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Not long ago, I had the uncomfortable privilege of reporting for jury duty, and spent three days in a downtown courtroom—cursing the inconvenience, waiting to be called, and yet coming away inspired by the process. From a genuine cross-section of New Yorkers of many colors and classes, a jury was selected that seemed likely to do justice in a criminal case in which a man might be found guilty and deprived of his freedom. Waiting in the courtroom—though, by the luck of the draw, never called—I listened as the judge, a Black woman with a clear, soothing, rather Ina Garten-like voice, worked hard to spot biases, uncover conflicts of interest, discover outside attachments, and probe inadequate English to discover just how adequate it might become, while insisting, gently but keenly, that all potential jurors examine their consciences to be sure that they could judge the case objectively, according to the law.
It was touching, even encouraging, at this moment in history, to hear such old-fashioned terms—“impartial,” “following the law,” even “conscience”—used so confidently, and the judge’s explanation of how the trial would happen, with those honest consciences consulting one another after invigilating the facts, was still more impressive.
The circumstances of the juries that are likely to be impanelled to hear criminal trials of Donald Trump, presumably in the near future—in federal court in Washington, D.C., and in state court in Fulton County, Georgia, among other locales—are, I’m assured, recognizably alike. (The conservative converso David Frum wrote recently about serving on such D.C. juries, and of how impressive they were in the pluralism of their makeup and the seriousness of their purpose.)
Nonetheless, an effort is under way, not all of it from nakedly self-interested sources, to treat Trump’s criminal indictments (in which he denies all charges) as one more act in a kind of ongoing masquerade, or political pantomime. The indictments, in this view, do not simply submit him to the scrutiny of the law and that mixed box of fellow-citizens. They’re a strike of one discrete class against another, with “élite” Americans bent on settling a score with Trump and, through him, with his long-neglected supporters. The educated élite is out to get a tribune of the volk.
In recent weeks, David Brooks, in the Times, gently and empathetically, and David Von Drehle, in the Washington Post, more caustically, have both aired this by now well-rehearsed idea. Brooks wrote that “the Trump indictments seem like just another skirmish in the class war between the professionals and the workers, another assault by a bunch of coastal lawyers who want to take down the man who most aggressively stands up to them,” and Von Drehle noted that “I don’t think most Trump supporters actually want to live in a world where an elderly sociopath has unfettered power. But they do want to live in a world where those currently in power are cowed and cautious rather than smug. Trump delivers on that.”
Yet the empirical evidence does not support the idea that Trump and Trumpism are principally moved by those disposed by planetary capitalism or meritocratic displacement, and the vision of Trump as the voice of the economically anxious has been exploded as many times as it has been offered. If there is a pattern to Trumpite support, it seems to be that it is strongest among people—white, for the most part—who are among the wealthiest in their own communities, and fear a loss of status in the world at large. (This is a classic pattern of the rise of support for far-right nationalist groups—it isn’t only an aggrieved underclass but also a threatened portion of the overclass that supports fascism.)
Second, it is facially absurd, as lawyers say, to break down the pro- and anti-Trump divisions into that of an élite class against an overlooked one. Trump is a billionaire supported by billionaires. Some of those billionaires have developed cold feet over time, realizing what Trump is; some have not; and some, like Rupert Murdoch, who is perhaps the most important, are agonized—not least by the sheer expense of backing Trump’s lies—but will fall in line when the time comes, and in many cases already have. As Anne Applebaum recently suggested, in The Atlantic, what moves conservatives to collaborate with fascists—or leftists to collaborate with Stalinists—is not a blind embrace of what they know to be evil but a growing acceptance of what had originally been unimaginable, particularly, it seems, when another political party is imagined as becoming utterly destructive in the absence of some ferocious counterweight.
John Eastman—the lawyer who is reported to be the unindicted co-conspirator No. 2 in the special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump, involving events surrounding January 6th, and who on Monday became, along with Trump, one of nineteen named defendants in an indictment on attempts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia brought by Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County—unintentionally voiced this fear in a recent interview. (The law firm representing Eastman said that his alleged activities in Georgia were “political, but not criminal,” and that Eastman would fight the indictment.) Eastman implied there was a right to revolution even if he and his allies accepted the fact that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, and the horrors he landed on, which could seemingly end up justifying such momentous change, included children being forced into drag-queen story time. Granted, not everyone likes Drag Queen Story Hour, but it seems like a mighty trivial event to end a democracy over. In any case, the idea that somehow liberals are responsible for bringing on right-wing authoritarianism is of a piece with the domestic abuser’s refrain “Look what you made me do.” Or, for that matter, with the idea that antisemitism would not exist if Jews did not provoke their own persecution.
One can find other fractures and divides on the issue, but the idea that they fall along neat class or meritocratic lines, or represent some confrontation of educated and entrepreneurial kinds, is false. Political movements are coalitions of many kinds, and coalitions take in warring sides of the same social and educational class. I recently wrote about Jonathan Healey’s new historiography of the English Civil War—the seventeenth-century one that preceded the United States’—and the revelation that the familiar explanation of its origins, that of an ascendant bourgeois class pitted against an embattled aristocratic class, has been emptied out. The ideological lines, it turns out, ran right down the middle of both “classes,” with some supposed members of the bourgeoisie being staunch Royalists, and some in the aristocracy being the most open to anti-monarchical ideas—and, eventually, actions. The Civil War was, Healey writes, “a clash of ideologies, as often as not between members of the same class.”
So the fight in that war actually was over the ideas and beliefs that the people who fought it said it was: religious values, political convictions, ideas about the state and ideas about the individual, and, most powerfully, ideas about judicial process against a counter-ideal of absolutist obedience. The ideas in seventeenth-century London were distributed strangely, widely, and often eccentrically. But people held genuine beliefs, and the history is most lucidly understood as their clash.
In this country, at this most critical moment since our own Civil War, the question is not whether élites are condescending to the people, or whether those people and their country are somehow irrevocably or structurally racist. It’s a conflict between coalitions, each of which envelops the privileged and the underprivileged, the high-status and the status-threatened, the wealthy and the poor. It’s a conflict about values and beliefs, in which both sides—and, more important, each person—determine their own views and are responsible for their own choices. In the end, it is a fight, Lincoln’s fight, perpetual in American history, between those who actually believe in liberal democratic institutions and those who don’t. And the Trump indictments are a case that will involve individual consciences lined up on either side of a single question—Lincoln’s question. Can a nation conceived in liberty resist the temptations of tyranny?
The judge in the case that I didn’t get to serve on as a juror was right; ultimately, a democratic country depends on you consulting your own conscience, not your clan interests, and on questions of right and wrong and the legal process. It’s a high standard but—this is perhaps the best lesson of jury duty—a surprisingly obtainable one. Making civic judgements is a collective effort, cutting across kinds. It’s why, once in the jury box, we can see one another only as citizens. ♦
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