*Pic: From Boohoo HERE, Trumpism: The Apprentice with the Golden Arse
Some weeks ago, I had a spat with my youngest daughter over a Photoshopped picture of Donald Trump on her Facebook page. Images of his mouth were inserted where his eyes would normally be and the result was supposed to look ridiculous and make him seem like a clown. ( http://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/someone-swapped-donald-trumps-eyes-for-his-lips-and-its-just#.mbnZyNDk8 )
I commented that this was not particularly funny because treating him as if he were a clown was a dangerous underestimation of the man and an intellectual evasion of having to come to grips with the Trump phenomenon and what is giving him and it traction.
She threatened to ‘unfriend’ me if I didn’t stop ‘trolling’ her site. And I think that is some measure of how threatened and upset some people are about Trump and his local lookalikes in certain quarters of the Coalition parties in Australia.
This should not be a surprise. The hegemony of the post WW2 settlements by the western powers and the liberal nation-state consensus that legitimised that world order are starting to fray all over the world. It is being challenged increasingly effectively by both legal and criminal corporatist states within states and/or trans-nationals, plus conservative and religious fundamentalist forces from the Middle East, through the old Soviet Block into eastern and central Europe, Africa, the Americas and South-East Asia.
Being slightly autistic and foolish, I didn’t altogether give up with said daughter. I had seen an analysis by an American liberal commentator by the name of George Lakoff, titled ‘Why Trump?’ (http://georgelakoff.com/2016/03/02/why-trump/) and sent her the link explaining that while I didn’t agree with much of it, at least it was having a go at trying to deconstruct what was going on inside American society, that would account for why the bastard seems to have hit pay dirt.
Lakoff ladles out your stock standard liberal analysis of the ‘authoritarian personality’(the strict patriarchal father) that started its life with the eighteenth century utilitarians, who challenged the ‘arrogant’, ‘authoritarian’ and ‘dogmatic’ power of the feudal and ecclesiastical commons over the individual, through to the Popperian attack on the Marxist-Leninist enemies of the ‘open society’, and now applies itself to the altogether unexpected and very robust resurgence of ‘reactionary’ conservatism and religious fundamentalism, which by rights, ought to be mouldering in the dustbin of history, but aren’t.
Being a liberal intellectual, he resorts to the usual judgmental and caricatured stereotyping. It appeals to the prejudices of his ‘nurturing mother’ (as opposed to the ‘strict patriarchal father’) liberal audience. He and they ‘know’ that the open society’s enemies are the usual blend of irrational (plus all their favourite ideological clichés) blink-in-the-light inhabitants of the cracks beneath the all too thin fabric of (liberal) ‘civilization-as-we-know it.
Thus Trump represents the irrupting voice of darkest rebellion by these ‘irrational forces’ of ‘authoritarianism’, ‘bigotry’, ‘prejudice’, ‘racism’, ‘homophobism’, ‘sexism’ and so on, against what the rebels see as oppressive ‘political correctness’, but is in fact wilful and ‘ignorant’ denial of the hegemony of ‘The Enlightenment’, goodness, decency and the whole damn thing.
“Isn’t that right children?”… “Yes Miss.”
Being a professor of cognitive linguistics, Lakoff is able to bring to his ideological analysis a scientifically respectable and authoritative gloss…as if ideology and science weren’t a recipe for pseudo-scientific ideological mouthpiecing, in the tradition of social Darwinism, eugenics and Marxism-Leninism. Like all good ‘scientific’ propagandists, he only addresses the perverse mechanisms of the rebellion, but not the much more complex underlying reasons for it that might require (perish the thought) some difficult introspection and self criticism.
In Lakoff’s world, he and his ‘nurturing’ progressive friends have the legitimate and ‘logical’ beliefs, whereas the other guys only have ‘prejudices’. Lakoff et al control the armamentarium of negative stereotyping; what the old church used to call the categorizations of heresy. They are the ones in charge of the ideological prejudicedracisthomophobicbigotignorantdunce hat (same design that those accused of heresy were forced to wear in the ecclesiastical courts) that is kept in the Recalcitrant’s Naughty Corner.
