The outcome of the last presidential election required me to undergo some serious self-reflection.
“Keller wakes up the morning after the election thinking that he doesn’t know his own country anymore.
We’re not, he thinks, who I thought we were.
Not who I thought we were at all . . . What depresses him is loss of an ideal, an identity, an image of what this country is.
Or was.
That his country would vote for a racist, a fascist, a gangster, a preening, crowing narcissist, a fraud. A man who boasts about assaulting women, mocks a disabled man, cozies up with dictators.
A demonstrated liar.” (The Border, p. 411)
This excerpt from The Border, Don Winslow’s recently published novel on the current state of the drug war, neatly summarizes how it felt to wake up on November 9, 2016 via his main character’s similar reckoning with the presidential election of a man who, I don’t know if you noticed, subtly riffs on Trump.
Reading it – and the book itself, a gangbusters trilogy capper – made me want to heal an open wound of mine, perhaps left untreated out of shame. In fall 2015, I bypassed confidence and leaped straight into cockiness when I predicted not only that Hillary Clinton would win the election, but do so in a landslide.
That, assuredly, is not what happened.
Such a failure of imagination of humbling, especially for someone whom imagination is his livelihood. I remember messaging, texting, and talking all the way until the night of about how unlikely, nigh impossible, his victory would be.
It was all true, but that didn’t stop it from happening. The truth is not mutually exclusive.
I overestimated my country and my ability to prognosticate elections. It has taken me a long time to carry that as a lesson learned than a badge of exclusion. And the lesson?
What happened and what now? Well, I won’t be diving back into the political well with the gusto I did in the past. The diatribes and editorials won’t fully return. I have a novel to finish, damnit.
But will I stop writing about the state of the world, diagnosing problems, and offering solutions altogether? Stop knitting together the disparate threads of modern life into something that approximates sense? That’s not in the cards.
Per such a stipulation, a problem that has concerned me for years is the growth of a constituency for white identity politics in right-wing political circles. If I had to point to a single political event that activated my awakening to this danger, it would be Sarah Palin.
The elevation of ignorance on such a scale to the very height of U.S. and world power could only have damaging effects on what was once considered sacred. After the 2008 election, I thought the threat was averted.
Ha.
I was not the only one who saw her for what she represented.
In an interview with The New Yorker published after his ouster from Trump’s White House, Steve Bannon, Trump’s former campaign and White House strategist, said Palin’s ascent was a flare in the sky as well, one he was drawn to rather than repulsed by.
“I came back right before the 2008 election and saw this phenomenon called Sarah Palin,” he told me last year. The neo-populist movement that Trump eventually rode to victory was being born in the waning days of that campaign. Bannon thought that Republicans, who had become the party of tax cuts and free-market libertarian philosophy, exemplified by people like Paul Ryan, didn’t yet have the right vocabulary to speak to its own base. “The Republicans would not talk about anything related to reality,” he told me. “There was all this fucking Austrian school of economic theory.”
What Bannon is saying in crude but effective terms is that the GOP elite forgot or didn’t know why their voters voted for them. They bought their own sales pitch about supply-side economics and libertarian politics. This ignorance opened up a window for someone who did understand and did cater to those voters, in whatever base or simplistic terms the aforementioned elite couldn’t or wouldn’t offer. A crucial error of mine was underestimating the volume of people receptive to such a racist and ugly pitch or, to put it in context, the volume of people to whom Clinton was more unpalatable than such degrading tactics.
What Republicans complicit in this power structure don’t understand is that by actively destroying the concept of psychological safety – one of key uniting factor in group dynamics – among the American populace, they paved the way for social norms to get bulldozed next.
NORMS DETERMINE GROUP SUCCESS
As told in Smarter, Faster, Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by New York Times journalist Charles Duhigg, Google undertook a massive data research endeavor called Project Aristotle to finally answer why some teams were effective and others weren’t.
Research by psychologists from Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Oregon, and elsewhere indicate that norms determine whether we feel safe or threatened, enervated or excited, and motivated or discouraged by our teammates.
What they found was that how groups operated mattered more than who was in them.
Now, let’s read two team leaders’ styles from the book.
- In first, the team leader “is direct and straightforward, which creates a safe space for you to take risks . . . She also takes the time to ask how we are, figure out how she can help you and support you.”
- In the second, the team leader “had poor emotional control. He panics over small issues and keeps trying to grab control. I would hate to be driving with him in the passenger seat, because he would keep trying to grab the wheel and crash the car.”
Which led the one of the most effective teams at Google and which did not?
Alternatively, which one sounds more like the current White House?
My argument is not that Democrats do it exactly right. It is that Republicans, with Trump as their leader, do it exactly wrong.
This is the illusion the office of the presidency affords Trump. His election victory and administration lend him legitimacy. But it does not change the underlying problem: no matter how many red hats you put on a donkey, it’s still an ass.
THE DEATH FEELING
What has also changed is the public numbness to such abnormality. Indeed, the devious trick is that people now see the abnormal as normal.
Reversing such a trend becomes more difficult as time creates experiences that entrench views and beliefs. This was always the danger of giving Trump legitimacy, whether as a Republican presidential nominee or a president of the United States.
Violation of norms isn’t something we can shrug at. It is the upending of the ideas that hold humanity upright. But because we’ve taken the power away from the people, there is an apathy, a paralysis, a death feeling halting our development, keeping us stuck in past hurts and wrongs, unable to heal or move forward. People seek meaning everywhere now because it appears nowhere.
