#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Wallace Shawn↱, on a circumstance that really ought to be inconceivable: Now that I'm seventy-six, when I remember the way I used to feel—when I think about how important it once seemed to me to tell people the truth about the crimes in which we all were implicated—well, that all seems quaint and sad. It turns out that by the time the American public learned the sorts of things I'd felt they needed to learn, by the time they came to look in the mirror, what they saw there didn't look so bad to them. And so, yes, an awful lot of people don't get upset when they hear Trump talk. On the contrary, they seem to feel a great sense of relief. Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties—the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable—was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty…all of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn't need to feel bad because they didn't care about other people. Maybe they didn't want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn't want to be gentle or kind. He's not wrong. Once upon a time sheriff named Jim Clark, who gathered a posse to attack black people in Alabama, and used his authority not only to intimidate people registering to vote, but also to attempt to forbid the counting of black people's votes, believed up until his own bitter end that he was right. What has come to bear in the time of Trump is no accident. What President Trump and his supporters bring is an infliction upon their human neighbors, both at home and abroad. This is the secret of yearslong complaints about how unfair it is to call something or someone supremacist. It's not really that they're misogynist, or white supremacist; rather, they complain that feminism is so hateful, or #BlackLivesMatter is racist; to the other, we accept prominent anti-feminist and #BlackLivesMatter opponent James Lindsay's reminder that he is a slow learner. The mercy we owe them isn't that they are somehow correct, or decent; at best it is that they are retarded. Those who are old enough can think back to the Reagan years. Back then, the objection against Miranda rights was that liberals are commies who love criminals more than innocent Americans. That is, it wasn't that conservatives were racist authoritarians, but that liberals were elitists trying to radically force Americans to become internationalist effetes. So, y'know, sorry Black people, sorry Hispanics, it's just that the people who say you're human were so awful and obnoxious and elitist that American tradition obliged good and decent folk to oppose you. Or the any-excuse traditionalism of the Gay Fray, when the would-be good folk who needed change to slow down because it was too fast for some other people, so human and civil rights needed to wait because that was the only appropriate outcome, decided it was so controversial to object to open bigotry that they certainly did not subscribe to that they were obliged by decency to object to someone else's human and civil rights. And it's just like the American war against women. It is not unusual that I have had the opportunity to discuss such issues with various people over the course of my lifetime; and even before pop socmed like Facebook and Twitter, we had opportunities to consider such questions at places like Sciforums. Anecdotally, one of the reasons my father's outlook can loom large in certain political analyses is that compared to the mainstream discussions of the day, he was not far off. Similarly, there are people whose voices I have never heard who have said much to me, over time, and if some of what goes on in a place like this feels familiar to me, it is because I can find it elsewhere in society, and in that sense, yes, it's closer to the mainstream than the prevailing narrative is usually willing to acknowledge. While American tradition is supposed to be something of radiant merit, the result is something more akin to an obscure joke derived from Max Weber, that only from something as screwed up as British Protestantism could Americans raise something so perverse as their Capitalism. One important difference is that there came a point at which my father finally walked away from supporting conservatives; he was never comfortable with the supremacist wing, and having walked away from it all still finds the facts of their conduct unbelievable. And that disbelief used to offend him; the idea that these people he sympathized with could be so awful was a terrible thing to say about anyone. But they made a point of demonstrating the point. I found these paragraphs, from April, 2016↗: • A third point, about the difference 'twixt public service and civic leadership, also applies, and should we suggest that the two need not be so different, well, 'tis at once a simple point and a complex, difficult explanation. Nonetheless, provocative ballot measures and legislation, as well as naked rhetorical appeals to supremacism, have driven conservative politics for a long, long time. Party leaders have increasingly relied on bigotry to rally passions and call support. Disguised as public service, the humble submission of a politician to the voters' will, the Republican course has too often lacked any reasonable or functional context of civic leadership. If everybody jumped off a bridge? How about if your voters want vigilantism in the streets? Morality police? Supremacism as equality? Republcians have chosen to exploit those regressive passions instead of cultivate conservative progress; the Trump phenomenon and concomitant leadership ("ownership") crisis in the Party is pretty much inevitable. There is a time when the leaders must look at the people and say, "No". Republicans not only failed to do this, but also demonized this aspect of civic leadership. If what we're witnessing in the Republican Party was simply their own much-deserved mess, that would be one thing. But this also has serious potential implications for everyone else. How strange the words seem, yet not at all. They were written according to a presupposition, since laid to rest, that coincides with part of what Shawn refers to. "A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good," he explains. "Maybe they didn't want to be forbearing toward enemies." There isn't really any mabye about it: "Maybe they didn't want to be gentle or kind." To the one, no, they didn't. To the other, really? Are these people really supervillains? Are their years of sputtering, pretentious indignance just some calm calculation waiting for their moment to finally bring an evil plot to bear? Or are they frail, neurotic creatures burning up lifetimes grasping after excuses by which their priorities of infliction and exclusion are somehow noble? If we watch and listen closely enough, and