“Fox News and Breitbart have done to our parents what they said video games and Marilyn Manson would do to us.” -Internet meme
“It’s easy to fool people when they’re fooling themselves.” -Mysterio, Spider-Man: Far From Home
The phrase “reality-based community” was, tellingly, first meant as a pejorative. During the George W. Bush Administration, journalist Ron Suskind spoke to a Bush White House insider who said “guys like me [Suskind] were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This sort of attitude led to a backlash among liberal critics of Bush, who started calling each other “Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community.”
Of course the implication of such a comment is that the Bushie in
question (assumed by many to be Karl Rove) was aligning himself
against reality. But the Bush Administration were a sober council of
sages compared to the Trump Administration and the “conservative”
movement, which at this point is less a political party with a voter
base and more a voter base with a political party. If they define
themselves in opposition to their opponents, the modern Party of
Trump are clearly proud members of the fantasy-based community. And I
find it a bit ironic that many of these folks are older people who
now get most of their information from AM radio and Fox News, and
these are the same people who told me as a kid that listening to
heavy metal and playing Dungeons & Dragons was going to destroy
my sense of reality and ruin my life.
Even so, the other reason that ‘reality-based community’ is a pejorative is the secondary implication that people of a certain background are no more prepared for reality than the conservatives. You see this in the often hysterical reactions of liberals to the corruption of Trump government and their deliberate flouting of “rules” that were mostly created by liberals for the benefit of liberals. They see Trumpniks acting like they didn’t say what they just said and accuse them of “gaslighting” or attempting to destroy their own sense of reality. In truth, Trumpniks and other conservatives could care less about brainwashing liberals, because they could care less about liberals.
Only people who have access to the same information pool as
everybody else but doubt the objectivity of reality have any reason
to fear “gaslighting.” I have sometimes been accused of
having the attitude “everyone else is an idiot except for me.”
Well, the last few years of “gaslighting” from various
sides have only made my self-concept stronger than ever. In some
respects liberals are no more fond of objective reality than
“conservatives,” it’s just that since they were in charge
for so long, that their assumptions about reality were easier to take
for granted, and their conflicts with reality are not as violent as
those of conservatives. Or, Stephen Colbert was wrong when he said
“reality has a liberal bias.” It’s not that reality has a
liberal bias. It’s that conservatives have a bias against reality.
The human psychology needs fantasy. Fantasy expands our sense of
the possible. And this is a major advantage that conservatives have
over liberals. Liberal Democrats only operate in terms of the
existing structure without seriously trying to change it. They’re the
ones who keep saying, “politics is the art of the possible.”
For conservative Republicans, politics is the art of the impossible:
either forcing some idea that should not work or ought not to be
tried (like a state abortion ban that defies Roe v. Wade) or simply
preventing Democratic or bipartisan legislation that would have been
possible before they made it impossible. Republicans don’t think in
terms of the existing terrain. They seek to shape the terrain. They
go beyond what is accepted, and don’t care if anyone says “that’s
impossible” or “that’s evil.” The problem is that
defying conventional wisdom means that you don’t care if your idea
really IS impossible or impractical.
In some cases, fantasy is an expression of despair. It is an emotional assessment that reality is never going to get any better. According to studies after the 2016 election, 9.2% of people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. A lot of people, through no fault of their own, are not doing well in this improving but weak economy, essentially the same economy that they used to attack Obama but are now praising under Trump. They look at the world, in some cases through media that get a lot of hits from sensationalism and conflict, and see their country in decline and the things they took for granted slipping away. And they see Republicans doing nothing about this and some Democrats actively assisting this process. For them, reality is the enemy. Anybody who is “realist” is the enemy. They have given up on sensible politics and want the razzle-dazzle of grievance and revenge fantasy.
A certain element of hypocrisy is of course at the base of this
but what we are seeing in the Trumpnik is a deeper and far more
active commitment than simple hypocrisy. Most of our basic “beliefs”
are simply a collection of learned behaviors and impressions that
don’t necessarily go together, for example “I am a good
Christian” and “I like big butts, and I cannot lie”.
