|
from the New Deal to Donald Trump |
|
|
XXX
. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through
violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . .
. [Among humans] . . . primate-style dominance is periodically
overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again
and again.*
|
|
ecce homo:
a new biocultural variant emerges
|
XXXX
Reading and Modernity:
the Biocultural niche of Progressivism
|
Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard."
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
|
11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
|
|
semiotic webs/
biocultural niches/
cognitive performativities
|
Excerpts from Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)
Sinha, C. (2021). Artefacts, symbols, and the socio-cultural dynamics of niche construction. The Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution.
Planer and Sterelny, From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language (MIT Press, 2021)
Excerpts from Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)
Notebook (Philosophy)
|
|
"There is no
equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the
complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate
procedural habits of formal thinking."
from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2
Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and
deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate
individuals perform cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered
two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the
other in groups.
There is no
equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the
complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate
procedural habits of formal thinking. . . . Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on
the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several
different
technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields. These
skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the
person's mind carries out its work.
|
|
New Deal and Trump as two discursive webs
Now
compare the discussion among these UAW cadre with the discursive
performativity of Donald Trump as described in Rucker and Leonnig's
account of
Trump’s meeting in the Tank with the Joint Chiefs in A Very Stable Genius. ("the tank meeting had so
thoroughly shocked the conscience of military leaders that they tried
to keep it a secret")
Walter
Reuther is the bildungsproletarian in the room. The members of
the
Murray Body committee were plebeian upstarts. Reuther, born into
the
Socialist civilization of the midwest, had been a student at Wayne
State University. The ad hoc committee members were most likely
high school graduates. Interview with Kraus re. cog-disc. comparison of Mortimer and the activist pleb. upstarts
in both cases we observe the
unfolding of cognitive-discursive processes within well-defined
rational-bureaucratic frameworks* where certain kinds of
cognitive-discursive performative competencies were to be expected (normativity).
*Also, Fiona Hill's account of Trump's cognitive-discursive performativity in ‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin’ (New York Times, April 11, 2022)
|
|
New Deal/UAW Discursive Performativities, 1936-39
|
The competitive situation in the spring industry
Minutes of the
Murray Body Committee Local 2 at Executive Board Meeting, April 26,
1939, Toledo Ohio, Addes Collection, Box 14.11, Reuther Archives.
The members of the Local 2 Committee were:
Brother Hall from Spring &
Wire
Brother McDonnell from Stamping
Brothers Sanders and McWilliams
from Trim
Brother Smith from Frame (Ecorse plant)
Brother Manini,
Vice President
Also present was Executive Board member Walter Reuther
|
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - , October 1, 1936: Campaign Address (speech file 930)
Oelwein, Iowa, October 9, 1936 - Western Campaign Trip - Informal remarks (speech file 935),
Madison Square Garden, October 31, 1936
Campaign Speech, Audio, Transcript
Fireside Chat #13, June 24, 1938 - "Report to the Nation on National Affairs" (part 2) (speech file 1138B), View Online |
|
Trump/GOP Discursive Performativities, 2017-19
The headline--"he's a fucking moron"--is from A Very Stable Genius, chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience," p. 138B.
A close reading of chapter 9, "Shocking the Conscience," can be found here.
The most striking aspects of the Tank meeting are the primitive
cognitive performativity of Trump and his brutish behavior
toward the Joint Chiefs.
|
|
|
Thermidor and Patrimonialism
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
Gareth Stedman Jones, Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion (Penguin 2016), Bonaparte and Bonapartism," pp. 334-344.
from Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011
Patrimonialism,
until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced
by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the
histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be
challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms
throughout the world.
Philippe-Joseph Salazar, "Reconnaissances of Marx", Philosophy & Rhetoric, Vol. 48, No. 4, 2015
|
|
Thermidor: May 1937
click here for full text
Thermidor: August 1938
from William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (Harper, 1963)
Roosevelt
had hoped that, by distinguishing between liberal and conservative
representatives, he could win popular support for the creation of a
liberal Democratic party. Unhappily, ideological issues that
seemed clear in Washington blurred in South Carolina. When Cotton
Ed Smith waged a white-supremacy campaign, the New Deal's candidate,
Governor Olin Johnston, replied in kind. "Why, Ed Smith voted for
a bill that would permit a big buck Nigger to sit by your wife or
sister on a railroad train," the Governor cried. p268
|
|
|
from F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)
A
mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a
sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and
embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem
firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about
which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are
worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their
pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.
|
|
|
from Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 75
In Die
fröliche Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes that language enables
us to “produce” things, to shape our conception of reality: “This
has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what
things are called is incomparably more important than what they are . .
