2012: End Of World Or Just Death of America's Ego, c/o Trump?
July 27, 2018 8:44 AM   Subscribe

Old, violent, dominant ideologies sense that their demise is coming and therefore need to fight this hard in response. What we are seeing is the oppressive identity of America crying out in pain because of the damage that our awareness has done to it.
Rather than being afraid, we must remember that, as in the words of Rumi, "the wound is the place where the light enters." So rather than reacting to the pain of ego, I am choosing to be grateful that I was able to vote for a woman for president. Grateful that the glass ceiling may not be broken but that it is cracking. Confident that this is the wake up call that we need to catalyze lasting change. Hopeful that a large dose of such blatant displays of discrimination will pull us out of denial and into committed action. And hopeful that this will be the mirror that our country needs in order to look itself in the face.
posted by bologna on wry (26 comments total) 36 users marked this as a favorite
 
I needed to read this more than I knew. Thank you for posting
posted by donnagirl at 10:12 AM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


That's a fairly eloquent "surely this".

hopeful that this will be the mirror that our country needs in order to look itself in the face

Seems quite likely to me that this author was not yet politically aware during the previous go-around with a senile Republican in the Oval Office.

The US didn't look itself in the face after Reagan, though having sold arms to Iran in order to fund the ongoing fucking over of Latin America should have given it ample cause to do so, and it won't do it after Trump falls off the twig either. Instead, parts of it will elevate him to sainthood and worship him as a fallen American hero, just like they sainted the previous superannuated no-talent hack once he was no longer around to remind everybody daily what an insufferable fucknuckle he'd actually always been.

Expecting ugly Americans of the stripe who already think Trump is wonderful to admit that they have all been gulled and taken, like the rubes they are, is naive. You cannot convert, educate or deprogram these people. You can only outnumber them.

So concentrate on that. Don't expect them to change. They never, never will. Don't expect them to die out in some kind of generational colonic cleansing either; their death cult is firmly established and highly skilled in the indoctrination of children. You will be pushing back against them for the rest of your lives, and your children will be pushing back against them for the rest of theirs, and so will their children.

Morality and decency fall on a bell curve: about half of every country shades from politically apathetic to straight-up evil. The trick is to get the half that isn't organized.

If there's a ray of hope in America, it's got nothing to do with Trump regardless of how badly he'd want to take the credit for it. It's the DSA. Join. Go. Make America decent already.
posted by flabdablet at 11:10 AM on July 27, 2018 [34 favorites]


You cannot convert, educate or deprogram these people. You can only outnumber them.

The whole point of the article is that this is what is currently happening, hence the response. There's no claim that "ego death" has to synchronize with the electoral cycle or that Trump will be the last, only that he represents another escalation. Another gasp. Of course, the right has always believed that the Empire is falling -- that's what gets them out of bed in the morning -- but one day that broken clock will strike the correct hour. Believing otherwise is a sort of apathy in itself.

Funny to read this as a non-American though. Many of us see Trump as more-or-less an inevitability, given your founding mythology and the malarkey you -- all of you, even the"progressives" -- believe about yourselves. There's no such thing as "these people." The self-reflection has to go a little deeper than what box you plan to tick next November.
posted by klanawa at 12:48 PM on July 27, 2018 [20 favorites]


The US didn't look itself in the face after Reagan

Truly, nothing has gotten better for anyone, especially not women, minorities, and non-binary people. Definitely nothing has improved since Reagan.
posted by weed donkey at 3:58 PM on July 27, 2018 [5 favorites]


I think this was a nice essay. A bit optimistic, but I would rather optimism than the many ugly alternatives. Things are getting better because we are working to make them better, and it really does feel like Donald is an ego-reaction to the fact that white men are continuing to lose their outrageous privilege.
posted by weed donkey at 4:02 PM on July 27, 2018


Definitely nothing has improved since Reagan.

