Trump's first year in one word

The few picks seem to follow a chilling but logical evolution

It’s weird to think that one year ago today Barack Obama was still the president. Michelle Obama was decorating the White House with happy snowmen and gingerbread dogs instead of transforming the East Colonnade into a hell-bound gullet of witch fingers, apparently our new tradition, and the president of the United States somehow made it through the entire week without insulting a single 90-year-old Native American war hero.

Many of us were angry and terrified but still energized about things like vote audits and faithless electors. We hoped the system might have a fail-safe to protect us from our worst selves — a flash-frozen grown-up to defrost in case of emergencies. Now, a year wiser and few thousand older, in too many ways we are still waiting. It hasn’t clicked with the necessary urgency that we are the grown-ups. We are still frozen.

Every year, Dictionary.com chooses one word, “a symbol of the year’s most meaningful events and lookup trends,” to be the Word of the Year. The past few picks seem to follow a chilling but logical evolution. In 2015 the Word of the Year was broad and neutral — “identity” — issues of racial and gender injustice having finally come closer to becoming national priorities and weathered a ghastly but predictable (and still developing) backlash. Two thousand fifteen was a difficult year, but it was a year of progress.

By the end of 2016, as Trumpism seized the wheel, our national conversation on identity sharpened to a sinister specificity: that year’s word was “xenophobia.” Two thousand sixteen was a year of us versus them, of villains making their plans clear, of straight, white, Christian identity politics moving to supplant everyone else.

This year, the Word of the Year zooms out, implicating millions of us. The word is “complicit.” Two thousand seventeen is a year of reckoning.

Searches for the definition of “complicit” spiked in May, Dictionary.com tells us, when Ivanka Trump was asked to respond to accusations of complicity on “CBS This Morning.” This is one of my favorite Trump-family anecdotes, if one can be said to have a “favorite” venomous snake biting your child on the face: “If being complicit is wanting to be a force for good and to make a positive impact,” Ivanka said, “then I’m complicit.”

I mean, sure, if complicit means that you are 7-foot-1 and love Gold Bond Medicated Foot Powder, then Shaq is complicit. If complicit means an 18th-century wooden shoe, then I have some Dutch klompen Robert Mueller should talk to.

Unfortunately for the first daughter, despite what her father has taught her, even the very rich do not have the right (yet) to redefine basic English words so they can weasel out of accountability for abetting the rise of Nazism in America. The actual definition of complicit is having “involvement with wrongdoing,” and Ivanka Trump is certainly complicit by that measure. (Shaq, as far as I know, is in the clear.) Unfortunately for the rest of us, the rise of Trumpism is a systemic issue — the conditions that made it possible were fostered by our system, not in spite of it — which means that we’re culpable, too.

Complicity, obviously, is a spectrum. Ivanka Trump, for example, is more complicit than your neighbor who voted for Gary Johnson, who is more complicit than your cousin who supported Hillary Clinton but still laughs at sexist jokes. She’s presumably less complicit than her father, although one of the scariest things about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t even seem to be at the top of his own complicity food chain.

It is vital to catch the big fish here — those in power trying to dismantle net neutrality, affordable health care, abortion access, immigrants’ rights, religious freedom, anti-discrimination legislation, environmental regulation, any semblance of a reasonable tax code and our national sense of shared humanity — but it’s just as important to remember that Trumpism didn’t spring out of nowhere. Social media companies let it happen. Politicians let it happen. White Americans let it happen.

We didn’t take to the streets when Republicans were rolling back voting rights in plain sight. We let labor unions dwindle. We ignored our racist uncles at Thanksgiving. We pretended that “apolitical” wasn’t a political stance. We didn’t bother to call our representatives. We turned activists into clowns. We left sexism and racism on the table as viable debate topics. We made sure to hear “both sides.” Millions of us voted for Trump on purpose.

If we manage to get rid of Trump (or Harvey Weinstein or Leon Wieseltier or Louis C. K. or Matt Lauer) without profoundly addressing the culture and power structure that made his success possible, we’re just going to end up with a smarter, savvier, more effective Trump. And we’re barely surviving the incompetent version.

The opposite of complicity isn’t apology — it’s fixing what you broke.

©2017 The New York Times News Service