Tag Archives: presidential election

Living by Fiction

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I’m at home this week with what I hope is almost the last of a case of pneumonia. I joked with a friend the other day that I have ‘the rockin’ pneumonia and the boogie woogie flu,’ though I’d not like to call up the lyrics of that Johnny Rivers hit too literally. Yesterday, in the midst of some solemn Sunday reflections, I received a nag from Facebook telling me I hadn’t posted on my blog for a week, tsk., etc. So I dutifully looked around under the bed for some unfinished thoughts I could work up into something to fulfill the Facebookian expectation.

And I found something. For years now, at least since I observed how Richard Nixon fulfilled the expectation of comic book ads I grew up with and made himself the life of parties by playing the piano, I’ve wanted to write something about the authority of the fake. We Americans can seem obsessed with authenticity sometimes. Consider such icons of popular culture as Antiques Roadshow, and now Finding Your Roots, wherein we are led to appreciate wonders by experts whose appeal is enhanced by their ability to startle us with surprises hidden in the obscurity of some past represented by an artifact or an old letter.

Yet we can also give credence and power to utterly trivial people, to patently false but convenient beliefs, and to confidence tricks masquerading as dark hidden truths. Today’s Internet rumor mills are rife with the apocalyptic predictions of charlatans of all stripes. Somehow the world goes on, but so do multitudinous predictions of its demise. I’m not speaking now of authentic concern about the survival of our planet in this post-scientific age or of legitimate concern over lost values. I can get as distressed as the next person about the potential alteration or disappearance of Social Security, for instance; but I doubt very seriously that God is punishing us with storm and drought because our culture is changing.

And who better to represent our present obsession with the grandiose than Donald Trump?— a man who is an utter fake but who has apparently convinced many of us that his candidacy for the presidency is substantial and serious. We’ve seen many iterations of this American type, a figure with no particular talent for anything else who manages to achieve prominence by standing in a media spotlight and convincing a large segment of the public he belongs there, that he is a winner in a culture that worships winning and regards losers, except for the Chicago Cubs, as beneath contempt. Not only does Trump seem to succeed by brashness alone (a fine American virtue), but he also tells lots of lies, many of them about himself. Indeed he projects an image as fake as his hair and so slight one suspects a lucky breeze might blow it away, which may be why he resorts to thuggery and surrounds himself with other thugs to keep his critics at bay. Yet we are told that Trump is popular among losers, chiefly white working class voters who find themselves economically disadvantaged and feel culturally disadvantaged as well. And about this factoid the pundits seem able to dance to various tunes, some arguing that Trump is a legitimate populist while others lament his apparent racism, sexism, authoritarianism, etc.

Of course the list of losers among us is getting fairly long now. Lots of us never learned to play the piano, it seems; but the genius of fakers like Trump and his predecessor, P. T. Barnum, is a gift for the same trick performed by the Wizard of Oz, who even after he is unmasked is able to retain preeminence by presenting his postulants with various consolation prizes. Everybody knows that losers love consolation prizes. The trick is to keep the prizes believable but relatively commonplace. The more portentous they seem to be the more likely the giver is to be accused of practicing an invidious affirmative action, leading to lost value for true winners in the race to the top. Trump’s speech to the NRA last week was a masterful consolation prize. The NRA and its zealous partisans are winners presently, but their program is despicable, destructive, and anarchic. It surely can’t last forever. Like most of the rest of his campaign Trump’s pandering to the NRA cost him absolutely nothing. Old Barnum, who is supposed to have claimed there’s a sucker born every minute, could hardly have done better.

This puts me in a difficult position, because with another hat on my head I’ll defend the importance and value of fiction and the fictive, even the fictitious, till the proverbial cows come home. Where do I get off sneering at Trump? A lot of people like him after all, and many in the Republican party are now vowing to support him as their candidate for president (I note that only recently many of those Republicans deplored Trump, but let that go). Trump is real, he is authentic, they claim. He says things openly that many believe but are shy of uttering, namely his now famous racist and misogynistic statements which seem to resonate with many conservatives. Part of my answer would have to be an admission that though I acknowledge the value of a popular culture figure such as Harry Potter to model courage and heroism for the rest of us (though that is not all such figures do), I don’t expect Daniel Radcliffe to run for president dressed in his Hogwarts scarf with a wand in his hand.

