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  • Confidence manBreaking the spell of Trump the brand
  • Alison Hearn (bio)

In the days following Donald Trump's election, I found myself sporadically weeping. I teared up while speaking in front of a room full of students. I wept at the grocery store and at the doctor's office. My emotional reaction seemed extreme. But then friends told me that they too had had unaccountable emotional responses to the election-tears, shaking, insomnia. After the first six months of Trump's administration, the tears have been replaced by a terrifying kind of vertigo for many of us, induced by a dizzying array of racist and sexist appointments, postures and policies and a steady barrage of self-aggrandising lies, incompetence, petulance, baseless accusations, wastefulness and self indulgence, as well as the certain knowledge that, behind it all, there is just … nothing. In hindsight it's become clear that the extreme and visceral responses to Trump's election were, quite simply, the symptoms of whatever faith we had left in electoral politics being fully and finally shattered. Trump's election severed us entirely from any flimsy pretence, conscious or unconscious, that traditional politics still matters. The (neo)liberal democratic experiment in the United States has failed, as it is failing in Europe and Canada. Polite company refers to it as a 'democratic deficit', but we all know the truth. After Trump, all bets are off.

The birth of an industry

To be sure, this is not the first time American politics have been disrupted by xenophobic political outsiders striving to restore the country to some imagined former glory. In the 1850s, politics as usual was disrupted by the sudden emergence (and then disappearance) of the American Party, popularly known as the 'Know Nothings', a nativist party with origins in a secret society that embraced clandestine [End Page 79] handshakes and conspiracy theories, and required its members to state they 'knew nothing' when asked publicly about politics. The Know Nothings were virulent nationalists and profoundly anti-immigrant, specifically anti-Catholic. They arose at a time when the two major political parties (at that time the Whigs and the Democrats) were seen as being in the pockets of industry and unresponsive to the social problems of regular people. In response they offered a potent populism steeped in demagoguery. Running on a claim that the political game was rigged, by the mid-1850s the Know Nothings had elected over 100 congressmen and eight governors, and had come to dominate a number of state legislatures. But their decline was just as quick as their rise: by the end of the 1850s the Know Nothings were politically dead, disgraced by their demagogic leaders, who had seen government as an opportunity to fill their own pockets.1

During the heyday of the Know Nothings, Herman Melville, then living in Massachusetts, one of their strongholds, was writing The Confidence-Man: A Masquerade. Set on the Mississippi steamer Fidele on April Fool's Day, the novel narrates the interactions between different passengers and a mysterious shape-shifting individual (or group of individuals, we are never sure) who is the confidence man of the title. In the course of impressing on each of his interlocutors the importance of trust, the conman tries to gain some small advantage from them – a haircut or a few dollars. In the end, however, he appears to have 'accumulated' very little and the reader is left uncertain about who the character actually is and what he wants: is he simply in it for the joy of the con/versation?

Upon its publication, The Confidence-Man was criticised as plot-less and unreadable. As it proceeds through a series of digressions and stories within stories, refusing to provide a clearly delineated protagonist or moral message, the novel's cryptic style and content continue to disorient readers to this day. Regarded by some as a deconstructive text avant la lettre, The Confidence-Man is seen by Jackson Lears as producing a 'devastating assault on all the cultural idioms that mid-nineteenth century Americans hoped might stabilize the sorcery of market relations: sentimentality, rationality, mimesis, above all, the belief in a transparently communicative language and plainspoken autonomous self...

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