That just isn't true. Just off the top of my head in 5 seconds of reflection: we elected the first black President, gay marriage is legal, there are now 3 women on the Supreme Court... All of these victories are only partial and of course provisional, as with all of history. But if we don't acknowledge and celebrate our victories and even our baby steps toward a more just society, it becomes all too easy to despair and lose the will to keep fighting the good fights.
posted by PhineasGage at 4:19 PM on July 27, 2018 [11 favorites]


Apologies that my sarcasm wasn't clearer. I get frustrated when people say "nothing has changed since Reagan" because literally everything has changed, and for the better. The only people for whom nothing has changed since Reagan are white men, and they're the ones causing all the problems.
posted by weed donkey at 4:44 PM on July 27, 2018 [12 favorites]


Apologies - sometimes hard to read tone correctly. Hey, can we add [droll] or [ironic] or [sarcastic] tags to the compose box? [kidding]
posted by PhineasGage at 4:57 PM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


weed donkey, I'm really unsure of what you mean by your statement, considering Reagan and his wife and his administration basically caused the AIDS crisis to escalate due to not deeming queer people as worthy of any level of care. It's had such a lasting impact on our communities. Reagan was a white man too...white supremacy kills. What Would Queer Life Be Like If AIDS Had Never Happened?
posted by yueliang at 5:19 PM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


yueliang, I know, that's exactly what I'm saying. I had a direct to response to the comment of "the US didn't look itself in the face after Reagan". That silences so much important history, and as I'm sure you are aware, SILENCE = DEATH.
posted by weed donkey at 5:59 PM on July 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


weed donkey - gotcha! I was really confused and wondering if I was missing something and then I reread and realized that I completely missed the first of your comments. I thought you were saying the complete opposite! good that is cleared up.
posted by yueliang at 12:17 AM on July 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


I fully agree that huge amounts of really important stuff has got better since Reagan, but I contend that very little of that has anything to do with the US "looking itself in the face"; essentially all of it comes from the same place that social improvement of all kinds has always and everywhere come from, which is committed groups of activists driving the kind of organization that makes it happen.

Slowly, slowly, bit by bit and person by person, the country has been learning not to punch itself in the face. But it still appears to have very little collective clue just what that face looks like to the rest of the world. There's a smug self-satisfaction there, proceeding from an apparent underlying belief that the US is God's Own Democracy and a shining exemplar of how a Free World ought to be run. And that's an expression I don't expect to see wiped off it in my lifetime.

Get back to me when the US has developed an appetite for the kinds of deep structural reform that would make it not murder, imprison, enslave, impoverish and abandon its own citizens at rates more typical of dictatorships and war zones than a "land of the free". Get back to me when the US starts to take the idea of freedom from hunger and sickness and poverty as seriously as it currently takes the idea of freedom to do whatever the hell it wants to whomever is inconvenient. Get back to me when the US no longer perceives itself as having both a God-given right and an iron moral responsibility to act as some kind of global policeman. Get back to me when having a dark and/or female face behind the desk in the Oval Office is unremarkable. Because those are the marks of a society that's actually been looking itself in the face.
posted by flabdablet at 1:01 AM on July 28, 2018 [9 favorites]


And you know? The thing about ragging on the US is that the instant reaction of pretty much every American to whom I have subjected similar tirades makes it pretty clear that they think I'm doing so from a position of envy.

Envy? Seriously? FUCK no. It's sheer relief at not having been born there.

There are obviously plenty of things wrong with Australia as well, and Australia equally obviously has yet to take a good hard look at itself in any mirror that didn't come from some kind of twisted funhouse, and there's obviously still an overwhelming amount of work to be done here before this place becomes anywhere near as fundamentally decent a society as the local fascists are so insistent it always has been since Invasion Day. But of all the societies in the world I would run screaming from if there were any prospect of my being forced to remain there the US is well up the list, and that's mainly due to the face it's been presenting to the rest of the world for the half century I've been aware of it.
posted by flabdablet at 2:13 AM on July 28, 2018 [4 favorites]


There's a smug self-satisfaction there, proceeding from an apparent underlying belief that the US is God's Own Democracy and a shining exemplar of how a Free World ought to be run. And that's an expression I don't expect to see wiped off it in my lifetime.

