Politics doesn’t have to be reality-based. But politics and policies that disregard reality eventually become disastrous. And the fantasies that fuel the campaigns of the Trumpistas of the world are often far removed from reality.
Ironically, the taunt “facts don’t care about your feelings” became a slogan of the Republican right to sneer at concerns about race or gender discrimination. It was a way of saying, we’re the serious grownups, you’re just a bunch of crybabies and sissies with no idea how the real world works.
Historian Peter Gordon suggests that we take the results of this year’s Presidential election as a major reminder of the precariousness of democracy in a more general sense:
Trump’s reelection points toward a tragedy from which we may never recover. Every critic will offer a different postmortem. Some will—convincingly—cast blame on the elitism and inertia of the Democratic party, which cleaved to its habits of liberal centrism and dismissed the grievances of the working class. Others will blame the Democrats for prioritizing issues of sexual or racial identity over the universalism of economic justice; still others will blame the brute misogyny and racism of the American public. Others will blame those groups who, moved by justified anger over the U.S. support for the devastation of Gaza, cast their lot with fringe candidates such as Jill Stein, motivated by a moralist’s belief that “sending a message” was more important than voting for somebody who might actually have won. All of these critics capture at least some share of the truth; social reality is infinitely complex, and our explanatory instruments always shed only a partial light on what we do. But we would be well advised to consider the most obvious fact: that the tragic ascent of Trump is not an anomaly to democracy but its fatal flaw. [my emphasis] (1)
He refers back to Napoleon III, aka, Louis Bonaparte (1808-1873), who is regarded as a kind of prototype of an authoritarian populist politician who exploited democratic sentiments to come to power and establish what we now call an “illiberal democracy.” Citing a famous pamphlet by Karl Marx on Louis Bonaparte, Gordon writes, “What in France was called the Party of Order had triumphed over the Party of Movement.
The institution of democratic suffrage, a novelty at the time, seems to have come into being only to annul democracy itself.” (my emphasis)
He summarizes the lesson, “there is always a powerful countercurrent in history that can sweep away like Noah’s flood whatever political gains may seem to have been made.”
In other words, democracy doesn’t run on autopilot. If enough people are determined to undermine it, and enough people are indifferent enough that they don’t actively support it, even the best institutional arrangements can’t hold off the next Louis Bonaparte or Mussolini or demented orange narcissist. Or, as Gordon puts it:
[T]he most painful truth of a democratic regime: that by the logic of universal suffrage, a democracy is only as enlightened as its citizens, who, in exercising their right to popular sovereignty, may just as easily opt for prejudice in place of progress and for charismatic authority in place of enlightenment.
Faith in Trumpism requires a significant decoupling from reality
A big element of the Trump movement has been the willingness by many people to ignore evidence plainly visible to all and instead embrace preposterous claims. One example that is particularly striking was what he said at an appearance before the far-right Moms for Liberty group: “The transgender thing is incredible. Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.” (2) In a later version, he reduced it to what sounds like a one-day version: “you know, they take your kid — there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl.” (3)
This is a remarkably cultish claim for him to make. For one, it’s blatantly untrue. No state in the US (or anywhere else in the world I’ve ever heard of) allows public schools to authorize sex changes operation or any other kind of non-emergency medical intervention on minors without their parents’ knowledge. Plus, anyone who knows anything about sex-change operations knows very well it not remotely close to a one-day, one-step process.
So why would Trump declare a blatant lie like this, one that most of his listeners would know was a blatant lie, and the rest could very quickly find fact-checks of it? At one level, it’s him saying to his followers: I don’t have the slightest respect for you. I think you’re all a bunch of suckers.
But in the cultish vein, it’s him telling his followers: this is a blatant lie. You and I both know it’s a blatant lie. But to be loyal to me you have to repeat it and act like you believe it.
In other words, there is a significant element of denying reality in Trump’s appeal, one which loyalty to Trump requires his followers to embrace. And in this case as well as others, this is not some broad ideological assumption that makes a questionable interpretation of politics or society. It’s just a cheap, sleazy lie. Decoupling political choice from the real, material world is definitely a factor in this.