But another part of my answer would have to be that it is the courage and sacrifice of this fictional character that we most admire, not the mere winning. Had Potter gone down to defeat we should still have admired him as we do his mentor, Albus Dumbledore. Sometimes even romantic fictional heroes suffer final defeat, as with Lancelot and Arthur. Or perhaps some token signals for us that their defeat isn’t absolute, as with the sword that returns to its home in the lake. One cannot imagine Donald Trump as a figure of heroic romance. Dictators and potential dictators tend to try to dress the heroic part, as Augusto Pinochet did in his Chilean heyday, for instance, as Raymond Burke, the darling of the Catholic right wing, does today. Their pretensions historically have had poor survivability, but Trump goes on. He is problematic for me, and for others who deplore him, because like Ronald Reagan he seems to have a Teflon skin, impervious to fact or other deconstructive force.

Annie Dillard once wrote a book entitled Living by Fiction. It’s not her best book. She was trying to be a literary critic, something she isn’t. Nevertheless, some of her observations in Living by Fiction are memorable. Here’s one: “Fiction elicits an interpretation of the world by being itself a worldlike object for interpretation . . . In the fiction of Aestheticism [fiction in the tradition of Joyce and Chekhov] ideas dissolve into their materials without a trace.” Trump’s presentation of himself as a presidential candidate invites the same interpretive exercise in which critics engage with such literary fictions, a teasing out of meaning not apparent on the surface of the text. From such a perspective Trump is an antihero, an iteration of Trump the reality TV star, whose feral mind seems to relish the corporate sewer. I cannot imagine any morally acceptable American scenario unfolding in a country with Trump as its leader. He is a know nothing and a blowhard. He inherited money, but unlike Mitt Romney he has not racked up a string of financial successes—rather a string of bankruptcies and frauds like Trump University. His thinking is grandiose. His call to unity evokes white supremacy, stigmatizes Americans of color, and proclaims them enemies of the people.

As I say, I am reading Trump’s presentation of himself as a candidate for president, some critics would say his performance of himself. When I say he is a fake, I don’t mean he is an empty suit masquerading as a leader, but something more. Trump’s language and behavior proclaim him to be a man without moral character who is perfectly willing to proclaim the worst in himself to be the best and to represent the worst in his constituents; yet he is seeking an office that requires moral seriousness, vision, historical perspective, and strength of character at a bare minimum. I am also reading the performance of the movement Trump’s candidacy seems to gather around him. Trump’s rallies and campaign are part of the fiction too, with their violence and demagoguery. Trump is not Hitler, as pundits remind us (and we must believe them, else they wouldn’t be pundits). But the country his campaign proclaims to be the America Trump wishes to lead resembles Germany in 1932, and that all too closely for comfort. If Trump represents winning to his constituents—winning for them, their winning—and I think he does, the rest of us would do well to lock our doors and keep our powder dry.

And as Americans we would do well to ask ourselves why the fake has power to move us to wish (or to do) harm to others, to vote for destructive policies, to support hate campaigns, and the other like things the Trump organization seems ready to accomplish. Or perhaps Trump isn’t fake at all. Perhaps these things are what his campaign is about, harm to those who differ from us, hatred and destructive public policies that promulgate hatred of the most vulnerable among us, reversal of the access to public life achieved by women and minorities over the past fifty to sixty years, restoration of white supremacy and patriarchy. Perhaps these are the means to making America great again envisioned by Trump and his followers. If so, then the question becomes how did a substantial number of Americans come to think these things, to wish these things?

What I did on election day

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I voted, of course, and I was glad to go to bed last Tuesday night with the knowledge that my guy had won a second term. But I also had good memories of having worked all afternoon on election day in a nonpartisan phone bank at one of our local TV stations. Here’s my beloved talking about it with Larry Conners, the Channel 4 news anchor. Our local League of Women Voters is one of the most active in the country. We have produced a voters’ guide in collaboration with the St. Louis Post Dispatch for some years now, and we all hope to continue the partnership with KMOV through future elections.

I worked election day afternoon until the polls closed at 7:00 p. m., answering calls from people with problems. The most common problems seemed to be with registration: people who had failed to file changes of address when they moved, weren’t sure whether they were registered, or didn’t know where their polling place was. In some cases I was able to tell callers how they could vote, but I had to explain to other callers that they had waited too long to register and would have to wait for the next election.

Though we did have difficulty at some polling places in the city, not uncommon in St. Louis. My beloved and I stood in line for two hours when we voted mid morning because our polling place was short staffed and had only three voting machines, a sharp contrast with 2008 when there had been plenty of staff and thirty or forty voting machines at the same site. I answered a good many calls in the afternoon from other voters who had encountered difficulties at the polls, all the way from illegal demands for picture IDs to the one caller who had gone to her polling place shortly after 6:00 p. m. and found it had closed early. We passed problems such as these on to a team of lawyers at the Election Protection group, but KMOV also sent investigative reporters to ferret out information about as many problems as time permitted them to investigate.