And as regime ideologues, Lakoff’s top gun constituency within the democratic state have the clout to make it stick, ‘Progressive’ Moralogians (Libertarchs) get substantial control of/input into the education system, the language and parameters of governance and welfare, the legal and institutional frameworks to enforce them and the media mouthpieces in the pulpits of the courts of opinion to maintain their legitimacy, much in the same way as the Medieval Church did.
It would not cross Lakoff’s mind that the re-appearance of forces that ought to have died off by now might be a symptom of some very serious problems emerging out of what has happened to the long standing ‘Establishment’ of liberal stewardship of things like governance, pedagogy, liberty, rights and welfarism. And like the Roman Church functionaries of the late Medieval period, before the Reformation crashed in on them and started to seriously split Christendom, these secular ideologues imagine their world view is as a universal bastion of all that is good against waves of ideological orcs and perverse error.
I say ‘Establishment’, because that is what the social libertarians are. Since the 1960s, they have been the ones against whom all others were measured and now it is they who have the record to defend and take their turn at being ‘measured’, including what they have to do and become to get their privileged positions as orthodox libertarchic apparatchiks within the larger regime.
It is not part of the Lakoff’s mindset that this liberal ‘Establishment’ is deeply implicated as the laissez-faire social libertarian wing of a mostly submerged multinational corporatist laissez-faire market libertarian matrix, whose agenda is the totalitarian commercial colonization of consciousness and its virtualization of society into a marketed system of discourse; including its undermining of the authority of and residualization of the nation state; its conversion of libertarian language into the practice of totalitarian enslavement, and its relentless destruction of the existential, social and ecological commons in favour of the privatized commercial and social realms.
Basically the libertarchs, like the clerics of an earlier age, decorate the regime with a veneer and myth of liberty and oppositional discourse that disguises the repressive and totalitarian whole, provides a libertarian language its corporate masters can colonize and reconstruct, and they have always moved reliably and swiftly to smash any disciplined ‘authoritariansim’ that might interrupt a culture of disinihibition and indulgence; that might slow susceptibility to the ever increasing stream of goods and services provided by a consumer economy.
Their occasionally noisy protests (There was also constant jostling between Church and Crown during the Medieval period for influence, prestige, institutional clout and territory) are tolerable because the system of discourse management is so powerful and its domination of mass imagination so complete, it doesn’t need a 100% of the market like the autarkies of the last century. Newscorp’s 70% of the media market plus billions of dollars in advertising, marketing and public relations expenditure is quite sufficient to provide mass working compliance.
The Libertarchs are fully integrated albeit quarrelsome official functionaries of a late modern epoch dominated by corporate oligarchs, no matter how nice and well meaning their rhetoric sounds.
Said daughter was neither humoured nor inclined to engage, so I gave up, at least with her. But I think it is important to understand that liberal denial about what is happening to the hegemony and legitimacy of its ideas is just as disabling in its own way as say climate change and free market failure denial is on the other side. All sides are under pressure and struggling to keep faith and reason buckled together, as faith becomes blind, closed circuited, delusional and bunkered down with sacred cows, and reason becomes glib excuse making, slip, slide weave ‘n duck rationalization, where publicrelationspeak dominates public discourse.
It is a very bad sign when faith and reason get into difficulties staying connected, because they need each other as vital reference points to the other. Faith/belief/assumption/values give compass and structure to the integrity of reason, just as reason gives structure and integrity to what is believable. The dance between the two is a virtuous circle and a leitmotif for a stable and intellectually integrated world capable of establishing a bedrock of broadly satisfactory truth values.
If reason takes its leave of faith and the integrity that it bolsters, it loses its way and becomes the plaything of whatever tempting opportunities happen to be floating by at the time. Malfeasance and corruption seem so much more justifiable when conscience and a sense of shame disappear. Crib, conflation, fudge and bluff become loaded with pretentions to honest reason as marketing, propaganda and keyword laden sloganeering replaces real debate and clear thinking, on all sides.