. it is sufficient to create new names and estimations and
probabilities in order to create, in the long run, new ‘things’” (GS
58).
For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order,
and judge what we regard as reality, and it also gives us the means to
reflect on this reality through the development of general terms and
concepts, which let us realize similarities and relations among things
and see contexts and construct coherent systems of belief about this
reality. Our experience and knowledge of reality . . . is
therefore embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we
perceive as our environment.
|
|
|
|
NAME
|
NOMOTHETIC AND HERMENEUTICAL MATERIALS
|
Abual-Ragheb, Rasha N.
cosmetologist
|
In November 2020, a Facebook account with display name Rasha Abu
participated in Facebook and Telegram group chats involving the New
Jersey chapter of the American Patriot 3%. In the Facebook chat, user
Rasha Abu advised the revolution will start not by standing by but by
standing up. In addition, she advised civil war is coming and they need
to show support, and rise up and fight for our Constitution.
|
Baranyi, Thomas
went into basic
training for the U.S. Marine Corps but was discharged.
|
graduated Trenton State College
In a Facebook post, Baranyi’s father said his son graduated from the
College of New Jersey, joined the Peace Corps, and also went into basic
training for the U.S. Marine Corps but was discharged.
From 2018 to 2020, he served in the Peace Corps in Albania.
On December 22, 2020, his father took to Facebook to say they have not seen each other in person since 2017.
|
Fairlamb, Scott
gym owner
martial artist
|
a
New Jersey gym owner, Fairlamb held a protest at his Pompton Lakes gym
in May in response to Gov. Murphy’s coronavirus restrictions.
Fairlamb, a mixed martial artist who
turned pro in 2000, owned and operated Fairlamb Fit in Pompton Lakes.
The gym's website has been taken down and the phone number is
disconnected. Social media accounts for both Fairlamb and his
co-workers have been removed.
|
Guthrie, Leonard
a street preacher
|
(married with a daughter; identified himself as a street preacher.
His father told a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter that his son went to
the rally as the chaplain for a group that met in Washington to "pray
and support President Trump and the whole movement.”
|
Hale-Cusanelli, Timothy Lewis
VIOLENCE
Military
PDLV
|
He is
an white supremacist and a Nazi sympathizer, according to an informant
who contacted Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) special
agent Daniel J. Meyers on January 12, 2021. The informant
is enrolled as a confidential human source (CHS) with the NCIS.
He has served in the U.S. Army since 2009 but has never deployed.
In 2011, when he was 19 years old, he was arrested after stabbing a man
he and his mother were living with in Pepperidge Court, Jackson, New
Jersey. With a wound to the abdomen, the victim underwent surgery in
the Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune Township, New
Jersey.
As a contractor at Naval Weapons Station Earle, he maintains a secret
security clearance and has access to a variety of munitions. He is
enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves. He is a human resources specialist
with the 174th Infantry Brigade at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in
Trenton, New Jersey.
He was a regular poster on anti-Semitic social media groups Jackson Strong and Rise Up Ocean County.
|
Hazelton, Stephanie
POLITICO
|
aliases Ayla Wolf and Ayla Wolfe
a prominent right-wing activist from South Jersey, one of the loudest
supporters of Atilis Gym, that Bellmawr business that refused to follow
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy’s shutdown orders.
Hazelton has helped organize protests against New Jersey’s shutdown orders and is active in the anti-vaxxer movement.