It is very easy for most of us to be hypocrites. But when one’s
hypocrisy is pointed out, most of us respond by either changing
outward behavior to correct one’s public image, or, perhaps
unconsciously, change inner motivation to match one’s self-image. In
the short term at least, the Trumpnik does neither. When confronted
with evidence of his self contradiction, rather than change his
position the Trumpnik carries on and refuses to acknowledge the
contradiction.
Perhaps the primary example of this psychology in fiction is in
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, when Winston Smith is
brought in to be interrogated by O’Brien of the Inner Party.
“An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was THE photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.
‘It exists!’ he cried.
‘No,’ said O’Brien.
He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.”
Orwell called this “doublethink.” Liberals call it
“gaslighting.” I call it “trying to have it both
ways.”
The genius of this is that the alternative-to-being-right are,
within their own camp, far more efficient at brainwashing than
Orwell’s Inner Party. For O’Brien to destroy Winston’s mind, he had
to completely control his perceptions and subject him to prolonged
torture. But Trumpniks, with access to the same reality and
information as the rest of us, happily brainwash themselves.
This is how Ben Shapiro can (accurately) say that “facts
don’t care about your feelings” and say this in service of a
movement that is built around the motive “my feelings trump your
facts.”
Another aspect of this psychology is what is commonly called tribalism. Ayn Rand:
“If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live?
Obviously, they will seek to join some group—any group—which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group—they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices—so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.
This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called “ethnicity.”
So, when Trump says that the judge in a civil case against him is necessarily biased because he’s (a US citizen) of Mexican heritage, this makes perfect sense to him; the idea that a judge has to review the facts in a case that may not favor Trump is less a reality than “Mexicans are necessarily bad.” For the Trump-rationalizing Christian, rather than the logic being “I am a good Christian because I believe X things”, the Trumpnik says “whatever things I believe are right BECAUSE I am a Good Christian.” The Party member can say “Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia” one day and then “Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia” the next day and back again the day after that because the point is loyalty to whatever the Party wants you to believe at the moment, not bourgeois legacies like “facts” and “reality.” The true believer resolves the threat of self-contradiction by remaining loyal to some greater good like God or Country or the Party, no matter what external contradictions present themselves as a consequence. The problem however is that the individual’s loyalty is still subjective, and the external contradictions still exist. When we talk about faith in God, which God are we talking about? And when we talk about faith in Trump… which Trump are we talking about?
I’d talked to one person on social media who said that she voted
for Trump and was doing so again because he isn’t a Republican OR a
Democrat. Which is in a way true. But try telling Republicans that.
I have mentioned more than once that to understand Trumpism, you have
to figure out how Trump can get the support of both David Duke and
Sheldon Adelson. Duke is an arch-anti-Semite. Adelson is an
arch-Zionist. They can’t both be right about Trump. Either Trump is
lying to at least one of them, or, far more likely, they are both
lying to themselves about what Trump really wants.
I remember back when Jon Stewart was still hosting The Daily
Show, and wondering if President Obama was some kind of “Jedi
Master” playing 3-D chess with his opponents and we couldn’t see
the whole strategy. Well, as it turns out, Mitch McConnell is a lot
better at strategy than Barack Obama. But Obama at least had enough
intelligence that you could justify projecting him as a super-genius.
To project Trump as a super-genius requires a lot more effort on
your end.
And projection is what this is all about. To a given Trump
supporter, Trump is just as much a blank slate for their aspirations
as Obama was to liberals, only that much more so because the
disconnect from reality is the whole point. Trump allows them to
believe that Mexico will pay for the wall, or gravity makes things
fall up, or 2 plus 2 is the square root of 13, and to say that these
assertions are lies and fantasy is to miss the point, because to
these cultists, who see reality as the enemy, Donald Trump is the
living example that bullshit works. Donald Trump has proven
his entire life that you can lie throughout your entire career,
indeed, that your entire life can be a lie, and you can still get
away with it and even prosper.
