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The Other Side, Part Two

17 Sep 2017, 08:14 pm
(For Part One, click here.)

We (Not You), the People

Everywhere we look, cultural institutions are dissolving. What’s the best way to participate in this chaotic historical moment without losing our sanity?

Or, to put it in more spiritually ambitious terms, how do we express ourselves from the center of our charts while a shit storm rages around us?

First of all, let’s press into service a raw truth about life that we’ve learned from physics, from astrology, from gardening: that breakdown entails the release of power.

Out of the mess

It’s just as true when obsolete social structures die as when anything else dies. Out of the destructive mess arises tremendous creativity. Of this we can have no doubt, if we believe in Plutonian law. What is less certain is precisely how we will negotiate the death/ rebirth transition. This depends on whether we want to handle it gracefully, or from a place of fear and reactivity.

Is our intention to hold onto our humanity in the face of inhumanity? Then we begin by confronting, with curiosity and honesty, the process of devolution that’s happening on our watch.

We avoid hanging out in denial; it’s a luxury we can’t afford. Viable responses to the Trump era begin where exasperation and incredulity leave off.

To discover what our own creative response we be to this culture war, we need an understanding of The Other Side.

Don’t try it at Thanksgiving dinner

It should be clear by now that there is no point trying to win over our countrymen who voted for Trump by appealing to their logic.

It won’t help to point out that he’s appointing and hiring and golfing with the very billionaire donors and lobbyists he promised to drain out of the swamp. It won’t help to explain that his tax cuts will only go towards benefiting these guys, and himself, while hurting everybody else.

It won’t help to point out that he lies, or that he is repulsive. They already know these things. Civility and moral character have never been what this is about.

Last dregs

Astrologically, these last years before 2020 represent the tail end of several cycles. Waning cycles, like all organic entities in their death throes, sometimes thrash around unbecomingly. Where awareness is lacking, last dregs of long cycles are notorious for fostering confusion, desperation and hopelessness.

The writer Ian Sinclair has characterized the current mood in Britain in similar terms. He sees the UK right now as lacking the life force for constructive solutions, stumbling round in a “suicide-note delirium… burning our bridges, starving hospitals of funds.”(1)

When energy is low, reactivity tends to run high. 

Reptile brain

Where human reactivity is concerned, Trump has proven himself an adept student. With Machiavellian genius he identified something in the reptile brain of his audience that trumps even financial self-preservation: the human dread of changing places, on the social totem pole, with people we used to be one notch above.

Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants exploits this dread in a couple of different ways. Most explicitly, it capitalizes on economic insecurity. He and his minions at Fox warn their audiences over and over that new arrivals will steal their jobs away, though the idea is factually groundless (here’s Sam Bee, debunking the Lump of Labor Fallacy).

The Don promises to…

…take the country back to another era, when factories were full of well-paid workers instead of robots, when there was little worry over international competition or environmental destruction and when everyone knew their place in society. — San Francisco Chronicle

The “knowing their place” part of his message, though less explicit than the part about jobs, is more fundamental. He understands what’s behind his fans’ anger. He knows they’re afraid that giving a leg up to even-more-vulnerable groups will cause their own vulnerable status to slip. (See this excellent article by Ta Nehisi Coates.)

As a chip-on-the-shoulder kid from the outer boroughs, Trump is himself motivated by the defensive rage of social insecurity (Saturn conjunct Venus in the 11th house). And with a little help from his campaign vizier (Steve Bannon, like Karl Rove before him), he figured out how to turn that rage into votes.

Not-so-silent majority

Like all false populists, Trump makes a lot of noise about “the people.” Remember Sarah Palin in 2008, singling out “the real Americans?” If you weren’t a fan of hers, apparently you were a fake American.

These phrases attempt to suggest that their side encompasses great heaving masses of humanity (e.g. Spiro Agnew’s “the Silent Majority.”) Just as Trump lies about the size of his audiences and body parts, he likes to flatter his supporters with illusions about their vast, teeming, historical significance.

But Trump’s core base is in fact relatively small. White Christians without college degrees constitute only about 20% of the population. The fact that this demographic is small — and getting smaller — is not lost on them, of course. That’s why they’re so pissed off.

In their own minds, they’re still the majority.

Everyman no longer

Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed.

— Ta Nehisi Coates

Traditionally, the kind of white American who thinks of himself as an average guy (and it is, always, a guy; the fiction of average-ness in a patriarchy is male by definition) could always count on his superiority of numbers.

Granted, there have always been uppity races and genders making distressing social inroads. Every time he looked around, the white everyman saw ball-breaking females, job-seeking foreigners and weird religions intruding onto his turf.

Forever nipping at his heels, these pesky Others were an incessant threat to his position on the totem pole. But at least they were still minorities.

Now, even this is being undermined.

The numerical superiority of Trump’s everyman is being stolen away from him by immigration, population mobility and intermarriage. And in the absence of white supremacy as a numerical fact, white supremacy as a racist illusion is coming out of the closet.

Aggrieved victims

We have elected the enemy, and we are his.

— Tom Toles

What is depriving these angry white Americans of their presumed entitlements? Social scientists might say that it is the impersonal forces of a multicultural world.

But the Trump propaganda declares that it is not a what but a who: “liberals,” or specific individuals among that group, are robbing them. The victim mentality prefers a specific, personalized enemy.(2)

None of the GOP candidates who preceded Trump was able to play the aggrieved victim as convincingly as he does. This is because his self-image, like that of most narcissists, is genuinely that of someone under siege (Blumenthal, op cit)

As such, Trump can be far more persuasive than Romney or McCain when he stands at the podium pumping up the paranoid fantasies of insecure white men. He is typecast to reassure them that blacks, women, struggling immigrants and handicapped journalists are victimizing them, not the other way around.

Political problem

But as many of his critics have pointed out, the traits that served Trump so well on the campaign trail have become a double-edged sword. The compulsion to goad one group of citizens into seething hostility against another doesn’t work so well if you’re supposed to be leading the whole citizenry.

Now that his branding exercise has morphed into a presidency, Trump’s psychological complex is more than a personality problem. It is a political one.

As historian Thomas Meaney has written, “Instead of trying to gain more recognition from more people, he has shrunk the imaginary number of those who count as ‘the people.’ The first task of resistance to Trump will be to expand it.”

To be continued:  The Other Side, Part Three

 

Image sources:
Trump graphics: Edel Rodriguez
Thanksgiving dinner: Norman Rockwell

Notes

1) What is especially ironic about the U.K. situation is that “’taking back control’ from the E.U. doesn’t extend, for many Brexit voters, to taking back control of the country’s foreign-owned infrastructure.” Migrants may not be welcome, but migrant capital has made Britain “a tenant of overseas landlords in every sphere of its economy.” (James Meek).

2) As Coates points out, “The fact of a black president seemed to insult Donald Trump personally. He has made the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own.” (ibid)

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