We wanted it darker, apparently: Leonard Cohen saw the second coming of Trump all along

Almost everything you could possibly say about Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has been said by now. The big problem with Trump as a symbol of America’s tragicomic decline is that he seems fictionally, improbably perfect for that role; the symbolism is painfully obvious, although that doesn’t deprive it of all resonance or meaning. 

I covered Trump’s first presidential campaign back in 2016, which both feels like a lifetime ago and like the day before yesterday. (Time! It doesn’t seem to work the way it used to.) One of the songs in constant rotation at his endlessly delayed rallies that year was "You Can’t Always Get What You Want," until the lawyers for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (or for whoever owned the rights to their songwriting catalog) made him stop. It struck me then, and strikes me now, as carrying a ham-fisted double meaning: Nearly nobody got what they wanted from Trump’s first presidency, but one could argue, at least for a while, that “we” — meaning both Americans and the people of the world — got a lesson we both needed and deserved.

So now what? With Trump reinstalled atop an administration of fully subservient toadies, apparently prepared to pursue a breathtaking range of unconstitutional, delusional or ill-advised policies, is it now clear that we need a different and harsher lesson, with potentially irreversible consequences? I don’t know; history will judge, and all that. But a different song suggests itself to me now: the final hit single from Leonard Cohen, the late Canadian Jewish prophet of doom and longtime observer of American folly, who never needed a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. 

"You Want It Darker" was released in October of 2016, less than three weeks before Cohen died, at age 82, on Nov. 7.  Donald Trump was elected president the next day. That coincidence was certainly noticed at the time; I hardly know what to say about it now. 

Like the best of Cohen’s songs, "You Want It Darker" carries an undercurrent of thrilling subversion, the sense of expressing forbidden but undeniable thoughts. It’s also a song that comments on itself, and establishes some ironic distance from its own lyrical ambition, another Cohen trademark. (Hence the nearly infinite number of mediocre covers of "Hallelujah," which somehow have not ruined it entirely.)

That certainly wasn’t the first time a Leonard Cohen song seemed to prefigure events that had not happened, or to capture a global state of mind before it fully coalesced. Most famously, there was "The Future," released in 1992 at the moment of liberal democracy’s supposed global triumph, which offered an eerie forecast of a rootless new century, struggling with the loss of existential meaning:

Give me back the Berlin Wall
Give me Stalin and St. Paul
Give me Christ
Or give me Hiroshima

Well, here we are. Donald Trump is surely not worthy of comparison with Jesus Christ or the atomic bomb — although he’d be delighted with either or both — but he just as surely represents the collective decision of just enough Americans: We want it darker. 

To resort to another Trump-era cliché, every inquisition into exactly who’s to blame for this unmitigated disaster has to begin by looking in the mirror. I’m willing to endorse, to varying degrees, indictments of the hapless Democratic Party, the self-torpedoing Kamala Harris campaign, the hubris of Joe Biden, the self-soothing mainstream media, the peaced-out “apolitical” nonvoters and the outmoded superstitions of Merrick Garland. (Especially those, in fact.) 

But it’s hard to avoid a more fatalistic conclusion: We — and by that unacceptable term of art, I really do mean all of us — were offered a crucial opportunity, with Trump’s first election, to reckon with some very big questions about the past and the future. We were asked to consider our history, and specifically the frustrating, never-to-be-finished project of American democracy, and to consider how we would use it to move forward. To put it in Cohen’s terms, exactly how much Stalin and St. Paul we wanted, or were willing to tolerate. We were asked, at very close to the last moment, to face what may be the greatest crisis in the history of human civilization, and to make choices that could yet redeem a livable planet for our descendants and the miraculous abundance of other living things.

Joe Biden gets about half a brownie point for trying to tell us those things, in his incomprehensible mumble. We could wear ourselves out listing our now-former president’s tragic flaws, but perhaps the saddest was that he believed we were big enough and wise enough and strong enough for the moment. We were not. There is no other conclusion to draw. 

Sure, I get it: If you’re reading this, then you and I could choose to congratulate ourselves for not actively desiring this outcome, and for doing whatever we did to prevent it. Let’s not bother, OK? We transparently did not do enough, and that goes a long way back; it wasn’t about holding more white-dude Zooms for Kamala or hectoring your neighbors about inflation not being real. 

With our boundless narcissism, Americans always tend to think that the whole world, and all of history, revolves around us as God’s favored nation or whatever. This time it’s at least a little bit true: Our national dance between Sex and Death, going back to the first Puritan refugees and the devil-haunted woods of New England, seems increasingly weighted toward self-destruction. Our former faith in manifest destiny always included another possibility; let’s call it a premonition of manifest doom. Even as it gnaws out its own innards, the United States of America remains the greatest economic and military power in world history, and its collapse will touch literally everyone in the world. 

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I suppose there are people who actually buy into Donald Trump’s ludicrous rhetoric as substance, rather than pure performance. As his spiritual ancestor P.T. Barnum observed, there’s one born every minute. But I don’t think most Trump voters are stupid or entirely detached from reality. They don’t believe he can miraculously bring down the price of groceries, or that deporting a lot of custodians, dishwashers and agricultural workers, along with their entire families, will somehow improve their own lives. 

They don’t know how much of Trump’s so-called agenda he and his minions can actually accomplish (since nobody knows that), and they don’t especially care. You’ve heard all this before: They feel excluded from America’s promise of universal prosperity, and they’re not entirely wrong. (News flash: They blame the wrong people for that.) They’re not interested in abstract concepts like democracy and fascism, and don’t believe we have much of a democracy anyway. They are one million percent not-wrong about that, and may indeed have a clearer grasp of that problem than the horrified Democrat-voting bourgeoisie who have convinced themselves that this isn’t who we are. As one tireless right-wing correspondent who emails Salon several times a day often puts it, “Yikes Lib/Dems! Ouch Lib/Dems!”

A large proportion of Trump supporters, I suspect, had no coherent program in mind and just wanted to f**k s**t up, in the immortal phrase previously used by anarchists. But whatever motives you want to impute to the tens of millions of Americans who voted for the guy — and the millions and millions more around the world who look at him and say, oh yes king — they have led us to this national inflection point. Such a dopey phrase! But accurate! We now face a re-reckoning, much dumber and more dangerous than the first one, with no guarantee we will pass the test this time. We wanted it darker, and we got it: The situation is both tragic and hilarious, and the only way through is through both doors. Leonard Cohen has been dead for eight years, and could not possibly have seen this coming, but of course he did.