Meaning of Trump's Victory
As
I contemplate the
re-election of Donald Trump to the presidency despite his deep and
well-known
character defects, his admiration of dictators, and his utter lack of
regard
for fundamental American precepts like abiding by the results of
elections, my
thoughts go in a direction that’s…well…not exactly part of the current
conventional
wisdom.
What
comes to my
mind is an image of a horribly unfortunate incident decades ago
involving an
attack by chimpanzees.
The chimpanzee attack
I’m thinking of occurred at a birthday party for a chimp named Moe, who
had
been brought back from Tanzania as an infant by a California couple,
and raised
in their home as if he were a human son.
Moe ate meals at the kitchen table with them, slept with
them in their
bed, and even served as the best man at their wedding.
After nearly 30
years of living with them in this manner without incident, Moe for some
reason
bit the finger of a house guest. The
town government stepped in to forcibly remove him from their home, and
he ended
up in a wildlife sanctuary, where he was housed in an enclosure with
other
chimps.
His adoptive human
parents maintained regular contact with him there.
On a special visit to celebrate Moe’s
birthday, they feted him with presents, sang Happy Birthday, and sat
down happily
to eat birthday cake with him.
The other chimps
couldn’t stand seeing all this attention and love being lavished on Moe
while they
were treated as if they didn’t even exist. They broke out of their
individual cages
within the enclosure, and went on a rampage.
They went a little
easier on Moe’s adoptive mother: her
most serious permanent injury was having her thumb bitten off. They were more brutal with
the adoptive father. He
lost all but two of his fingers—while also
having his genitals mauled, one of his eyes gouged out, and his nose
bitten
completely off, never to be replaced.
In a later television
report, an animal behaviorist explained that chimpanzees have an acute
sense of
fairness, and can become enraged if they feel it’s violated. The anchors could do
little more than shake
their heads sadly.
Today,
a lot of
people do essentially the same thing as those TV reporters when they
hear Trump's
followers go on a verbal rampage about a purported need to tear down
much of contemporary society to rid oursleves of what they believe to
be a a sinister "deep state."
We
can
and must do better than this.
We can start by
grasping just how powerful and destructive a sense of being disregarded
or cast
aside like we’re nothing can be.
Trump’s MAGA
movement is ultimately based on people who feel this way. Initially, they were
predominantly rural
and/or less educated than the general population. Until Donald Trump
came
along, nobody in the “bigger world” seemed to care much about them, or
even
acknowledge their existence. The
movement then grew to include many other demographic groups.
Many of these folks respond
less than warmly when they see our trend-conscious media showering
understanding, support, and, well, love on
whoever they’ve taken a special altruistic interest in at the moment. Today it’s transgender
people. Before that
it was gays. Before that it was
women, and before that the Woodstock generation, and before that
minorities,
especially Black people.
Supporting these
previously put-down and often scorned people was without question a
laudable
and positive act on the media’s part. But
meanwhile, in the past fifty years or so,
the people who have now coalesced into the MAGA movement have received
almost
no positive or empathetic attention of any kind—even though, as the
results of
the latest presidential election clearly indicate, they’re now the
majority of
the American people.
To make matters
worse, a widespread sense of pain and rage at being made to feel
inconsequential is not just a product of contemporary media practices. It arises from certain
core characteristics
of contemporary society. It’s
been festering
for at least a hundred years—well before many of today’s media forms
even
existed. And
perhaps most ominously for
our own times, it was a driving force in the rise of fascism during the
run-up
to World War II.
What’s at the root
of it all? I
believe that deep resentment
at not being valued, accompanied by a readiness to ascribe the most
bizarre
kinds of evil motives to the people perceived to be controlling
contemporary
society, are ultimately the products of a toxic gigantism of scale,
which now pervades
just about everyone’s frame of reference.
Here’s another
nonstandard way of viewing this phenomenon:
We’ve all become a bit like today’s musicians—whether or not we can even carry a tune.
Here's what I mean by that:
Very few people show
up these days at local bars or coffee houses or other neighborhood
places to
hear live musicians play. The vast majority of the population listens
only to
the music of a tiny handful of global megastars. As
a result, vanishingly few other musicians
can support themselves by their art, or even generate a significant
income
supplement from it.
Gifted and trained
professional-caliber musicians have come to be regarded as mere
wannabes—sad
dreamers who have never amounted to anything, and have maybe not even
completely grown up. It’s
hard to
imagine a society at any point in history that’s treated its musicians
as badly
as we do now. And
ultimately, it’s all
due to the vastness of our collective frame of reference, in which only
an
infinitesimally thin sliver of people can count.
People with
noteworthy athletic abilities are in a similar position.
What about all the
rest of us, whose abilities, while real, are far less remarkable? What does that do to our own feelings about ourselves—as well as
the society we live in?
At this point, the
only political figures who seem to really get and empathize with their
constituents’ sense of not being valued are Donald Trump, Steve Bannon,
and
perhaps J.D. Vance. This
seems to be
because of their own experiences of feeling scorned by social elites—of
not
being able to win the respect they felt they deserved, no matter how
significant their achievements were.
As
a result, these guys don’t just speak with understanding about the
feelings of
their fellow citizens. They
visibly and
emotionally exude and embody them.
Lots of people have
picked up on this, and sensed that deep, foundational feelings which
they
themselves have never actually articulated were now being implicitly
understood
and honored. The
upshot: large
numbers of Americans now regard Donald
Trump as their savior.
Unfortunately for
our country, these men have done little more with their insights than
exploit
them for political gain, via inflammatory rhetoric that has no chance
of
actually making things better—only worse.
It’s high time those of us who haven't joined the
Cult of Trump began understanding what’s going on
here,
and consider what can be done to genuinely make things better.
It may take a while
for viable corrective measures to be devised and implemented. But the very act of
showing people now under the Trumpian spell that we
understand the source of their still largely-unspoken pain and rage,
and are
working hard to find positive ways to alleviate it, could at least give
America
a viable alternative to goose-stepping down the same road that
ultimately led
only to
boundless suffering nearly a century ago.
Please take a little time to explore this proposition further, beginning with an episode of my Notes in a Bottle podcast entitled “When We Don’t Matter - Part 1.”
Here's
where you'll find it on Spotify:
Here's where it is on Apple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/when-we-dont-matter-part-1-of-4/id1715523642?i=1000634796013