Hazelton’s LinkedIn says she is the founder of New Jersey for Medical Freedom, the state chapter of an anti-vaccine network.
|
Stedman, Patrick Alonzo
“dating [and] relationship strategist”
GRIFTER
|
a self-described “dating [and] relationship strategist”
In addition to offering relationship advice and touting his $500 master
class—which he claims is the “fastest and most effective way to change
your outcomes with women”—Stedman frequently writes about political
topics and his affinity for Trump.
|
Suarez, Marissa A.
correctional police officer
|
worked
as a correctional police officer in Monmouth County since 2019 but
resigned after her arrest. At the time, Suarez was a probationary
corrections officer at the Monmouth County Corrections Facility
|
Todisco, Patricia
correctional police officer
|
the performative domain of “legitimate” violence
pdlv PDO"L"V PDLV
|
|
|
Three Anchors
Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014) and Ronald Planer and Kin Sterelny, From Signal to Symbol: The Evolution of Language (MIT, 2021)
Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (HarperCollins, 2005)
Jonathan Levy, Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States (Random House, 2021)
Flynn
from James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2009):
Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. . . . We differ
from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the
hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science
liberates thought from concrete situations. Since 1950 we have
become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve
problems on the spot. pp. 10-11
The scientific ethos, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment
of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to
permeate the minds of post-industrial peoples. This has paved the
way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an
intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be
inconceivable. p. 29
|
|
Reading and Modernity
|
Martyn Lyons, A History of Reading and Writing In the Western World (2010)
9. The Reading Fever, 1750-1830
("Everyone in Paris is reading . . . People read while riding in
carriages or taking walks . . . Women, children, journeymen
and apprentices read in shops. On Sundays people read while
seated at the front of their houses; lackeys read on their
back seats, coachmen up on their boxes, and soldiers keeping guard."
10. The Age of the Mass Reading Public (“Between the 1830s and the First World War . . . a mass reading public came into existence.”)
|
11. New Readers and Reading Cultures ("The half century between the 1880s and the 1930s was the golden age of the book in the West.")
|
|
In the beginning . . .
Two excerpts from Daniel Dor, Chris Knight, and Jerome Lewis, The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014), p.4
1. "Introduction" (Dor, Knight, and Lewis)
. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through
violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . .
. [Among humans] . . . primate-style dominance is periodically
overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again
and again.
2. "Vocal Deception, Laughter, and the linguistic significance of reverse dominance", pp. 307-9 (Knight and Lewis)
So decisively do women inhibit male aggression that the contest
collapses into laughter and sexual play. The outcome is . . .
‘communism in motion’—a never-ending pendulum swinging between male
dominance and its celebratory overturn, between brute force on the one
hand, and, on the other, female collectivized attractiveness and
corresponding power asserted through song, ribald laughter, and erotic
play. . . . So how was sexual violence contained and transcended in the
human case? . . . . Ritualized play pervades the very arena
which, in other primate—chimpanzees, for example—leads recurrently to
sexual violence.
|
| . . . Brief Interlude . . .
from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2
Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and
deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate
individuals perform cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered
two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the
other in groups.
There is no
equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the
complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate
procedural habits of formal thinking. . . . Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on
the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several
different
technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields. These
skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the
person's mind carries out its work.
|
| . . . The Return of the Repressed
from Richard Lachmann, "Coda: American Patrimonialism: The Return of the Repressed” in Patrimonial Power in the Modern World, Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, eds. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011
Patrimonialism,
until fairly recently, seemed an archaic social form, largely replaced
by bureaucratic rationalism. That confident view of modernity, in the
histories that Max Weber and his followers wrote, deserves to be
challenged as patrimonial regimes reappear in states and firms
throughout the world.
|
|
The Sado-Sexual Eigenvector of GOP Performativity:
Two Telephone Threats
Rep. Fred Upton telephone threat
"Fucking
traitor. That's what you are. You're a fucking piece
of shit traitor. I hope you die. I hope everybody in your fucking
family dies. You fucking piece of shit trash motherfucker.
Voted for dumb-ass fucking Biden? You're stupider than he
is. He can't even complete a fucking sentence, you dumb
motherfucker traitor, piece of shit, motherfucker, piece of
trash. I hope you fucking die. I hope your fucking family
dies. I hope everybody in you fucking staff dies, you fucking
piece of fucking shit. Traitor."
Rep. Debbie Dingell telephone threat
"You
fucking old, senile bitch, you’re as old and ugly as Biden,” the caller
says. “You ought to get the fuck off the planet. You fucking foul
bitch. I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God, if
you’ve got any children, they die in your face."
|
Fig.