All in all it was a good day. I worked for some years as an election judge here until I passed my 70th birthday and decided to retire. During that time I saw a lot of incompetence and misconduct on the part of election officials—so, what I heard on the phone this past election day didn’t surprise me. Still, most citizens here voted without difficulty. It was pretty intense, working in the phone bank, pretty much one call after another for the last three hours or so. But I enjoyed the experience and will do it again if I’m offered the chance. It reminded me a little of working in voter registration drives and precinct politics when I was young.

Habits of the Heart

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I need to append a disclaimer to the beginning of this essay. It isn’t my intention in what follows to attempt a move out of politics or to pretend that I am making an analytical and apolitical rhetorical gesture. What I argue is political through and through, a point to which I return at the end of the essay.

It’s a cliché of political theater to claim that an argument is merely political, as though there were some form of the argument or some similar argument or some site of the same or a similar argument that is free of the taint of politics. There’s no such place, no such argument. It’s politics all the way down; and moreover, politics isn’t a taint. It’s the queen of sciences according to Aristotle. It’s the means by which we are able to act together in groups of all sorts, the index jointly of how we differ and of our solidarity. It’s the creator of the public space in which we reason together, as Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying, or do not.

And there’s the rub. Politics is by nature adversarial, the alternative to war and tyranny in civilized societies who take seriously the perception that persuasion is superior to force as a means of settling all but the crudest of disputes. And a corollary is that the cruder our everyday disputes become, the more the public space shrinks as a space for reasoned argument and the closer we come to war and tyranny. The public space has all but disappeared once in the history of the United States of America, and we fought a bloody war as a result. I’m thinking we’re very close to a similar near disappearance in our present public life.

That the present right-wing insurgency in this country is a rejection of politics ought to be very clear by now. Consider just a few phenomena. Since the beginning of President Obama’s term in office, the chief goal of the right has been to ensure the failure of his presidency. Just a year ago Republicans in congress held the entire country hostage and brought us to the brink of public insolvency in pursuit of this goal. Many Republicans now speak openly of overturning the voting rights act and of the partisan intention of current voter ID laws. Republican Mike Turzai”s claim that Virginia’s voter ID law would allow Romney to win in that state has been widely circulated, but other Republicans have made still broader claims for the rash of voter ID laws being passed by state legislatures.1 As conservative columnist Matthew Vadum put it:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.

And Minnesota Republican Kurt Zellers has been quoted as saying:

I think [voting is] a privilege, it’s not a right. Everybody doesn’t get it because if you go to jail or if you commit some heinous crime your [voting] rights are taken away. This is a privilege.

My point here isn’t to argue against these actions and claims (I think they are beneath contempt) but rather to present them as examples of the extent to which today’s right-wing insurgency rejects the most basic aspects of our republican tradition, and deeper still rejects politics itself. The ability of citizens to engage in political action depends in large measure on a shared sense of the common good. This is what present-day Republican strategies seem determined to destroy. Moreover, nobody should believe the right-wing insurgency’s claim to speak and act in defense of traditional American liberties. Quite the opposite is true—the right speaks and acts in an orchestrated effort to engineer the appearance of consent and thereby to restrict liberty.2

Republicans will shortly nominate Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan as their party’s candidates for the higest offices in the land. Both come from inherited wealth. Romney represents America’s most privileged class; Ryan is less wealthy but still much better off than most middle class Americans. The idea that Romney and Ryan are self-made individuals is equally ludicrous with respect to both men.3 Indeed, it is President Obama who has a reasonable claim to being a self-made person in the traditional sense (problematic for some voters who are sure he has been the recipient of some sort of afirmative action privilege).

Still, in the coming weeks the Republican ticket will attempt, indeed is already attempting, to draw upon a fund of populist support. They may have figured out something that progressives haven’t. In a recent New York Times piece, Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff describe the ressentiment that this Republican ticket attempts to enlist. Here’s one anecdote they present:

Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.

He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.

Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.

“I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government,” says Gulbranson.