Honestly I'd be willing to put money down that it's already happened. It's impossible to take America's self-importance seriously after electing Trump, someone who was already world-famous for embodying the worst traits of America, as their leader. It's going to be hanging over the head of America after 2020 and for decades.
posted by Merus at 2:28 AM on July 28, 2018 [2 favorites]


It's impossible to take America's self-importance seriously after electing Trump

It's been impossible to take America's self-importance seriously since Nixon was not enough to make Carter's election a no-brainer landslide, and since Carter got bumped after a single term in favour of the next vicious, vacuous Fascism Lite fuckhead they kept around for two. The world has yet to dismantle the handbasket we all watched Reagan and Thatcher send it to hell in, and two terms for Dubya were the confirmatory shit icing on the shit cake. Trump, from where the rest of us sit, is just more of the same. He's more overtly self-serving and fucked in the head than Nixon, Reagan or either Bush, but he's no more essentially exceptional than the country that currently employs him.

I have already spent my entire life failing to see a US administration pay more than lip service to the marketing slogan about liberty and justice for all, and Trump's successful gouging out of the US system's already failing eyes with the Gorsuch and Kavanaugh appointments suggests to me that it will remain without the wherewithal to look itself in the face for the foreseeable future.

Because when it comes right down to it, what the rest of us see on the face of the US is an unwavering commitment to maintaining its position as the world's biggest consumer of resources and supplier of armaments. America's self-importance has been maintained at gunpoint since World War II, just as Ike warned it would be, apparently having caught a glimpse of his own administration's face out of the corner of his eye on his political deathbed.
posted by flabdablet at 4:14 AM on July 28, 2018 [10 favorites]


I think I'm largely in the same position as you with regards to America's hypocrisy, but I maintain that This Time It's Different. America still has the guns out, but there's increasingly less incentive for everyone to pretend everything is okay and it's just culture shock that makes America look like dipshits to foreign eyes.
Part of that is how obviously and thoroughly Russia is pulling the strings. If Russia can get one over America, how hard could it be to turn their big guns elsewhere?
Part of it is that China is where the smart money is. There's big opportunity for growth there, and while America is a big economy, China's big and more stable and hungry.
Part of it is that the EU are clearly the leaders of the Free World now. Trump ceded leadership on Iran to them without even realising what he was doing, and their willingness to go after abuses by American tech companies when American tech companies are helping to destabilise the world means they're the closest thing we have right now to world police.
Part of it is that Americans themselves are less inclined to buy into their own bullshit. After Bush was re-elected, we got lots of signs saying 'this isn't us' but Americans aren't saying that about Trump nearly as much. They're less willing to argue that their bad democratic systems still deliver democratic outcomes, and more are educated about how gerrymandering and private funding is a fixture of American politics and a sign of dysfunction outside of it. They're less willing to argue that American cultural positions are obviously right and that countries outside the US are less free (by America's definition of free) and therefore strictly worse (by America's definition of worse). (They still do it, admittedly; I'm baffled by some of my friends who maintain that only America tolerates multi-ethnic marriages.)
I don't think China or the EU are inclined to sweep America's asshattery under the carpet after 2020 without Changes. China won't want to give up its economic leadership without capitulation; the EU won't want to give up its leverage over American companies. And I think the leadership in 2020, assuming it's not four more years of Trump, will probably be under pressure to cut wasteful military spending to fund socialist programs, and I can see a path to that being actually politically feasible. And that's not taking into account Trump doing something even stupider between now and 2020 which, given his trajectory so far, is guaranteed.
posted by Merus at 7:52 AM on July 28, 2018 [3 favorites]


I maintain that This Time It's Different.

I hope you're right.
posted by flabdablet at 8:32 AM on July 28, 2018 [1 favorite]


what an utterly refreshing thread to read after what feels like decades of fog

Thank you flabdablet for the lucidly written easy to read commentary I could only nod along to.

And Merus, you have a point -

Part of it is that Americans themselves are less inclined to buy into their own bullshit.