0 can be illuminated by reference to what The Ages of American
Capitalism omits, but which are the key coniderations of
using a text constructively
The Social Origins of Language
Ages omits in a most thoroughgoing way any consideration of the
development of homo sapiens' cognizing powers, simply taking for
granted the availability of <the skill set> necessary for the
activities of thought and language that are the sine qua non of modern
human economic activity. It thus omits the central praxiological
characteristic of progressivism, the New Deal, and the acitivities and
contexts that resulted in the industrial organization of the workers in
the auto industry, circa 1920s to 1940s.
It also omits the history of violence, and thus the one of the major
dimensions of the history of the united states and of the world.
And while it addresses the world of desire and fantasy that is at the
heart of modern consumption (the consumer dreamscape, pp. 502-509), it
simply notes the existence and the importance of fantasy, rather than
digging into such phenomena. For example, Envy Theory:
Perspectives on the Psychology of Envy
|
|
Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (HarperCollins, 2005)
Herman
Melville had "a mordant fascination with a modern, commercial
civilization that seemed fraudulent at its core. Melville's
probes into the psychological, social and even sexual interiors of that
civilization run through many of his major novels and short
stories. He was arguably the nineteesnth century's profoundest
seer into the spiritual malignancy metastasizing inside the young
country's infatuation with the marketplace. Starbuck's terrifying
confrontation with Ahab in the captain's cabin is an echoing
disillusionment even today for all those who, like the Pequod's first
mate, trust in the inherent rationality, equality, and peacableness of
the capitalist order of things. . . .
Again and again, Melville drives relentlessly toward the heart of darkness his countrymen are too sun-blinded to see. (67)
Melville's was a
remorseless gaze. A society given over to the pursuit of money
was full to overflowing with chicanery wherever one looked. That
vision achieved a certain black density in what is certainly Melville's
most allusive and recondite novel, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade.
. . . [which] is a veritable black mass of confidence men: religious
confidence men and philosphical confidence men, literary and political
confidence men, crooked businessmen and crooked philanthropists,
peddlers of nostrums and miracle cures for the ailments of body and
soul . . . (68)
Why were people
like Vanderbilt admired rather than stigmtized? Why did people
tolerate these displays of “unmitigated selfishness” and raise
monuments to these “peculiarly American virtues” such as “audacity,
push, unscrupulousness, and brazen disregard of others’
rights.” That even during an era of legendary rapaciousness
Wall Street figures could elicit feelings of awe and reverence, that
they could become exemplars of national achievement and prowess, is an
enigma. (72)
A distinctive
vocabulary inscribed these men in urban-industrial legend.
Contemporaries, even critical ones, always described them as “bold,”
and “magnificent of view,” full of “verve,” capable of absorbing hard
blows without flinching, as “audacious,” “keen,” and possessed of that
sangfroid that could stand up to the worst possible news. Often
treated as American primitives, observers marked and often celebrated
their lack of education and refinement; they were profane and uncouth
but endowed with native frankness, self-confidence, and blunt force of
personality. This language of masculine virility and plebeian
brashness . . . (95)
|
The
category grifter emerged out of conversations between PF and
RB based on a working dataset: the Mob at the Capitol. It
is striking now to realize just how like Trump these arrestees
were! Thus, the necessity at this late date of putting the
principle result first. PDLV, grifter, marginal worker, marginal
business, phantom
("GOP Rep. Dan Crenshaw calls members of House Freedom Caucus ‘grifters,’ ‘performance artists’," WAPO Dec 7, 2021)
Grifter or Grafter? A new parlor game that explains Trumpworld.
BY JACOB WEISBERG,MAY 10, 2018
Dover case
Fraser, Every Man A Speculator
|
|
Eli Zaretsky, "The Mass Psychology of Trumpism" (London Review of Books, September 18, 2018)
Part 1 of 3
Since the Republican primaries of 2015-16, some people have turned to
psychiatry in an effort to locate the irrational wellsprings of Trump’s
victory, but so far little progress has been made. This is because most
of the effort has gone into analysing Trump, who is often described as
suffering from ‘narcissistic personality disorder’. Not only are such
diagnoses, made from a distance, implausible; they also fail to address
a more important question: the nature of Trump’s appeal. Constituting
something close to a third of the electorate, his followers form an
intensely loyal and, psychologically, tight-knit band. They are
impervious to liberal or progressive criticisms of Trump or his
policies. On the contrary, their loyalty thrives on anti-Trump
arguments, and digs in deeper.