Appelbaum and Gebeloff focus on Chisago County, Minnesota, where “Mr. Gulbranson and many other residents who describe themselves as self-sufficient members of the American middle class and as opponents of government largess are drawing more deeply on that government with each passing year,” pointing out that Rick Santorum won 57 percent of the vote in the recent Republican caucuses there with his rhetoric about “the narcotic of government dependency.” Not all Chisago residents share Mr. Gulbranson’s views or his frustrations, as some of Appelbaum and Gebeloff’s other interviews illustrate. Still, the weight of Appelbaum and Gebeloff’s researches seems to justify this conclusion:

[A]s more middle-class families like the Gulbransons land in the safety net in Chisago and similar communities, anger at the government has increased alongside. Many people say they are angry because the government is wasting money and giving money to people who do not deserve it. But more than that, they say they want to reduce the role of government in their own lives. They are frustrated that they need help, feel guilty for taking it and resent the government for providing it.
………………………………….
But the reality of life here is that Mr. Gulbranson and many of his neighbors continue to take as much help from the government as they can get. When pressed to choose between paying more and taking less, many people interviewed here hemmed and hawed and said they could not decide. Some were reduced to tears.

Thirty years ago a team of social scientists led by Robert Bellah published a book entitled Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life.5 The aporias that Appelbaum and Gebeloff detail remind me of some of the interviews recounted in first part of Habits of the Heart, narratives whose subjects encounter difficulty in resolving issues of commitment and relationship because they are trapped in a “culture of radical, privatized autonomy.”4

Bellah and his colleagues characterized the two large political discourses of modernism as welfare liberalism and neocapitalism. The problem with both as visions of our public life is that they share investment in an individualism that is empty of any conception of civic virtue and offers a vision of the good life based entirely upon accumulation and consumption. Ki Gulbranson wants to think of himself as a self-reliant individual, but his individualism cannot cope with the fact that he relies on elements of the welfare state in order to survive. As he puts it, “I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government.” But he does need the government, and his individualism gives him no ground for self-respect given that need. Nor does his individualism help him when he tries to think in terms of civic virtue. “You have to help and have compassion as a people, because otherwise you have no society, but financially you can’t destroy yourself. And that is what we’re doing,” he says mournfully.

Both modern political discourses reify individualism, the left primarily in terms of therapeutic self-actualization or traditional civil rights, the right primarily in terms of economics. We have come to see individualism as the only alternative to tryranny in contemporary social life. The left accuses the right of fostering a tyranny of wealth, and the right accuses the left of fostering state tyranny. Both are partly and sometimes right and partly and sometimes wrong, but the corrective is not to be sought in either, any more than it is to be sought in a retreat from politics.

Bellah and his colleagues claimed, I think rightly, that we Americans need to renew our civic life by reviving those habits of the heart which Alexis de Tocqueville long ago experienced as the foundations of our society. Tocqueville defined such habits loosely, as collections of notions and mental habits, but also as habitual practices involving religious, civic, and economic life. What is missing in our present social life is the understanding that such habits are public. For Tocqueville, indeed for his age, the notion of a private citizen would have been an absurdity. We are spouses, farmers, teachers, physicians—above all we are citizens. These roles and many others like them, together with the habits of mind and practice that shape them, are the forms of our public life, not items of reified private identity. Habits of the heart attach to our shared humanity, something we still experience (or at least some of us do) in “communities of memory and hope”6 such as churches, schools and universities, where vestiges of mutuality and shared obligation remain.

Churches, schools and universities are communities too small to effect a renewal of our social life. Tocqueville’s conception of American life was tied to a small-town, agrarian culture that hasn’t existed in this country since the late nineteenth century. Much of our American mythology nostalgically evokes images of that culture, but if we are to reconstitute a large-scale American community of memory and hope, it will surely possess outlines far different from the community Tocqueville experienced in the 1830s. One thing is certain, however. If we do seek to renew our social life, we will do so by a return to politics. It’s the only means we have. Part of any such return will inevitably involve the perception that present social and economic dislocation proceed (at least in part) from, and are exacerbated by, our present structures of inequality as well as by the level of incivility that characterizes our popular culture. As I write this my beloved is listening to President Obama’s press conference in the next room as she works on a syllabus for the coming school term. It is refreshing to hear the civil tone of the president’s conversation with reporters. Time will tell.

Notes

1The linkage beetween the broad Republican effort to restrict voting and the American Legislative Exchange council (which claims to be non-partisan), the Koch brothers, and other rightist foundations and corporations is now well known. See here, and here, and here.
2Noam Chomsky makes this point forcefully in a recent essay at the Huffington Post, “Destroying the Commons: How the Magna Carta Became a Minor Carta.”
3About Romney and Ryan’s relative wealth see this. On Ryan’s inherited benefits see this and this.
4For the quotation see “Individualism and Commitment in American Life,” a lecture delivered by Robert Bellah at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1986.
5Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. A new third edition has been available since 2007.
6The term occurs pervasively in Habits of the Heart.