I just got out of the latest megathread on potus thinking just this - how the conversation had changed in these two short years (or less) and how aware and awake the commentary seemed to be across the board.

I just hope flabdablet's vision of Charlie Brown doesn't hold past 2020, for your own sakes, and for the sake of friends and family members I left behind ten years ago when it all got to be too much.
posted by infini at 1:12 PM on July 28, 2018


our country is going through a great transformation. It therefore is acting like a wounded animal because its ego is fighting for its life.

Reminds me of this passage from one Harry Kessler, which I came across shortly after the 2016 election. He was writing about the WWI era:
Something… was growing old and weak, dying out; and something new, young, energetic, and still unimaginable was in the offing. We felt it like a frost, like a spring in our limbs, the one with muffled pain, the other with a keen joy.

Which brought me back to the great Gramsci line: "The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."
posted by doctornemo at 9:53 AM on July 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


that reminds me of my favourite lines by Dr Barbara Schaetti

At the heart of this experience is the social-psychological construct of "liminality." From the Greek limnos, meaning "threshold," liminality describes an in-between time when what was, is no longer, and what will be, is not yet. It is a time rich with ambiguity, uncertainty, and the possibility of creative fomentation.

posted by infini at 12:21 PM on July 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


I fully agree that huge amounts of really important stuff has got better since Reagan, but I contend that very little of that has anything to do with the US "looking itself in the face"

Yep. Our resignation to letting Reagan be acknowledged as "one of the good ones" because he passed an immigration bill has obscured how much damage he wrought. He got a bunch of attention with a jingoistic stance against relinquishing control of the Panama canal, he widened his appeal by securing the support of white evangelical groups, he concerned himself with "reverse discrimination" while expanding the war on drugs that disproportionately targeted the black community (even as the CIA was involved in drug trafficking), he got rid of the solar panels on the White House. He mindlessly pushed the dogma of deregulation, low taxes, anti-union, etc, etc, etc.

I'm only stopping here because the idea of revisiting the horrors of 1980s government policy is making me angry, and I need to save my rage for 2018 things. Still. It is unfair to say that every bad thing in America started under Reagan, but it is surprising how many bad things Reagan was responsible for that are celebrated to this day. And yes, it feels like our politics and policy might've become less terrible if our nation didn't breathlessly mythologize the 1980s as the good old days. The fact that we're now treated to sincere reminiscing about how "dignified" W was suggests that Americans will not be improving at the hindsight thing...
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:32 PM on July 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


Since we're at psychoanalytical metaphors, I got reminded of this essay from a year ago:

The Blathering Superego at the End of History (Emmett Rensin, LA Review of Books)
I am not qualified to make, nor do I want to make, any claims about the psychological character of any particular American liberal. And I am not at all convinced that Freudian psychoanalysis constitutes the most useful way to do so, in any case. But the superego as a metaphor for the collective operation of the liberal world order throws a great deal of much-needed light on what we are observing in the wake of the 2016 election. When history is meant to be over and a single political faction begins to conceive of itself as the permanent manager of a static world, then that faction ceases to be political in the ordinary sense. Politics, in its classic incarnation, is the art of deriving an is from an ought; the point, as Marx famously said, is not to describe the world but to change it. But if the world is as it ought to be already and the essential task is to maintain it — that is, to police the circumscribed boundaries of permissible behavior and ideas — then those tasked with that maintenance must conceive of themselves as acting above politics itself. They become a superego, beyond the libidinal whims of any faction and dedicated not to some alternative vision of the world but to resisting all impulse toward alternatives. Possibility goes in, correction comes out. The End of History suggests a perfectly healthy mind; thus, any attempt to alter this situation is dangerous. But the trouble with superegos is that, once they have taken on this role, they cannot cease to perform it. When the id can be kept in control, all is well. But when it can’t, then the result is not the superego’s surrender — it is repetitious, manic dysfunction. It becomes the blathering superego at the end of history.
Some prescient (or really inevitable) observation:
Like any superego, managerial liberalism is concerned first and foremost with appearances. This explains why, in the face of so much bad policy, liberals are incessantly talking about decorum.
The essay's vibe was in marked contrast against the FPP's. A tl;dr summary would say that the capitalistic censor that had been policing the nation's (and the world's) collective psyche was broken, and capital no longer needs its old, malfunctioning robotic henchman.

