Faced with, at least, four years of Trump, and having knowledge of the insidious tactics he used to get there, we might take some consolation and hope in the complexity of human nature, especially as concerns the distance between fancy and reality that was at play in his campaign.
I would go back to a true believer who stood outside of a Trump rally and, in front of a reporter, waxed romantically about a day when you could go to the border, buy a 25$ permit, and get 50$ for each confirmed kill. He then retracted by saying he was just being “ironic”. And we should put in mind here that this suggested that he recognized that his statement was not socially acceptable: the very source of of the superego, This, of course, does not absolve him of the pleasure he seemed to take from that particular fantasy. And I would also note the connection between what people fancy and what they will eventually do. For instance, if you are in love with someone who constantly expresses a deep seated identification with Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”, your best bet, likely, is to get the fuck out of Dodge.
Still, breaking someone’s heart is something quite different than killing them. So you have to ask if that individual outside of the Trump rally, appealing to fancy and the radical strictly for the sake of radical, would, put in the situation he fantasized about, actually be willing to shoot Mexicans trying to cross the border –that is even at 50$ a head. Note, for instance, the difference between the fancy involved in listening to a hardcore rap song and actually engaging in the behavior it describes.
And I think we can apply this same understanding to Trump who, throughout his campaign, was like a beer-table demagogue spouting out his “if I were dictator for a year” wish list with the reinforcement of others around the table. And as Coleridge argued: it’s alright to build castles in the sky; the idea is to build foundations under them. We can only hope that Trump builds foundations under those castles that involve the American worker while actually facing the reality, as compared to his fancies, of those he would choose to exclude from his personal and phantasmal utopia.