If faith walks out of the relationship, it becomes the plaything of whatever affective passions and disturbances are floating by at the time. The great totalitarian state autarchies of the twentieth century traded on the psychology of catastrophe and displacement to the point that ordinary critical faculties just weren’t up to the task of fending them off.
And faith will walk out if it thinks that reason is having a lend of it (overborrowing on faith’s goodwill) or compromising its basic tenets. The religious fundamentalists have put a stop loss on the hegemony of secular knowledge (science) because the modern world order that science has helped build seems to them to be turning into garbage, because it isn’t just removing the cosmology of traditional religion, but everything else that comes with it. Creationism and climate change denial maybe intellectually delusional, but makes sense in terms of putting lines in the sand that represent absolutely non-negotiable bottom lines about the meaning, character and regulation of life.
No matter how childish we think belief in Father Christmas and God might be, that realm of social software and practice that religion covers, supplies at least half our individual and collective net worth. One can be surrounded by the glittering prizes of the market place, but be desperately impoverished and not have clue as to what it is that is missing; why life feels so empty and key social arrangements keep disintegrating when the going gets a bit hard’; or even when they don’t; just not getting enough ‘satisfaction’; not having anything ‘in common anymore’, and needing to ‘move on’ are the favourite euphemisms I believe.
And just as the Old Medieval Church started to lose ground against the rise of Absolute Monarchies from without and schism from within, for the Libertarchs, the collapse of class warfare, the attenuation of the anti-Imperialist struggle and the decline of the welfare state means they are struggling for a raison d’etre and anything will do, as long as it is ‘a poor thing’ in need; refugees, ‘racism’ sufferers, the ‘disadvantaged ‘and homosexuals; anything that will keep the well meaners in some degree of continuing relevance as political players.
“And don’t they treat them like a sacred sites girls and boys?”… “Yes Miss!”
All that is left of ‘progressive’ Libertarchic ‘analysis’ is empathy…..which is why its position on asylum seekers is so marginal; not because of dark forces, but because of a complete disjunct between compassion and being a gullible suck and soft touch; between Good Samaritanism and not thinking consequentially and sustainably; between the ideal of humanity and the grotty realities of being all too human, desperate and unscrupulous.
Virtue without critical judgment is indistinguishable from deliberate perfidy and policy cancer! Being on the side of the angels does not necessarily lead to divine providence. It isn’t even a precondition for doing good. For that I would more readily rely on a Machiavellian Princess with enough foresight to exploit the benefits of good policy even if it isn’t always benign. Good policy, if it is any good at all, will always produce losers for the larger benefit, whether they are the hydrocarbon lobbies or welfare recipients.
The sort of discussions that are going on amongst Trumpists about ‘race’ are very similar to the ones we are having here; absolute frustration with black communities that are obviously disintegrating and hitting bottom in the valley of the shadow of marginalization. They aren’t just poor. They have been trashed by false gods; disinhibition, indulgence and the loss of moral agency. The Reverend Martin Luther King promised the freedom of the righteous, but the righteousness disappeared with his congregations and Christian conscience, because ‘you can get anything that you want, in Alice’s restaurant’.
African migrants to the US get treated almost like whites, because the moment they open their mouths and speak, everyone knows they are not an Afro-American and that they very likely come from still relatively traditional and orderly third world communities where people can still be relied upon to be conservative, secure, robust, honest, disciplined, constant and not averse to enforcing their writ. It isn’t just ‘authoritarianism’, but the clarity necessary to keep not just ‘order’, but sufficient values to know the difference between right and wrong, what the fundamental bottom lines are and what one has to do to fight for them, within the self, family, community and the wider world.
Governance in black American communities has been so badly damaged by the loss of what kept body and soul together through really terrible times, that even though the all singing all dancing negro evangelicalism was a bit quaint, it was the difference between staying in one piece and falling through the existential cracks.