Republicans who are not necessarily true believers simply assume
that Trump has some magic power to avoid social sanction, blanking
out the point that they give him that power by rationalizing,
and thereby tacitly approving, his actions. Trump doesn’t care that
white nationalists explicitly endorse his agenda, because “a lot
of people agree with me.” Presumably a lot of people who aren’t
white nationalists.
I had mentioned a while back that if Trump announced tomorrow that
he is a woman undergoing the process of transition, then every
Republican in Congress would fight for a pair of garden shears to be
the first one to castrate himself on the grounds that masculinity is
now “gay.” I can say this because they have done the
equivalent of such on a repeated basis. The latest twitstorm, where
Trump told non-white American Congresswomen to “go back where
you came from” is simply the latest example. We already see
after just a few days that the storm is blowing over and Trump’s
rating with Republicans is actually increased, because the
respectable cloth-coat Republicans have gone to the floor to come up
with more polite wording, to complain about the alleged anti-American
and anti-Semitic positions of “progressive” Democrats, to
say that Trump was referring to anti-Americanism in action rather
than asserting that if you’re of a certain bloodline you can’t be
American. It is an attempt to convince the outside world – but
especially oneself – that we didn’t all see what we just saw.
I mean, up to a point, the more well-spoken Republicans had done a decent job in creating a distinction between Trump’s racism towards the Democrats and legitimate critique of their positions, but then when Republican spinmeister Kellyanne Conway was interviewed by reporters on the subject, she referred to the Democratic “Squad” as “the dark underbelly in this country” and when reporters asked which country the women were supposed to back to, she asked one of them, “what’s your ethnicity?” Oh, so now we’re playing “I’m not racist, I’m just questioning your worth on the basis of your ethnic origin.”
At this point to deny that Trump is a racist is to not only defy
reality but to defy the English language. It is to assert that vowels
are a Socialist plot and consonants are all Muslims out to destroy
Christianity.
This is the issue with living on faith as opposed to facts. The
argument is that faith allows us to tap into the universal values
from some supernatural realm outside the subjectivity of human
fashions and politics. But in practice faith itself is a subjective
value, and the sacred texts are subject to interpretation, and
sometimes that interpretation is called “crusade” or
“jihad.” But at least the sacred texts exist as a matter of
record. When the focus of your faith is a demented, elderly man-baby
with the attention span of a fruit fly on meth, it becomes that much
harder to find a stable value. If you wish for a leader who will
“provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of
unspecified means”, then you would get more stable guidance as a
henchman of Two-Face or the Joker. Rather than defending an eternal
set of values and expecting their leader to conform to it,
Republicans hold their Leader as the standard of value, which is
consistent only in its negativity. And the practical consequence of
that is that no matter how much Republicans claim to not be a stupid
and racist party, their actions brand them as The Stupid and Racist
Party, because that’s what Trump and his pack of jeering redcaps
want, and without those people, Republicans won’t even have the
shrinking voter base that they do now.
Which gets to one more aspect of living in the fantasy-based
community. In abstract philosophical terms, Trumpniks seek to deny
reality, but in practical terms what they want is to dodge
responsibility.
Even this week, when the redcaps at a Trump rally chanted “Send her back!” at Ilhan Omar, they thought “that’s what Trump said!” And when Trump was called on it, he was like, “well, that wasn’t me, that’s what the crowd said!“
Trump in particular has coasted most of his life by threatening
things without having to go all the way. He wants the benefits of a
social arrangement without having to truly commit to it. Just ask his
ex-wives. Why do you think he never has locked Hillary up?
Because it would attract too much attention from people who would see
he really did want to establish fascism in America. Like, Chuck
Schumer might use harsh language or something.
The Trumpnik wants to assert that he can chant at the rallies
without being a willing servant of evil. That one can align with a
declared racist without being a racist, because after all, Hillary
would have been worse. That he can align with a movement that wants
to ghettoize women, dissidents and minorities without declaring his
allegiance against his own friends who may be women, minorities or
people who disagree with that movement.