Reality’s unpleasant habit of intruding itself
Sigmund Freud was famously pessimistic about the state of humanity generally. Especially his experience of the First World War and then near the end of his life the outbreak of the Second World War. Which was preceded by his having to flee Vienna for Britain after the German takeover of Austria in 1938.
In his short book
The Future of An Illusion (1927), Freud described his Enlightenment view that gave him basis for cautious Big Picture optimism, despite everything:
We may insist as often as we like that man's [sic] intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind, but it is in itself a point of no small importance. (4)
That quote came to mind in reflecting on what we seem to have experienced in politics in 2024, not only in the US but even around the world, which could very plausibly be very much related to psychological aftershocks of the COVID-19 epidemic.
2024 was the largest year of elections in global history; more people voted this year than ever before. And across the world, voters told the party in power — regardless of their ideology or history — that it was time for a change.
We saw this anti-incumbent wave in elections in the United Kingdom and Botswana; in India and North Macedonia; and in South Korea and South Africa. It continued a global trend begun in the previous year, when voters in Poland and Argentina opted to move on from current leadership. The handful of 2024 exceptions to this general rule look like true outliers: The incumbent party’s victory in Mexico, for example, came after 20 straight defeats for incumbents across Latin America. (5)
Politics has never been a purely rational process, an observation that will surprise basically no one. But public policies that are based on faulty premises about what is going on in the real world can cause more harm than good.
Of course, it takes much more than soft voices to defeat Trumpism and its political cousins in other parts of the world.
But Freud’s quote was a way of saying that reality has a way of imposing itself. There is almost certainly apocryphal store that when Galileo was convicted by a Vatican tribunal of heresy over his contention that the earth orbits around the sun, he muttered to the inquisitors, “And yet it moves.” (“
Eppur si muove.”)
It's a favorite anecdote for skeptical-minded authors and historians of science, especially emphasizing the conflict between science and religion (and the Catholic Church in particular). (Atheist-minded skeptics are often tempted to exaggerate that conflict, but that’s another story.) Astrophysicist Mario Livio, who argues that quote is very likely apocryphal, is still fond of the story:
Even if Galileo never spoke those words, they have some relevance for our current troubled times, when even provable facts are under attack by science deniers. Galileo’s legendary intellectual defiance – “in spite of what you believe, these are the facts” - becomes more important than ever. (6)
American fantasies and Trumpism
Kurt Anderson wrote (pre-COVID-19) in 2017:
I first noticed our national lurch toward fantasy in 2004, after President George W. Bush’s political mastermind, Karl Rove, came up with the remarkable phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community,” he told a reporter, “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality … That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”
A year later, The Colbert Report went on the air. In the first few minutes of the first episode, Stephen Colbert, playing his right-wing-populist commentator character, performed a feature called “The Word.” His first selection: truthiness.
“Now, I’m sure some of the ‘word police,’ the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen.
Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books—they’re all fact, no heart … Face it, folks, we are a divided nation … divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart … Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen - the gut.” [my emphasis] (7)
Anderson’s unhappy judgment: “We have passed through the looking glass and down the rabbit hole. America has mutated into Fantasyland.” In the essay, he looks over recent decades at major trends in reality-testing in the US public sphere.
Anderson does indulge in some “skeptical” rhetoric that is a bit superficial. For instance, he writes, “More than half [of Americans] say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God—not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy.” He doesn’t cite the particular source. But, given the history of religiosity in the US, it’s notable that this means half of the country does not believe in a “personal God.” Also, I’m sure if such a survey had more detailed questions about what those respondents thought “personal God” means, their concepts would be all over the map with far from all of them being able to give a passable theological definition of what that is.
It's true that more conservative, conventional religiosity is associated with more conservative and also Trumpista politics. But even people who go to church regularly on Sunday and are confident (or very optimistic) about a vaguely-defined afterlife still mostly want their children and grandchildren to be vaccinated against measles and smallpox. And most of them are unlikely to believe in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy headed by George Soros to use Islamic terrorists and immigrants to wipe all white Gentiles. Nor in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Jewish space lasers” that control the weather.
