I never quite grasped why Jefferson and Adams were so discouraged by the way the country had democratized by the 1820s. Wasn't that what they, especially Jefferson, had hoped for? I tended to dismiss their concerns as a snooty elitism. But I understand it differently now, especially in light of Trump’s ascendancy. Reading Wood, Howe, and Potter over the last several months has set me straight about that. There was a snootiness in it, but also there were good reasons for them to be appalled.
The “populism” that dismayed Jefferson and Adams was the kind of populism that lifted Trump into power. Adams's and Jefferson’s republican ideals —and really the ideals of the entire revolutionary generation—seem quaintly naïve over against the crude, myopically interest-driven energies released after the Revolution. The most active Americans were remarkably ignorant and short-sighted, they were drunks, they were all too inclined to run with the mob, they were white supremacists and nativists who exhibited a barbaric violence toward Blacks and Indians, and they indulged in a kind of grandiosity about being an American that fed their delusions and their worst instincts. America was a nasty, nasty place in the 19th Century. There is very little about it to be nostalgic about.
The old republican ideals were payed lip service to, but played hardly any role in the dynamic realities shaping the political and economic spheres. Everything was transactional. Everybody in the private sector was on the make and in the public sector you were considered an idiot if you weren't on the take. You know the picture we have about the lawless, wild west in the period after the Civil War? That's the way it was back East before it.
It's a mentality that made America economically dynamic, for sure, but also what made it shallow and cruel. It's the America that Trump envisions when he wants to make it great again because Trump's America appeals to whatever is shallow, cruel, and short-sighted in the American character. Trump's candidacy and now his presidency have shown how fragile the norms that have suppressed what has always been there as the ugliest aspects of the American character. And what has become clearer to me is not that Trump is an aberration, but rather he is a reversion to the 19th century, pre-Progressive Era norm. He's the culmination, if not the reductio ad absurdum, of the Republican project that began with Reagan in 1980 to dismantle the reforms that made the U.S. a relatively decent place to live for a while.
What we see in Trump's kakistocracy (look it up) is very much in line with that part of the American character. The Mueller investigation seems to be approaching its climax. It seems to be big news that Cohen has come public about lying about not having contact with the Russians during Trump’s 2016 campaign. People think this is a big deal because it shows that Trump was dealing with the Russians to promote his own business interests in such a way that could compromise the country’s interests. But we know this already, and do we have any confidence that Mueller's proving it will make a difference?
The talking heads on TV keep telling us that the Trump people are second raters who cannot withstand Mueller’s attack. But it’s amazing to me that the elites in this country have put up with Trump this long, and it’s simply because the elite factions disgusted by Trump simply don’t have enough power anymore to push him out. A piece in the NYT today sums it up:
The allure of a Mueller report lies in its imagined promise of a single, definitive truth capable of cutting through the haze of lies, confusion and “alternative facts.” But Mr. Corsi’s and Mr. Papadopoulos’s antics are a warning that this hope will inevitably fall short. Conspiracy theorists and prosecutors live in different worlds: The first, unmoored from truth; the second, devoted to proving facts beyond a reasonable doubt. Mr. Mueller has the power to charge Mr. Corsi for lying; he has already done so to Mr. Papadopoulos. Rather than crumbling, though, their falsehoods have continued to spread and grow — and they’ve taken root in the media ecosystem in which the president chooses to spend his days.
In this environment, the question is less what Mr. Mueller will do next and more what Congress and the American people will do with the information they already have.
By now it’s clear that the special counsel is not armed with a silver bullet, not because the facts are not bad for the president but precisely because they are. If facts were enough, Mr. Trump would already have been impeached.
The Republican Party and Fox News are more than ok with Trump and his unprecedented awfulness. They represent the America that appalled Jefferson and Adams that I described above. The Republicans have become the party of incompetent ideologues and grifters who think that America is at its best when it is a crude, un-regulated circus where the most cunning kleptocrats can engorge themselves on the public teat. They want to destroy the whole American public infrastructure for reasons they don’t even understand because their ignorance, venality, and short-term thinking blinds them to the consequences of their actions. (If this isn't obvious to you already, read Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.) But tens of millions of American think that any accusations about Trump and his cronies' corruption and incompetence is fake news. The Democrats are just as bad, they argue. How do you penetrate that kind of filter?
