk of it that's just disingenuous propaganda, because they are being paid off by big business. But I also think wealthy people in the Republican party (and among their donors) find it hard to conceive of having things happen to you. (And the Democrats, in their overall refusal to push for progressive economic reform, I think suffer from the same blind spot). Of course, even Republicans die. But the idea that you could be helpless before a disease or condition in a way that had more to do with being able to afford treatment than with the ultimate will of God is, I think, inconceivable to them. They can always DO something about an illness, because they're wealthy. At the level at which they can't do something, it's because God has for some reason decided the sick person's fate (based, of course, on whether or not the person was worthy somehow). I think that's how they imagine healthcare.

To those of us in the middle-class, it's a little different, obviously--and I've been thinking, especially, about the widespread expressions of horror around the issue of pre-existing conditions. There was a huge public outcry when Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama opined a couple of weeks ago that people who don't have pre-existing conditions are people who have lived "good lives" and therefore should be rewarded with cheaper health insurance. We have this intense reaction to that issue (which I think is warranted), and the basis of it seems to be that it's not fair to penalize people for pre-existing conditions, because they can't help it. Pre-existing conditions are no one's fault, and the market should recognize that. Of course to the market that's ludicrous--the issue isn't whether fault is involved, it's whether certain patients cost more than others to insure, and how they can swing the most money into their coffers. But it's interesting to me that we take it for granted that the question of personal control should matter--that you shouldn't be penalized for what you can't control--and how different that can look from perspective to perspective. Trump probably looked at previous presidents and wondered why they didn't just make people do whatever the hell they wanted them to do--although, as he is currently finding out, a president has far less control over the actions of others than a CEO does. It's a matter of positioning. In the same way, the middle-class has far less control over the kinds of health care it can access than the wealthy--and we also, realistically, have less control over the kind of incidents that impact our lives and health in general. From our perspective, it's not our fault--from Rep. Brook's perspective, we should have lived better lives. But then what about the kinds of pre-existing conditions that the white middle-class assumes are within people's control because that would be true for us? Poverty, realistically, is largely a pre-existing condition in this country. Geography is a pre-existing condition. Access to education is a pre-existing  condition. We say, well, why couldn't you just get another job? Why couldn't you just move? Why didn't you find another school for your kid if she wasn't doing well there? Those things are within our control, most often, the same way quality health care is within the control of people who are wealthy (and, I might add, who are male--even wealthy women in the US are generally getting health care that is less good than what they would get in other developed countries). We base our assumptions of what other people can do based on what we can do, and then we apportion fault or blamelessness based on that--but it's pretty ridiculous. It's true, having cancer or chronic depression or diabetes doesn't mean you've lived a bad life--but neither do all the conditions attendant on being born to poor parents or being born with a particular skin color in a particular country or town. It's assuming that the conditions of your life pertain in other people's that leads to that kind of faulty reasoning. Of course, I do it, we all do it, but maybe it's worth thinking about.

It also might be worth considering why this issue exists in this country to the extent that we are currently seeing it does (and we're seeing it partly because Trump, unlike previous presidents, has made no claim to middle-class culture or values. He doesn't look like the rest of us, but he's also not trying to do that). And how that huge gap between the supposed mainstream (the white middle-class) and Trump, as well as the other huge gap between the "mainstream" and marginalized communities, impacts the way the country runs. I've been reading a book by Elizabeth Janeway, The Powers of the Weak, which I recommend. (Tip of the type to The Neglected Books Page, where I found out about this book). It was apparently dismissed in the 80s, when it was written, as a feminist tract (not that there's anything wrong with a feminist tract from my perspective) but her analysis really has much broader applications. One of the things she talks a lot about is the impact on systems of governance when people on both sides of the system (governing and governed) come to see the powerless as qualitatively different than the powerful because they can't control the same things. What's wrong with you, that you can't control your access to healthcare? Of course, access to healthcare is a function of power, and so that's really like asking, what's wrong with you, that you aren't powerful? It hasn't been a problem for us! The powerful are powerful because they have power.  The more impossible it is for the powerless to obtain power, the more both powerful and powerless come to see themselves as completely different kinds of creatures....and the more the consent of the governed becomes a kind of sham. Because the powerful no longer believe that the people they govern either deserve to give or are capable of giving real consent. They're not capable of much else, after all, are they? Just look at how they can't get their healthcare/education/housing together! The scenery of consent is still part of democracy--we vote and go to rallies and such--but it no longer occurs to the governing body that the people they govern are in fact people, like them, with whom they are supposed to have some kind of reciprocal relationship. As a point of comparison, you can think about the relationship between Congress-people and their donors,which continues to be reciprocal. The concerns of one are taken seriously by the other because it's assumed there's mutual benefit involved. Ideally, the consent of the governed is also a benefit to politicians, and they would respond to it by conferring return benefits. In actual fact, however, the appearance of consent is created by those with the power to, say, pass voter ID laws or fund campaign ads. The consent of the governed is considered something to extract, like oil, rather than something offered in the context of human exchange.

The point is, you cannot maintain anything other than a sham of democracy in the face of the depth of inequality that exists in this country. And I think that's one thing we should be noticing about the debacle that is the Trump presidency. Inequality does not only impact people we consider marginalized--there is a gap between the middle-class and people like Trump, and it impacts our citizenship rights in real ways. But also, if the gap between the middle-class and marginalized communities is as big as the one between us and Trump, and engenders as much unwarranted dismissal of other people's real concerns (by us)--maybe this is a new way to become aware of it.