There is an older body of psychological thought, however, that
illuminates the kind of tight bond Trump has forged with a significant
minority of Americans. Inspired by Freud, this thought arose following
the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, when Americans, too, had
become wary of authoritarian elements in their society. Southern
politics had been rife with race-baiting demagogues like Mississippi’s
Theodore Bilbo since the 1890s, and the popularity of the pro-Mussolini
radio priest, Father Coughlin, demonstrated the appeal of an
authoritarian message to the immigrant North.
At the highpoint of the New Deal, it was widely understood that
legitimate economic grievances needed to be addressed. But there was
something more, which manifested itself in intense loyalty to agitators
and demagogues like Coughlin. To understand that devotion, Frankfurt
School refugees from Hitler – including Leo Löwenthal and Theodor
Adorno – drew on a Freudian-inspired ‘mass psychology’ to analyze
anti-Semites and demagogues in the US.
Their crucial innovation was the discovery of the special form that
authoritarianism takes in democratic societies. Previously, the
agitator had been thought of as a kind of hypnotist, while the crowd
that responded to him was credulous and childlike. Open to rumor and
fear, it demanded strength and even violence from its leaders. As the
19th-century French psychologist Gustave Le Bon put it, the crowd
‘wants to be ruled and oppressed and to fear its masters’. Freud had
this model of crowd psychology in mind when he wrote that
the
members of a group stand in need of the illusion that they are equally
and justly loved by their leader; but the leader himself need love no
one else, he [must] be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic,
self-confident and independent.
Hitler, Mussolini, Ataturk and even De Gaulle fit this model, as they
drew on mass media, parades, sporting events and film to project
themselves as father figures to enthralled nations.
|
|
|
Rep. Fred Upton telephone threat
"Fucking
traitor. That's what you are. You're a fucking piece
of shit traitor. I hope you die. I hope everybody in your fucking
family dies. You fucking piece of shit trash motherfucker.
Voted for dumb-ass fucking Biden? You're stupider than he
is. He can't even complete a fucking sentence, you dumb
motherfucker traitor, piece of shit, motherfucker, piece of
trash. I hope you fucking die. I hope your fucking family
dies. I hope everybody in you fucking staff dies, you fucking
piece of fucking shit. Traitor."
Rep. Debbie Dingell telephone threat
"You
fucking old, senile bitch, you’re as old and ugly as Biden,” the caller
says. “You ought to get the fuck off the planet. You fucking foul
bitch. I hope your family dies in front of you. I pray to God, if
you’ve got any children, they die in your face."
|
|
Part 2 of 3
Adorno realised, however,
that the model only applied in part to American demagogues. What
distinguishes the demagogue in a democratic society, he argued in
‘Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda’ (1951), is the
identification between the leader and his followers. The narcissism in
question is not only Trump’s. More important is that of his followers,
who idealize him as they once, in childhood, idealized themselves.
Beyond that, the demagogue has a special appeal to wounded narcissism,
to the feeling that one has failed to meet standards one has set for
oneself.
The successful demagogue activates this feeling by possessing the
typical qualities of the individuals who follow him, but in what
Adorno, quoting Freud, called a ‘clearly marked and pure form’ that
gives the impression ‘of greater force and of more freedom of libido’.
•In Adorno’s words, ‘the superman has to resemble the follower and
appear as his “enlargement”.’ The leader ‘completes’ the follower’s
self-image. This helps explain the phenomenon of the ‘great little
man’, the ‘Aw shucks’, ‘just folks’ demagogue like Huey Long. He ‘seems
to be the enlargement of the subject’s own personality, a collective
projection of himself, rather than an image of the father’ – a Trump,
in other words, rather than a Washington or Roosevelt.