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Trump doesn't frighten me nearly as much as the breathtaking stupidity, the willful ignorance, the childish resentfulness, and the ideological blindness of the Americans who allowed themselves to be conned by him. Their psychology is very similar to the kind of delusional psychology that led to the Civil War. I understand better now how this kind of ignorance and stupidity can take hold after reading Howe and Potter. At the time of the founding and even into the first couple of decades of the 19thcentury, everyone, including southern elites, was embarrassed about slavery. It was an unhealthy thing, like smoking or drinking too much. It's something that everybody wanted to stop, but they kept procrastinating about because it would be hard to do.
And then around 1820 with the Missouri crisis, it became clear that the slaveholders no longer wanted to give slavery up, and they started looking for ways to justify it. They were rather like the drunk who comes up with any rationalization to keep drinking. And like the drunk who is really deeply ashamed of his having a problem, he denies he has one. And because he cannot face it, he becomes indignant when someone confronts him about it. He tells the person to mind his own business, and maybe takes a swing at him.
States Rights and Nullification become the ideological justifications to beat back the busy-body northerners. Heretofore American nationalists like Calhoun become localists in the name of protecting slavery from Federal interdict. And after 1830, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave rebellion, this shame is compounded by an intensified fear that the cruelty that they have inflicted on their slaves will in turn be inflicted on them if the slaves are ever freed. What goes around comes around is a deep source of fear for the violent and cruel. Black slaves come to represent all their repressed fear and shame, and rather than face it, they must double down to make sure they keep it repressed. This subconscious drama gets acted out in ante-bellum Slavery politics and after the war in the fantasy of the Lost Cause and the cruelty of Jim Crow.
Anything that threatened to weaken Slaveholder control threatened to unleash all these dark, repressed, violently irrational parts of the Southern psyche. A fantasy about Southern nobility and gentility begins to develop. Southern elites begin to think they are not morally inferior for being slaveholders, but rather morally superior to Northerners. Those Yankees don’t have the nobility of soul to understand what makes their Southern way of life so sweet, so civilized as compared to their money-grubbing, mercantile ways.
Theological digression: Everybody feels ontological shame; all humans feel that they don’t measure up, that they’ve failed, even if they cannot understand quite why. Call it original sin or whatever you please; it's just built in to the human condition. And so much of human motivation is about compensating for the feeling of shame and inadequacy that is its chief symptom. It might be a cliché, but it points to a real truth about why the greatest achievers are often those who feel most intensely this “ontological” inadequacy. It drives them to do almost anything to get rid of it.
And that's why 'pride' is considered by the wise to be among the worst human characteristics. Pride is not a sense of one's inherent dignity as someone born in the image and likeness of God. Pride is a false image of ourselves that we fabricate to overcome our sense of ontological shame. That's why the tradition has always been suspicious about human effort. It's not that effort is bad in itself, but rather that the effort is more often than not in the service of the wrong motivation--that it's a causa sui project, and as such delusional because we are not causa sui. That is the fundamental insight of the person of faith and the reason why gratitude, not pride, is the fundamental precondition of a life well lived. And this is why American culture, for all its ostensible religiosity, is fundamentally delusional. It is a prideful, greedy, and ungrateful culture through and through
And so the one thing that people cannot stand is to be accused of doing anything shameful by someone whom they see as no better. And in a kind of deep ontological sense we are right to think that our accusers are no better. We’re all projecting our deep-down ontological sense of shame onto others. And that’s why the gospels admonish us not to judge or accuse others, because more likely than not what we see in others is just a reflection of what is in ourselves that we don’t want to face.
But complementing this suppressed shame is a transcultural honor fantasy that is central to sustaining this pathology. It's called "losing face", when the "face" is the delusional construct, the mask we wear that masks the deep truth about who we are. The honor fantasy is a delusional fantasy about our identity being the same as the mask we present to the world, that part of ourselves we've constructed that’s captured in our reputation. And when that reputation is challenged as fraudulent by someone, we feel a deep, angry hostility toward whoever would shame us by doing so.
But everyone captured by the honor fantasy is by definition a fraud because the whole idea of one's 'honor' is a delusional construct designed to keep you from confronting who you really are. If you lived in ante-bellum America and other places, your honor would require you to fight to the death to defend this fantasy, because nothing is more unbearable to people who have become identified with their "honor" than to face the deep truth about their ontological inadequacy. And this, in brief, is why we fought the Civil War, and it's why so many Americans cannot admit why their vote for Donald Trump was a disaster. You must cling to the fantasy at all costs, because once it bursts there's nothing to hold onto to prevent your plunge into that deep vat of ontological shame.
