Trump and the destruction of rational consensus
With attention focused on the US election, what can we learn that might throw light on the appeal of authoritarian populism?
There is no doubt that what we have witnessed confounds our expectation of what is normal. However bad presidents may have been, none has ever sought to undermine the democratic process itself. None has ever threatened to blatantly cheat a victory. That millions of Trump supporters seem perfectly happy with this marks a terrifying moment. If more than half of the people turn against democracy, it will fail. America was, and perhaps still is, perilously close to that tipping point. The question for us, and anyone trying to understand authoritarian populism, is how entire communities can become convinced that dispensing with democracy is in their best interests?
A glance at the distribution of votes tells us that Trump had more support in rural areas than the cities and that less populated areas were more susceptible to his message. We see immediately that the success of his campaign depended on the state, city, or district on which the message landed. His campaign did not have universal appeal. Where it did strike a chord, something must have resonated. That something has been described in terms ranging from the anger of the left behind, to a failure of politics in general, to the breakdown in consensus of what “politics” even means. How do we get a handle on what happened?
We can start with the obvious. The campaign was built on one bold idea from which everything else flowed: Make America Great Again. Trump did not need to invent the myth of American greatness, it permeates American culture and would persist with or without him; remade each time a film is argued over, a car is bought, or a flag is raised. It might be opposed or rejected but it exists in some form inside every American head. And for those who identify with its core message, that you are free to make of yourself what you will, it has the seductive pull of the Wild West.
Trump knew how to use this myth, the myth of the American Dream. He also knew how to exploit its flip side, that there must be things stopping America from being great again: the immigrants, or unpatriotic moderates too afraid to man up and throw off their masks, or the white supremacists denied the right to speak, or the lockdown fanatics intent on destroying the economy. He knew how to ignite prejudices, with which America came fully stocked.
From this we can see that politics is not a one-way process. The US government does not decide how its people think. As the result proved, there is not one single version of the American Dream. At the state level, California prefers a more egalitarian version than South Carolina does, and the cities are more likely to vote Democrat than the surrounding areas, as Philadelphia proved. America, like all nations, is a patchwork quilt of beliefs and the quilt is finely woven. A recent Channel 4 investigation [1] exposed data the Republicans held on millions of voters. It showed how beliefs can vary from street to street and from house to house. The Republicans used this data cynically, to suppress the black vote. What it demonstrates is that however much politics may be perceived as a vague, enveloping reality, it is experienced locally, inside a house with a number on the door.
We should begin to see that the American Dream can only exist in the mind of the voter. In there, it must be rendered as its own unique version, whether it be the fully-fledged, fuck you, Trump version, or the more nuanced Biden version, or the more radically opposed Bernie Sanders version, or the completely oppositional, dystopian film version. It cannot exist without being visualised, perhaps as a Western, or Trump himself, or as a policeman kneeling on a black man’s neck.
Voters, therefore, are not told what to think. There must be a complex field of interactions that involve the media, social media, and the intricate web of moments people share - in their homes, at school, and in their communities. The unfortunate culmination of which was, millions of Americans were already poised and waiting for someone to validate their version of the American Dream. As Michel Foucault [2] put it:
The strategic adversary is fascism … the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
To understand authoritarian populism, it seems vital to recognise that it is produced not within the government, but within the individual, who exists within a cultural context. Only then do certain things become explicable. Trump’s theory of using disinfectant against Covid-19, for example, did not deter his supporters. They, having built their cultural identity from what they already believed, or were able to draw upon from media sources, were indifferent. If the group rule was that Trump’s word is final, then it was final. The collective beliefs of the group overpower individual dissent. The cult of Jim Jones demonstrates the power of this effect. In 1978, the self-styled preacher led his followers to commit mass suicide in a commune he founded in Guyana. We see the same destructive power with anti-maskers, who make a show of taking risks to assert their group membership.
From the above, it should be obvious that rationality is not a prerequisite of a convincing campaign. It may even be a hindrance. Those perplexed by Brexit or horrified by Trump should take note. Rational arguments are doomed if they are pitched against belief systems that oppose rationality. Experts become deceitful elitists. Science becomes a tool of the “deep state”. News is fake. Irrational beliefs are illusive, and by their nature, unreasonable. As The Cynical Squid (@SquidCynical) [3] has written in Goody Proctor’s Poppet – an epistemological lament, they are limited only by the imagination.
Democracy is at heart a rational idea. It demands we know its historical context and understand its principles. Trump supporters, as we have seen, are bound by a dream that is not rational and demands only that believers have faith. Once rationality is abandoned, cultural forces cannot be restrained from confecting wild theories, such as the ones proposed by QAnon, or lead credence to notions of election rigging. Unless this cultural power is recognised, a thoroughly dystopian future can be envisaged.
References
[2] Foucault. (1983). Preface. Retrieved from https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf [Google Scholar]
[3] https://thecynicalsquid.wordpress.com/2020/11/11/goody-proctors-poppet-an-epistemological-lament/
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