Stop Making Monsters
Music: Biosphere: Substrata (2011)
A favorite Sunday tradition is reading the paper and listening to the political talk shows on television. Unfortunately, paper delivery is no longer reliable, but I can certainly count on generic norms for politicians. Today the discussion on at least two of the shows concerned "responsibility" in relation to two attempts at mass, targeted carnage: the murder of eleven faithful at a Pittsburgh synagogue and 13 pipe bombs sent to leaders in the Democratic Party. John Dickerson put it a number of politicians: hasn't President Trump enflamed "tribal" hatreds, and shouldn't he accept some responsibility for these attacks?
None of the talking heads would assign blame to the president, while a number did suggest that Trump's pugnacious "tone" has exacerbated scapegoating. All of them described the killers as "deranged," such as Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford. Despite research suggesting a dramatic increase in anti-Semitic violence over the last two years, Lankford sees "no connection" to Trump's rhetoric (video is here).
Lankford, of course, appears like a fool: like water for fishes, of course hateful rhetoric from the president enflames hatred. Regardless of your methodological leanings, we have pretty solid evidence to suggest violent media enflames aggression and "anti-social" attitudes. While there is no causal link between, say, Trump encouraging violence--even when he means it as a joke, sorry not sorry--it's also quite silly to insist the rhetoric of influential leaders does not "influence" people to do bad things. History is instructive here, right?
As I've been writing for many years, thanks to the insights of the Frankfurt School on authoritarian personalities, the story is not complicated: life is hard. Trying to live the good life, trying to do right by others, trying to take care of one's family, it's not easy. What Freud called the "over-I" or "superego" refers to all the moral codes and rules and laws and sensibilities that we learn and inherit as a member of a given culture. Unfortunately, the demands of "society" can be pretty brutal. So we have all sorts of ways to relieve the pressure, mostly intoxicants of some sort or another--such as, say, going to the movies or binging a television show. Powerful leaders are such intoxicants: by allowing their sense of responsibility or ethical perspectives temporarily take-over the superego functions, people can find relief. This is how authoritarians always come to power, by substituting their judgments or moods for our own. In this way, for example, a long dominant norm of "political correctness"--which basically boils down to the Golden Rule and trying to be empathic with difference--has been dismantled in about two years.
For many, I think the question concerns to what extent has the (re)installation of hatreds and other-anxiety depend on Trump? Has he succeeded in completely perverting (or rather, exposing the perversion of) the national political imaginary? That remains to be seen, however, there's no question serious reparations are now necessary--unless there is a revolution hastened by an endless parade of "general crises" that, so far, seem to be part of the motor of neoliberal-capitalism.
I have been thinking a lot about the repairing that must be done, both ideologically and structurally. Since I've been arguing for some years now that rhetorical norms in U.S. culture are increasingly perverse, a number have asked me what might be some correctives or solutions. My first response is that politics has always been perverse, and so what Trump has done is, in some sense, expose the ugly underbelly with a kind of humorless meanness. Such exposure still gets people killed, and so while we can see the hate that underwrites the machine better, the response is not to cover it back up.
But this is precisely what the political talk this morning has done: by isolating violence to Trump or "deranged" crazy persons, the systemic character of a structuring violence is obscured. To even begin to fix, reform, or "revolutionize" the political machinery, we need to see these attempts at mass, targeted violence as a kind of outbreak, a reactionary response at the level of a people and a culture, not this or that mentally ill person. Such persons, like Trump, are reflections of an illness that produces them. These killers are not the cause of structural violence; they are the effect.