So whenever we judge or accuse others, it's more likely than not that they are just going to dig in and come to a far more rigid defense of their delusional thinking. So better not to judge, right? But then you have this problem of an entire social system behaving toward other human beings in a way that is horrifically cruel and living in a fantasy that justifies it. And just as you have a loved one with a wife-beating problem, you can’t just do nothing. You have to intervene. And this is where things tend to go off the rails, especially when you call the police, all of whom have a wife-beating problem, metaphorically speaking. This was essentially the situation that the relatively sane and decent people had in confronting slaveholder delusions in the ante-bellum south.
Now while the Abolitionists wanted the southerners to go cold turkey, the free-soil types thought that it was impossible to tell the southerners to quit, so they adopted a strategy of containment. The Wilmot Proviso introduced in 1846 initiates a pitched battle fought not about the existence of slavery where it already existed, but about whether slavery, in principle, should be allowed in the territories opened up by the Mexican cession. Here’s it’s wording:
Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.
Ironically this statement is modeled on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was uncontroversial when formulated for reasons explained above, and it shows how much things had changed since the founding. The slaveholders didn’t want to be contained anymore. To agree to a containment policy in the new territories would be "dishonorable"; it would imply that to be a slaveholder was to be morally inferior, and the Southern honor fantasy could not be sustained if they were to give in on that.
There were other factors besides honor, of course. The economic and power dynamic was always a factor, and the southerners were justifiably afraid of being outnumbered in Congress if they didn’t match the admission of each new ‘free’ state with a ‘slave’ state. And they understandably feared that no matter what people said in 1846, they would not have the power to resist a future abolitionist congress. The slaveholders understood deep down that they were on the wrong side of history, and they did everything they could to keep the tide from rising.
And in the short run they succeeded. They controlled the Senate, and their threats of secession forced concessions that were wins for them: In the Compromise of 1850 with its notorious Fugitive Slave Act, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1855 that repealed the Missouri Compromise, in the Dred Scott decision in '57 that made slavery legal even in the states that had banned it, and in '58 the astonishingly fraudulent pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Bleeding Kansas that President Buchanan rammed through. Mitch McConnell is playing the same game. He's read his history, and he's learned a thing or two from his ante-bellum ancestors. It remains to be seen whether his victories will be as Pyrrhic.
So the Civil War ends in slavehollder defeat. Six hundred thousand dead. For what? For Southern honor? If it was just about the money, they could have worked it out. The Civil War, like most wars, is always about something else, something deeper and darker in the human psyche. Sometimes, a war though, knocks some sense into those who waged it, but not true for the South. The honor fantasy morphs into the Lost Cause fantasy, and a deep-seated culture of resentment develops there. Slavery ends officially, and while Black Americans get a taste of freedom for a decade or so, it's quickly back to the same old, same old as the white shame-repression fantasy reasserts itself. Black Americans find themselves getting 'repressed' in whatever way it's still possible for white people to do it.
A part of the fantasy is still to see Northerners as soulless, money-grubbing grifters, which, of course, many are. But then this curious thing happens when Donald Trump runs for office. There is no one in the history of American politics who embodies the kind of person Southerners hate more than Donald Trump. He is the king of the grifters. He owns casinos, for gods sakes. And yet there he is, playing his blatant, pandering con, and they embrace him like a long, lost brother. So now we've got the worst of the North embraced by the worst of the South.
And we have to ask what is there in the American character in the long term to push back against this deep-seated worst? In the short term, sure, people in the mushy middle who voted for him and kakistocrats like him vote for the other party. We saw this a couple of weeks ago. Why am I not relieved? Because too many deeply awful, ignorant, delusional people beat truly decent and intelligent ones, and because it won't take long for the kakisitocrats to regroup where they've lost. They want power in a way that ordinary, decent Americans don't. Decent Americans can say No when things get egregiously bad, but they can't win in the long run until there's something truly decent to which they can say Yes.
Donald Trump is not an aberration, he is an exemplar of a long tradition of American bad actors who have played too large a role in shaping our history. People like him and his supporters are deeply ignorant, delusional people living in a self-worth magnification fantasy. The only real cure is intervention by people who are wise and compassionate, and who can point to an alternative, reality-based meaning story that gives all Americans a robust imagination of future possibility. We have to hope and pray that some how, some way, a movement will arise in America that can promote such an alternative. I think there is a fundamental, latent decency in every human being, but you have to have a cultural story that activates it. And until we do, MAGA, or variations of it. wins by default.