#trumpswindle | #WhatTheyVotedFor
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.
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.
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.
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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