It is not that the rest of secular American society isn’t starting to disintegrate for the same reasons. It is just that it inherited a bit more ‘fat’ to keep its components going for a bit longer and delay the worst effects of laissez-faire libertarianism. But it has caught up there too. The children of the upper classes can afford the more expensive drugs to destroy themselves with, because their parents are too busy shorting each other to notice
For conservative and religious America, all this is blazingly obvious, but their old fashioned ideologies just aren’t up to nailing it on their libertarian adversaries. And they keep getting nailed with the tried and true negative liberal stereotypes .
When faith and reason do break up, the divorce is always messy and almost inevitably ends in war, because that is what happens when people start hitting non-negotiable bottom lines. The conversations crossing America between its conservative religious and liberal wings is reminiscent of those between the North and South before the Civil War.
My thesis is that we are in the middle of a tectonic shift out of the modern era that is as shocking, disruptive and war prone as The Reformation that brought it into being five hundred years ago, when the axis of faith and reason was disrupted by the decline of the medieval world and the rise of modern ideas, institutions and cities.
When that happens, all the bets come off, and everyone starts playing for keeps in a game where the stakes become so large, no one can afford to lose. People start to find that increasingly, when they pull the usual levers of life, either they don’t work anymore, or they do, but perversely.
As an old order sinks, people head for if not ideological lifeboats, anything that will float in a sea of uncertainty, or they drown in it and become grist for the existential predators that lurk beneath. Existential fear and rage are meat and drink to suicide bombers, for to die on a battlefield is nothing compared to having to live among the existential dead, or even worse, join them.
What I wanted to say to my third generation shop trooper and youngest daughter is difficult to speak. It does not fit easily into the present system of discourse. To explain the rise of someone as bizarre as Trump is a much tougher exercise than Lakoff tries to make it look, just as it is to work out why Islam is convulsing into a Reformational explosion, as we speak; just as it is to elucidate the sexistenialist puffery and folly of liberal ‘tolerance’ (indulgence) of a migration (invasion) by homosexual and transgender ideological cuckoos into our almost defenceless and smashed up reproductive nest; or even throw light on why authorities all over the world are losing the battle against the ultimate network marketed consumer product, which hits the central nerve centre of the pleasure principle, the consumer cult of satisfaction and all that is corrupt, unsustainable, inconsequential and chaotic in latter day consumer societies; the psychotropic drug.
In order to track the disintegration of a global and personal order of things requires its own language that gets out of the polarized discourse of business-as-usual. We have to get out of the kind of complacency that says it is only the other guy who occupies that space. And the problem with trying to do that is that whoever attempts this exercise is going to be unpopular with everyone, because everyone has an axe to grind within the status quo.
Trump’s constituencies knows some of this stuff in their hearts but cannot articulate it, like the inchoate peasant Jacques (Johns) who fought in the Jacquerie rebellions against their feudal lords in France during the fourteenth century. When they try, like their peasant counterparts who were no match for a cavalry charge by heavily armoured knights, they are made to look like fools and feel bad about themselves, because their liberal interlocutors have all the ideological tools to run rings around them, even if they are just morons who are good at throwing conversation ending accusations of heresy, using nothing but keywords, slogans and sprays of high moral dudgeon.
They feel themselves to have been oppressed by an ideological elite and its acolytes that have no right to their vast and puffed up pretensions. They have found themselves stuck in a system of discourse, terminology and political/moral control that they do not just hate, but quite rightly do not regard as legitimate, anymore than were the feudal lords and the very corrupted church of the late medieval period
This is not to say that the Trumpists are a prettier sight than their antagonists. When faith and reason part company it is never a good look. But it is enough that we understand that their liberal antagonists are neither better nor worse. The detritus of their conversations are littered with the same disabling mixture of fragments of the awful truth and blindness to it. All sides can see or feel each other’s weaknesses and frailties clearly through their own prisms, while unable to even begin to plumb their own, so this is no apology for Trump and co; just a reality check for his liberal antagonists who fondly imagine they have it all in one.
They don’t.
When it comes to their sacred sites, guys like Lakoff are as delusional as the off-with-the-fairies Tea Party Christian fundamentalists. And their sense of intellectual domination prevents them from seeing just how compromised, blunted, conflated and cribbed liberal ideas and thinking have become.