The sad truth is that much of this threat comes from my demographic: young white men. Though a writer I often disagree with, Kevin Williamson described well this self-imposed psychological stranglehold in the wake of Charlottesville violence in August 2017:
“A great many of these young men have an interest in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology — they like to think of themselves as “alpha males,” as though they were living in a chimpanzee troop — but it never occurs to them to consider their own status as rejects and failed men in that context. Online fantasy lives notwithstanding, random girls do not want to have sex with them. How do we know this? Because they are carrying tiki torches in a giant dork parade in Charlottesville. There’s no prom queen waiting at home. If we credit their own sociobiological model, they are the superfluous males who would have been discarded, along with their genetic material, by the pitiless state of nature. The fantasy of proving that they are something else is why they dream of violence and confrontation. They are the products of the soft liberal-democratic society they hold in contempt — and upon which they depend, utterly. James Alex Fields Jr. is angry at the world, and angry at his mother, probably for the same reason.
What does an angry white boy want? The fact that they get together to play dress-up — to engage in a large and sometimes murderous game of cowboys and Indians — may give us our answer. They want to be someone other than who they are. That’s the great irony of identity politics: They seek identity in the tribe because they are failed individuals. They are a chain composed exclusively of weak links. What they are engaged in isn’t politics, but theater: play-acting in the hopes of achieving catharsis. Their online personas — knights, Vikings, reincarnations of Charles Martel — will be familiar enough to anybody with a Dungeons and Dragons nerd in his life. But sometimes, role-playing around a card table isn’t enough: Sometimes, you need a stage and an audience. In the theater, actors and audience both can forget ourselves for an hour or two. Under the soft glow of the tiki torches, these angry white boys can be something else — for a night.”
The privileged pining of such angry white boys and my familiarity with it is why I put my trust in the powerless.
They are the guiding light, not the powerful. While the powerful few accrue more and more, the powerless many are lost, their genius and potential benefit to society along with them. It is not simply a matter of individual choice. Some are never in a system or environment that allows them to make a choice.
A solution, such as we can achieve, is to replace the powerful with those familiar with powerlessness. In a country founded by white male slave owners on the basis of self-determination and equality under the law, where 44 of the 45 presidents have been straight white men, it does not occur to me that we need to reach into that hyper specific candidate pool yet again hoping for significantly different results. If we want significantly different results, we must pick from a pool of significantly different candidates.
If we truly want to hold people responsible for their impact on each other, on our planet, then we cannot also claim they’re complicit in circumstances that were created to spite them, rather than help them. It is like tying someone’s hands behind their back and then claiming their self-defense sucks.
THE SPIRITUAL ACHE
“With this loss of myth what has not been lost is our need for meaning, and therefore the West finds itself in a precarious position, for without a myth to help us author a meaningful life story and unite the culture in which we live, many people, according to Nietzsche and Jung, will latch onto collectivist political ideologies. These ideologies, encompassing their own sets of symbols and rituals, allow those who follow them to feel they are contributing to something bigger than their solitary self.” – The Academy of Ideas, Nietzsche and Jung: Myth and the Age of the Hero (6:43-7:11)
When opioid manufacturers created a demand for expensive pills, drug traffickers responded by selling extra-potent heroin extra-cheap and undercut the market. Suddenly, pill poppers who were topping out had access to cheaper and better highs. As a side effect, such heroin is often lethal.
In the marketplace of ideas, such poisonous undercutting is also possible. Evil cloaks itself in the absurd to become plausible to those seeking answers or their anxiety soothed, which is why trolls are central to the spread of anti-democratic ideology, both as individual content creators and as weapons in global information warfare (did you think by joining social media, you drafted yourself into a war for the future of the human mind? Me either).
The fracturing of our faith in our better angels creates the absence of a uniting myth. Nature abhors a vacuum and into the void of meaning has stepped a global rise in nationalism and fascism.
The institutions that could help or save us are handicapped. The people pulling the levers of power within them live in bubbles of privilege that render them unaccustomed to sacrifice without gain or weakness without shame, unable to model such behaviors. Indeed, quite the opposite, and the behaviors transmitted make it easier for everyone else to rationalize corrupt actions.
People are suffering because they are disconnected – spiritually, from our mythic past, personally, by technology and business, and professionally, via ever-widening inequality.
Such false idols lead us from truly healthy practices and disrupt, even halt, delivery of innovation that could solve such problems, leading to a vicious cycle wherein nothing gets accomplished.
Why is it so hard to change course? To do what is right?
One answer is norms. What is it normal or not normal to accept guide the array of choices the world provides us. It used to be that transcending such difficulty was the American Dream. The old idea that this was the land of opportunity, of self-made men, the shining city on a hill.
Par the course for a Western world based on the idea that God was external, separate, unattainable, but most importantly, singularly real. But in the past, polytheistic religions didn’t claim such verisimilitude, only to act as symbolic conduits to meaning. A close analogue to such elemental characters in our modern age is the superhero, paragons of the many facets of humanity and the world around us.
Perhaps that’s why love of superheroes have come to dominate cinemas worldwide and permeate global storytelling. For a couple hours, audiences can see a reality where a person’s dreams can become real, they transcend their limitations, they act heroically in the face of opposition, and they experience, however momentarily, stories that reward them. The last bastion of the self-actualized, a realm that has for too many become out of reach.
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