If there's a thing in common in the two takes that borrows from psychoanalytic language, I guess it's what Merus said upthread: This Time It's Different.

Those are different views, but as things stand now, it's not so much about views than actions. What to do? Love you neighbour, I guess. The neighbour is not an arbitrary one, an object. It's always a relationship, with "I" on one side and another one just as real as I on the other. Believe in the existence of the neighbour, who may be woman, black, poor, non-abled, undocumented, queer, non-NT, unAmerican, all labels that used to suppress the very thought of neighbouring. Reappropriate them as symbols of solidarity. Hold this bond. Love yourself in this love. Because this time it's different.
posted by runcifex at 11:39 PM on July 29, 2018


So this time we can rely on everybody else in the country adopting neighbour-loving solidarity as the Right Thing?

Have you met Trump supporters?

There's plenty of solidarity there. Watch any Trump rally. They don't need to get their feeling of solidarity from loving their neighbour; they get it from sharing and perpetuating expressions of blind allegiance to their leader and contempt for all who oppose him. Just like I saw W supporters do. Just like I saw Reagan supporters do. Just like I saw Nixon supporters do.

When W famously remarked that "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists", he was expressing the prevailing right-wing mindset in a completely straightforward fashion. It's a kind of solidarity that's easy to design election campaigns to cater to: just fall in behind the figurehead, march in lockstep and damn the consequences because USA! USA! USA! USA! Now get out there and Win One For The Gipper!

The prevalence of circular firing squads on the Left is exactly what you'd expect from a broad coalition encompassing genuine differences of opinion about the best ways to achieve a fair and equitable society. The Right cares a lot less about the consequences of actual policy. It can afford to care a lot less about policy because its leaders understand full well that the deck has been stacked in its favour all along, and its followers are content to continue ascribing any dissonance between their own experiences and the illusory Just World they're sure they live in to the pernicious influence of the Other, even if that temporarily requires believing wholly in an Other that doesn't actually exist.

None of this is new. None of it. And the only people for whom Trump's incomparable grotesquery throws it all into unbearably sharp relief are those who have already been staring into the face of the USA for their whole lives anyway. I really don't believe we're seeing any meaningful reduction at all in the numbers of those whose instinctive reaction to catching a glimpse of their own face is a panicked grab for the concealer.
posted by flabdablet at 2:15 AM on July 30, 2018 [2 favorites]


I think "none of this is new" is part of "it's different this time." The fact that more people, possibly even the left-of-centre-but-tada-tada-not-so-lefty class, are realising that none of this is new, is a difference from the roaring pre-Trumpian decades. Both the FPP article and the LABR one I linked upthread, I think, are not written with Trumpists as intended audience, and I don't know how the hardcore Trumpist -- if that's not just a stereotype glossing over too much human messiness -- gets to really integrate in a kind of society that I'd like to envision. But as a perennial sceptic of essentialism (heh) I have a vague sense of optimism. In human relations, it usually happens that the dynamic evolves like "I change, and you change; I become someone better (for the lack of a better word) in this relation, and your attitude toward me changes in accord." I hope this is true on a grander scale.

BTW, the leftist circular firing squad thing, I feel that the picture one sees depends on the scale. What seems a leftist internal brawl, on a more global political landscape, may look like just plain old left--right struggle. The US as a whole is much father on the left than most free countries.
posted by runcifex at 5:45 AM on July 30, 2018


The US as a whole is much father on the left than most free countries.

Surely you mean "right" here.
posted by Kitty Stardust at 9:06 AM on July 30, 2018 [3 favorites]


Thanks for spotting the error. That was what I meant to write.
posted by runcifex at 4:51 AM on August 1, 2018


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