When it gets to that, one can almost smell the decay of an age and the coming of something else that will owe absolutely nothing to the self-proclaimed ‘enlightenment’ or the hydrocarbon based lumpen- capitalism that made it possible and plausible. And as that happens, we are going to hear great deal more about the business of governance in a very likely decentralized and heavily cut down lean and green capitalism ‘lite’, working within a command (and probably militarized) economy and society that is very clear about its authority and right to use it, but does have some qualified democratic features.
They will be real democratic features that join rights and freedoms to moral agency and the social templating, training, mentoring, regulation, standards, qualifying to meet them, conforming to the norms they establish and enforcing them if they aren’t conformed to, that underpins all legitimate social entitlement. This is the foundation for the reproduction of genuine adults capable of entering mature relationships, rather than the post-adolescent ones now on offer, because the present system of adult producing socialization has all but imploded into a producer/consumer vanishing point.
Those rights and freedoms are all the more prized and respected for that, because they have to be earned and then maintained to keep them. There are no unconditional freebies, because in the end, everything costs, no matter what it is. If it doesn’t cost something, it is worthless.
In an ecologically constrained world, decent social software is all the more precious, because integrity can neither be confiscated nor stolen. And faith and reason will be rejoined, even if it means going to war to get it done. And whether that is accomplished through a new type of secular compact or old time religion, well history doesn’t give a damn; first up best dressed.
In the hundred years after the crushing of French Jacqueries came the Hussite rebellion in Bohemia that this time was bolstered by articulate religious and secular leadership and good generals. It took twenty years of fighting to get a compromise that would leave the status quo intact. And in the hundred years after that, religious rebellion went right through Europe and blew Christendom to bits. And right now I am flagging the emergence of ideological articulation that will stick it on the Liberalman-Wiseguys like Lakoff, nail them to the floor and flay the bastards
We will look back on this period as one the locusts ate, regard its economic practices as suicidal and its decadent social and political ones somewhere between horrified incomprehension, visceral disgust and rage at the terrible legacies it and they left behind for successors to clean up.
This essay has done no more than make a preliminary assessment of why liberal ideas are not getting the kind of traction they once did and why men like Trump can exploit that, even if all he is doing is riding a wave of resentment. It suggests that resentment is not ill founded, but it has not gone into why beyond a general theory of the collapse in the relationship of faith and reason and pointing to just how implicated liberal establishments have become as regime administrators. What it hasn’t done is trace in detail just how badly liberal rhetoric and rationalization has deteriorated and why. That is a whole subject on its own, which I will deal with next time.
It will provide the kind of intellectual rationale that the people down at Trump Inc just haven’t figured out yet. But they won’t like it anymore than their liberal antagonists, because the road it points to isn’t a free enterprise libertarian world, but one that will rebuild, reregulate and ramrod a new social commons and brand new social traditions to go with it, just as it moves to do the same for the ecological ones.
Retraditionalization doesn’t need to be old fashioned. It just needs to be grounded in the fundamentals and prepared to take from our past as much as is useful, but not so much as to weigh us down to the point of paralysis, in a journey that is going to be difficult and strewn with casualties.
Great journeys must be imagined first
and so trenchant in their intent
to slake the deepest kind of thirst,
it grasps imaginers by the throat
and tells them bluntly:
only through travail and trial,
by purging fire
and hammer blows be smote
can their spirit be reforged
and history’s child
be sired.
This ordeal can either temper
or destroy
according to its whim,
or perhaps the pilgrims’ strength within.
Courage can surmount faint hearts,
but how can faith presume
that having gambled all,
there is a way to save us in the end?
There are no roads upon the other side,
except the ones we make,
every step perhaps at stake
our lives,
every view through soldiers’ eyes.
And so we wile away our days
beside brooding familiarities
that will not speak to us for fear
that it is not the sun that brightens
all that we hold dear,
but the bonfire of our vanities;
that the deepening darkening shade it castes
is not shadow,
but decaying sanity.
We look for hopeful signs,
but at midnight,
the clock rings its hands and says
in anguished tones,
“Ladies and Gentlemen,
it’s time.”