Chris Hedges on the Christian fascist element of Trumpism
Chris Hedges in August discussed how Trump himself, about as far from a conventionally pious person as one could imagine, nevertheless was able to harness Christian nationalist religiosity for his very non-divine purposes. One kind of faith-based denial of reality can make people susceptible to scamsters and demagogues promoting other versions.
Hedges, author of
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (2007), explains:
Because I'm biblically literate and I understand the church I'm acutely aware of how the Christian fascists or the Christian nationalists have distorted the Christian religion to sacralize the worst elements of American imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism. And they're heretics. … Jesus did not come to make us rich Jesus would not have blessed the dropping of iron fragmentation Bombs all over Iraq or anywhere else.
So, it's a complete sacrilege modeled very much on the so-called German Christian Church which was pro-Nazi and these [American] megachurches - … I spent two years on this book so I would go I was everywhere, pro-life weekends and evangelism explosion seminars and creationist classes I spent a lot of time reporting off the ground because it's the only way you can understand it.
But I would go to these decayed former industrial centers and places like Ohio and the only building that was new and had any kind of vitality to it were these megachurches and inevitably you would have quote-unquote “Christian” pastors - almost always white men, of course - and you would have a cult following around them.
They were in touch with God. And so when Trump first ran, … many people asked, how can the Christian Right Embrace Trump. And my answer was, no, no, the megapastors are exactly the same as Trump. They prey on the despair in the same way that Trump prayed on the despair of people in his casinos or a sham University.
They prey, and the irony is that because so many of these Mega pastors endorsed Trump that he took that cult-like power that they had onto himself. They disempowered themselves by essentially backing Trump uh I used to say the only difference between Trump. And the megapastors that I could see anecdotally is that the megapastors’ sexual proclivities are usually kinkier than Trump's.
But the same people exactly the same people and remember these megapastors are worth millions they the ones who are very successful they fly in private jets and [they flaunt their wealth in a similar] way that Trump flaunts his wealth. They [flaunt their wealth] as a gift from God. So, Trump who has no ideology other than an outsize narcissism - but he used the ideology of the Christian Right in his first Administration to fill that ideological void, his own ideological void, and that's how you got [Mike] Pence as vice president. That's how you got William Barr [as] Attorney General. That's how you got running education.
These people all come out of the Christian fascist movement. Now, a second Trump presidency will be different from the first. It'll be far, far more vindictive, especially at the Establishment institutions that sought to bring Trump down. that would be the courts, the press, and the Democratic Party.
People like me are an afterthought. They'll get to us later. But that will be the primary target. And they will distort the system every way possible to do it. And you will see a much more virent and a much more pronounced Christian nationalism in a second Trump Administration. And it will bring us very, very close to, if not finally complete this move towards the kind of Christian fascism that I wrote about in my book. [my emphasis] (8)
The trail of reality-denial in the US conservative movement
After his fretting over conventional religiosity, Kurt Anderson’s concern about “truthiness” and faith in the unreal veers for a while into tired, stock conservative moaning and groaning about those terrible Sixties.
He gives a genealogy of the trends responsible for the loosely-tethered-to-reality beliefs and passions he blames for the situation in 2017. There were the California hippies and their LSD and yoga and things like that. The Sixties in general were about all those Boomer young’uns deciding, “Reason and rationality were over.” Instead, there was meditating and pot-smoking and sex-drugs-and-rock-n-roll. And annoying egghead perfessers who wrote with less-than-total-disapproval about all this hippie, peace, dope, and free love stuff that was suddenly all over the place. Including that Foucault fellow and the postmodernism stuff.
He eventually he starts snapping out of that mode and discusses some of the more explicit pseudo-science by Erich von Däniken and his ancient astronauts, which actually did contribute to Trumpist-style conspiracist thinking. The UFO narratives were full of dark conspiracies by what the Trumpists now call the Deep State. And he also mentions the Satanic panics of the 1980s started mainstreaming Marjorie Taylor Greene type thinking into the respectable Republican mainstream:
Many Americans announced that they’d experienced fantastic horrors and adventures, abuse by Satanists, and abduction by extraterrestrials, and their claims began to be taken seriously. Parts of the establishment—psychology and psychiatry, academia, religion, law enforcement—encouraged people to believe that all sorts of imaginary traumas were real.