Again, more sensible Republicans had played this “having it both ways” strategy in the past and it had worked to a point. The architects of the “Southern Strategy” may have been racists, or at least willing to use racism for political purposes (which may be even more cynical) but racism or white supremacy was not the be-all and end-all to them. Racism was a means to an end. The old conservatives aimed to control government to accomplish certain greater goals, like protecting this country from Russia.
Well, the redcaps like Russia, and prefer Putin’s society
to contemporary America. Racism may have been a means to older
conservatives, but to the Party of Trump, it is the end in itself.
Older conservatives may have wanted government to enforce certain
policies like fiscal conservatism, but to the Trumpnik, government
exists only to inflict suffering on the people they hate. And in
Trump, they have a dealer who gets high on his own supply. Because he
craves attention and adulation even more than racism, he says the
most evil and disgusting things in public because he knows it will
get attention, and his movement, which is much less a political party
than a fan club, eggs him on and responds in an even more evil and
disgusting manner, knowing that this will get a rise from Trump’s
enemies, who they see as their enemies. And in this hatred, they
reinforce their own us-against-the-world romance.
But even if these guys got their Whites Only America (or an America where only white men had the franchise), climate change is parching the fields, threatening the coastal cities and causing “freak” storms to be less and less freakish and more and more common. Anthropogenic climate change is a fact, and it is exacerbated by the policies that Trump and his cronies want. You can’t wish that away, or use the magic power of government force to change the consensus and say that consensus dictates reality. The Russians had a government that declared that political consensus was reality. It got them Lysenko, pollution, declining birth rates and Chernobyl.
And even in “consensus reality” actions have
consequences. You can’t retain the “soft power” of America
as leader of the free world if you hate freedom at home, persecute
asylum seekers and show in your foreign policy that your government
under Trump is at best completely unreliable and at worst, Putin’s
gimp. You can’t treat the queer community and non-whites the way the
Nazis treated Jews and Slavs and not expect them to mobilize against
you. You cannot align yourself with hate without provoking hate in
return, any more than you can devour your cake and still have it in
front of you. You cannot create some sort of Kantian distinction
between the phenomenal realm of your morality as demonstrated in
action and the noumenal realm of your self-assigned virtue and good
intentions.
And that is because the rest of us are not living in a magical
land of dogma and wishes. We are living in the real world of actions
and results.
The longer this Tijuana Donkey Act of a presidency goes on, the
more pathetically obvious it is that it continues only because the
Republican Party wants it to, which means that the longer this goes
on, the more they, not Trump, are the issue. Third-party voters,
independents, and Socialists who align with the Democrats purely for
practical reasons do not have the same illusions about the duopoly as
establishment Democrats, but if they want to avoid becoming a “third”
party themselves, those Democrats need to realize that the Republican
Party has declared war on them and respond appropriately, if they
want to retain their own power and privilege, which is of course all
that they care about.
And if they don’t, we still have a largely non-partisan structure of judges and law enforcement agencies that is continuing to investigate not only Trump but some of his acquaintances. The “deep state” (which prior to Trump was simply ‘the state’) let these people indulge themselves because they were not really a threat to the system, but as they have continued to abuse the privilege more and more, more and more people are realizing how much of a threat they always were.
You cannot declare yourself to be at war with reality without
reality striking back. You cannot say “the rules don’t apply to
me” – or even worse, “your rules don’t apply to me, but
my whims are law for you” – without abandoning reason and
civilization. At that point all you have is force and fraud, and that
boils down to who has the biggest gang. And the whole reason for
“conservative” demographic fear is the inner realization
that they are not the biggest gang, and have not been for a while.
And if Republicans thought things were bad in 2018 when they lost the
House, continuing to antagonize the rest of the country will make
things that much harder for their Party in 2020 and for Donald
Trump’s legal position whether he gets impeached or re-elected.
Of course, that’s the ultimate example of Trumpniks wanting it
both ways. They want their boy to be Jesus, but you can’t really be
Jesus until you’re crucified.