don't write people off, and give genuine thought and sympathy toward their humanity, they do tell truths by their behavior, even if their words do not always reasonably attend reality. And once you've seen it a couple times, what starts to stand out is how common certain processes and behaviors are. I know someone who put particular effort into pretending goodness and decency, or, at least, the pretense of noble righteousness that comes with sincerely believing oneself correct. And it did wear thin over the course of years. But there came a point at which it was a lot harder to pretend that goodness than it used to be. And this question of pretending goodness is pretty much what his indignance has left. While the world is a large place, and the Internet itself an extraordinary environment, and even considering the unique aspects of any given human relationship, we can also acknowledge the parts that just don't look that much different from what we find in the larger marketplace. And when Shawn suggests Trump supporters despise Barack Obama not simply for being the first president of color, nor the elitism of his educated presentation, "but because the words he used somehow harked back to the ethical aspirations" we often attribute to Kennedy mythopoeia, and which in his tale becomes a benchmark, he is not wrong. "America has always been good to me," Shawn recalls, "and so it's really hard for me to believe that Donald Trump's face is the true face of America." To the other, he is not insensate: "But for those countless others, in the cities and towns of the USA and in countries far away, to whom America has not been good, the face of America has always and forever been the face of Donald Trump." He's not wrong. Well, unless he is. This really is what it comes to, and if it seems people are tired of pretending to be good, we might still wonder why they pretended in the first place. ____________________ Notes: Shawn, Wallace. "Developments Since My Birth". The New York Review of Books. 27 October 2020. NYBooks.com. 28 October 2020. https://bit.ly/31LMAhV
#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Adam Serwer↱, two years ago: We can hear the spectacle of cruel laughter throughout the Trump era. There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother. There were the police who laughed uproariously when the president encouraged them to abuse suspects, and the Fox News hosts mocking a survivor of the Pulse Nightclub massacre (and in the process inundating him with threats), the survivors of sexual assault protesting to Senator Jeff Flake, the women who said the president had sexually assaulted them, and the teen survivors of the Parkland school shooting. There was the president mocking Puerto Rican accents shortly after thousands were killed and tens of thousands displaced by Hurricane Maria, the black athletes protesting unjustified killings by the police, the women of the #MeToo movement who have come forward with stories of sexual abuse, and the disabled reporter whose crime was reporting on Trump truthfully. It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump. Taking joy in that suffering is more human than most would like to admit. Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life. The laughter undergirds the daily spectacle of insincerity, as the president and his aides pledge fealty to bedrock democratic principles they have no intention of respecting. The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn't commit decrying "false accusations," when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of "Lock her up!" The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process. This isn't incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process .... .... Trump's only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president's ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them. Antisociality: The cruelty, as Serwer puts it, is the point. This isn't a new idea. Wallace Shawn's sense of "maybe"↱ is, as he recognizes, a question of perspective; it is hard to accept that so many of our American neighbors really would be so cruel. Nor, in those classifications, is it simply "us" who find it so unbelievable; this wells up from American traditionalism, so "we" are also taught into these perspectives, and even "they" recoil at the prospect of their own cruelty, hatred, and sin. And for those who would point out it's not just "them" who show cruel vice, 'tis true, so do "we". But if "we" see it as not the same, it is because we recognize the problem about it, and, technically, even agree with "them" that certain things are problematic. And in this Us and Them, it has gone so far that "they" really are, at their political demographic core, those who want particular harmful actions and results but simply wish it called by another name that does not rankle their self-loving virtue. The hashtagged trumpswindle includes intentional easy wordplay: Are Trump supporters merely marks, or are they in on the grift? Inasmuch as they can be considered in on the grift, they are as anxious or marks and useful of tools as any con artist could hope for. Trump supporters are united in pride of cruelty: "And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them." And there are various iterations by which, sure, "we" could have told you, but at some point the outcome really is suppsoed to be unbelievable. The coincidence of such indignant pretenses as "they" put on over time with the results we now bear witness to is not some great mystery. And, "they"? That's the thing; there's only an us and them in this because they insist. Remember, function matters. It is not us who insist their equality is somehow violated, or safety endangered, if they cannot refuse another's equality, or endanger their neighbors, for the sake of their own emotional aesthetics. That's their problem, and their decision to make it anyone else's°. And when they got their way, this is what they brought. They didn't just bring us the societal dysfunction they fearfully projected of others, but also the cruelty they indignantly insisted, to the point of societal dysfunction, wasn't really there. ____________________ Notes: ° cf., Hamburger, 2018↱, "ought not to be allowed to pretend that its ideas are, historically speaking, anything other than conservative". See also, post in re "cancel culture"↗. Hamburger, Jacob. "The 'Intellectual Dark Web' Is Nothing New". Los Angeles Review of Books. 18 July 2018. LAReviewOfBooks.org 31 October 2020. http://bit.ly/2zP6VXX Serwer, Adam. "The Cruelty Is the Point". The Atlantic. 3 October 2018. TheAtlantic.com. 31 October 2018. http://bit.ly/2RpxCYd Shawn, Wallace. "Developments Since My Birth". The New York Review of Books. 27 October 2020. NYBooks.com. 28 October 2020. https://bit.ly/31LMAhV