And, to his credit, he discusses the remarkable rightwing fabulations the emerging rightwing media ecosystem symbolized by Rush Limbaugh and that eventually produced FOX News.
Fox News brought the Limbaughvian talk-radio version of the world to national TV, offering viewers an unending and immersive propaganda experience of a kind that had never existed before. For Americans, this was a new condition. Over the course of the century, electronic mass media had come to serve an important democratic function: presenting Americans with a single shared set of facts. Now TV and radio were enabling a reversion to the narrower, factional, partisan discourse that had been normal in America’s earlier centuries.
And there was also the internet, which eventually would have mooted the Fairness Doctrine anyhow. In 1994, the first modern spam message was sent, visible to everyone on Usenet: GLOBAL ALERT FOR ALL. JESUS IS COMING SOON: Over the next year or two, the masses learned of the World Wide Web. The tinder had been gathered and stacked since the ’60s, and now the match was lit and thrown. After the ’60s and ’70s happened as they happened, the internet may have broken America’s dynamic balance between rational thinking and magical thinking for good.
Before the web, cockamamy ideas and outright falsehoods could not spread nearly as fast or as widely, so it was much easier for reason and reasonableness to prevail. Before the web, institutionalizing any one alternate reality required the long, hard work of hundreds of full-time militants. In the digital age, however, every tribe and fiefdom and principality and region of Fantasyland—every screwball with a computer and an internet connection—suddenly had an unprecedented way to instruct and rile up and mobilize believers, and to recruit more. False beliefs were rendered both more real-seeming and more contagious, creating a kind of fantasy cascade in which millions of bedoozled Americans surfed and swam. [my emphasis]
These changes in the information environment haven’t stopped. One of the political realities now in the US and Europe and much of the rest of the world is that the media environment has become more fragmented, both in the number of sources and in their commitment to a shared standard of accuracy and integrity.
As Andersen summarizes the problem, “Reason remains free to combat unreason, but the internet entitles and equips all the proponents of unreason and error to a previously unimaginable degree.” That means that the voice of reality-based thought that Freud wrote about nearly a century ago has more work to do than ever before. And, on the bright side, more tools for doing it.
The challenge is that the famous observation (often if dubiously attributed to Mark Twain) has, in an important sense, become truer than ever: “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes.” At least these days, when the liar stops to put on his shoes the refutations can also literally travel around the world before he picks up his mobile phone again. That is, if the algorithms on the platforms owned by TechBro billionaires allow them to!
Notes:
(1) Gordon, Peter (2024): The Eighteenth Brumaire of Donald J. Trump.
Boston Review 11/08/2024. <
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-eighteenth-brumaire-of-donald-j-trump/> (Accessed: 2024-09-11).
(2) Dale, Daniel (2024): Fact check: Trump falsely claims schools are secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries.
CNN Politics 09/04/2024. <
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics/donald-trump-fact-check-children-gender-affirming-surgery/index.html> (Accessed: 2024-09-11).
(3) Dale, Daniel (2024): Fact check: Trump revives his lie that schools are secretly sending children for gender-affirming surgeries.
CNN Politics 09/04/2024. <
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/26/politics/fact-check-trump-rogan-children-gender-affirming-surgeries/index.html> (Accessed: 2024-09-11).
(5) Freud, Sigmund (1927): The Future of an Illusion. In:
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 21 (1963), 53.
German version:
Sigmund Freud Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 14 (1948 [1955]), 377.
(6) Livio, Mario (2020): Did Galileo Truly Say, ‘And Yet It Moves’? A Modern Detective Story.
Scientific American Blog 11/06/2024. <
https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/observations/did-galileo-truly-say-and-yet-it-moves-a-modern-detective-story/> (Accessed: 2024-09-11).
(7) Andersen, Kurt (2017): How America Lost Its Mind.
The Atlantic Sept 2017 issue (updated 12/28/20217): <
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/> (Accessed: 2020-24-05). Paragraph breaks added.
(8) Is this the end of the American Empire? Chris Hedges - Real Talk.
Middle East Eye YouTube channel 08/05/2024 (after 49:00). <
https://youtu.be/eGPa_omV9WI?si=NntAWR0-byNi-V-q> (Accessed: 2024-09-11).