One might object that Trump, a billionaire TV star, does not resemble
his followers. But this misses the powerful intimacy that he
establishes with them, at rallies, on TV and on Twitter. Part of his
malicious genius lies in his ability to forge a bond with people who
are otherwise excluded from the world to which he belongs. Even as he
cast Hillary Clinton as the tool of international finance, he said:
I
do deals – big deals – all the time. I know and work with all the
toughest operators in the world of high-stakes global finance. These
are hard-driving, vicious cut-throat financial killers, the kind of
people who leave blood all over the boardroom table and fight to the
bitter end to gain maximum advantage.
With these words he brought his followers into the boardroom with him
and encouraged them to take part in a shared, cynical exposure of the
soiled motives and practices that lie behind wealth. His role in the
Birther movement, the prelude to his successful presidential campaign,
was not only racist, but also showed that he was at home with the most
ignorant, benighted, prejudiced people in America. Who else but a
complete loser would engage in Birtherism, so far from the Hollywood,
Silicon Valley and Harvard aura that elevated Obama, but also distanced
him from the masses?
|
|
|
|
Part 3 of 3
The consistent derogation of
Trump in the New York Times or on MSNBC may be helpful in keeping the
resistance fired up, but it is counterproductive when it comes to
breaking down the Trump coalition. His followers take every attack on
their leader as an attack on them. ‘The fascist leader’s startling
symptoms of inferiority’, Adorno wrote, ‘his resemblance to ham actors
and asocial psychopaths’, facilitates the identification, which is the
basis of the ideal. On the Access Hollywood tape, which was widely
assumed would finish him, Trump was giving voice to a common enough
daydream, but with ‘greater force’ and greater ‘freedom of libido’ than
his followers allow themselves. And he was bolstering the narcissism of
the women who support him, too, by describing himself as helpless in
the grip of his desires for them.
Adorno also observed that demagoguery of this sort is a profession, a
livelihood with well-tested methods. Trump is a far more familiar
figure than may at first appear. The demagogue’s appeals, Adorno wrote,
‘have been standardized, similarly to the advertising slogans which
proved to be most valuable in the promotion of business’. Trump’s
background in salesmanship and reality TV prepared him perfectly for
his present role. According to Adorno,
the leader can guess the psychological wants and needs of those
susceptible to his propaganda because he resembles them
psychologically, and is distinguished from them by a capacity to
express without inhibitions what is latent in them, rather than by any
intrinsic superiority.
To meet the unconscious wishes of his audience, the leader
simply turns his own unconscious outward ... Experience has taught him
consciously to exploit this faculty, to make rational use of his
irrationality, similarly to the actor, or a certain type of journalist
who knows how to sell their ... sensitivity.
All he has to do in order to make the sale, to get his TV audience to
click, or to arouse a campaign rally, is exploit his own psychology.
Using old-fashioned but still illuminating language, Adorno continued:
The leaders are generally oral character types, with a compulsion to
speak incessantly and to befool the others. The famous spell they
exercise over their followers seems largely to depend on their orality:
language itself, devoid of its rational significance, functions in a
magical way and furthers those archaic regressions which reduce
individuals to members of crowds.
Since uninhibited associative speech presupposes at least a temporary
lack of ego control, it can indicate weakness as well as strength. The
agitators’ boasting is frequently accompanied by hints of weakness,
often merged with claims of strength. This was particularly striking,
Adorno wrote, when the agitator begged for monetary contributions. As
with the Birther movement or Access Hollywood, Trump’s self-debasement
– pretending to sell steaks on the campaign trail – forges a bond that
secures his idealised status.
Since 8 November 2016, many people have concluded that what they
understandably view as a catastrophe was the result of the neglect by
neoliberal elites of the white working class, simply put. Inspired by
Bernie Sanders, they believe that the Democratic Party has to reorient
its politics from the idea that ‘a few get rich first’ to protection
for the least advantaged. Yet no one who lived through the civil rights
and feminist rebellions of recent decades can believe that an economic
programme per se is a sufficient basis for a Democratic-led politics.
This holds as well when it comes to trying to reach out to Trump’s
supporters. Of those providing his roughly 40 per cent approval
ratings, half say they ‘strongly approve’ and are probably lost to the
Democrats. But if we understand the personal level at which pro-Trump
strivings operate, we may better appeal to the other half, and in that
way forestall the coming emergency.
|
|
|
