Trump’s Election and Collective Madness
W. J. T. Mitchell
The shocking election of Donald Trump reminds us that the real
location of mental illness, whether it takes the form of anger or a
melancholic sense of wounding and resentment, is primarily in the group,
not the individual. We sometimes think that the paradigm of madness is
to be found in the individual case. Nothing could be further from the
truth. Paranoia is most effective when it is shared with others;
nurtured in isolation, it shrivels up and dies. It is a long standing
commonplace that human reason of the practical sort, the kind that
involves the management of one’s own affairs generally prevails at the
individual level. Even the famously psychotic Judge Schreber could
perform complex feats of legal reasoning, and convince a court that he
was capable of managing his own affairs. Reason also operates quite
efficiently at the level of tactics and strategy, never more
relentlessly than in warfare, the most dramatic form of collective
madness known to our species. In politics, the supposedly peaceful
sublimation of war, reason moves from the manipulation of weapons and
destruction to the skillful manipulation of unreason; it deploys the
ancient lessons of rhetoric as opposed to logic, of instrumental,
egoistic reason as contrasted with wisdom or Kantian Enlightenment.
Calculated appeals to emotion trump (you will forgive the pun) those of
reason. The heart has reasons of its own, and it is the chief exercise
of cynical, manipulative reason to understand the triggers that set off
collective madness in the mass. See Kelly Ann Conway, Trump’s brilliant
campaign manager, who showed us the power and “reasonableness” of
wiliness, cunning, and clever rhetorical agility.
Trump’s campaign capitalized on all the dark forces in the electorate that lay below the threshold of opinion polls and their data bases, unreachable by rational arguments about policy solutions to shared problems, unembarrassed by transparent lies and demagoguery. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, anxiety, resentment, paranoia, and a generalized hatred of elites, experts, and established institutions were all mobilized to produce a wave of collective passion seen in the crowds that chanted “lock her up,” and threatened violent revolution if the “rigged” election went against them.
Now that the election, and the frenzy that has swept the American public for the last 18 months, has passed over us, a strange, ambiguous calm will settle over the country. Everyone will urge us to “come together as a nation,” and to heal the wounds that have been opened. Even Trump will remind us that, at heart, he is just a negotiator who has no principles except “the art of the deal” that favors his perception of national interest. The madness, however, has simply gone underground, the wounds festering, leaving the American dream as always, only the blink of an eye removed from the nightmare of our history.
“History is a Nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” –James Joyce, Ulysses
“Insanity in individuals is somewhat rare. But in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” –Nietzsche
“A single Athenian is a wily fox. A group of Athenians is a flock of sheep.” –Solon
“Every man, seen as an individual, is tolerably shrewd and sensible, see them in corpore, and you will instantly find a fool.” Schiller
“No one ever went broke underestimating the American public.” -P.T. Barnum
“You can fool all of the people some of
the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all
of the people all of the time.” –Abraham Lincoln.
What Lincoln failed to add is, those
are pretty good odds for the success of a determined and skilled con
artist in the short run.
“We Palestinians love Trump because he is
pure Americana. He shows the true face of the American character, and we
feel it is important for the world to see that truth for what it is.”
–Conversations with Palestinians in the West Bank, May, 2016.
To which I replied: “That is easy for you to say in the safety of Palestine.”
Trump’s campaign capitalized on all the dark forces in the electorate that lay below the threshold of opinion polls and their data bases, unreachable by rational arguments about policy solutions to shared problems, unembarrassed by transparent lies and demagoguery. Racism, misogyny, xenophobia, anxiety, resentment, paranoia, and a generalized hatred of elites, experts, and established institutions were all mobilized to produce a wave of collective passion seen in the crowds that chanted “lock her up,” and threatened violent revolution if the “rigged” election went against them.
Now that the election, and the frenzy that has swept the American public for the last 18 months, has passed over us, a strange, ambiguous calm will settle over the country. Everyone will urge us to “come together as a nation,” and to heal the wounds that have been opened. Even Trump will remind us that, at heart, he is just a negotiator who has no principles except “the art of the deal” that favors his perception of national interest. The madness, however, has simply gone underground, the wounds festering, leaving the American dream as always, only the blink of an eye removed from the nightmare of our history.
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1 Comment
Filed under 2016 election, WJT Report
One response to “Trump’s Election and Collective Madness”
Trump’s election is truly horrifying
and the worst thing that could happen is for those of us insulated by
tenure and big city life to go back to our regular routines. I hope
those opposed to his agenda will seriously contend with the issues that
have led the nation to this point.
That said, one reason “red state” America hates the so-called liberal
elites (Hollywood, academia, the coasts) is that we continually dismiss
them as too stupid to know what’s good for them (and using a pull quote
from Friedrich ‘sum of zeros’ Nietzsche doesn’t help!) I don’t agree
with all of Emmett Rensin’s points in “The Smug Style in American
Liberalism,” but if the Left truly wants to think in terms of
intersectionality, I think we would do well to avoid the fantasy that we
are “rational” agents and they are all morons who let the TV think for
them. Anecdotally, many appear to have voted for Trump for the very
same reason Zizek “endorsed” him last week–to create utter chaos for the
two-party system. With a nation-state split 50/50 (at least in terms
of those who actually voted), I think we might do better to find ways to
engage the other side rather than read an inverted version of “Culture
and Anarchy” at them.
