I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said something along the lines that all life is high school. I think he meant that most people learn how the social world and its hierarchies work then and the patterns of behavior and attitudes that set in then, for most people, not all, last for the rest of their lives. In other words few people really become independent thinkers. Most just go along with whatever is determined as legitimate by the cool kids.
So high school graduates in this metaphorical sense are the kind of people who accept the given social hierarchies as reality, and they define themselves by their success in their careers in the corporate and political worlds. They may not have much capacity to think on their own, but they have astute social intelligence, they know how to get ahead. They learn quickly which way the wind is blowing and what attitudes and behaviors to adopt that will ensure their social/career success. They pass for grownups because they have learned to mimic adult behavior, but most are not.
You need to be able to think independently, to develop one's convictions independently, and to have courage in those convictions when they require that you go against the institutions in which one seeks success. Most people don't do either because they have no real convictions or they haven't the courage. Whoever the whistleblower is, he or she did, and so qualifies as a grownup, as did the I.G. as do the people inside the White House who pushed what I'm calling QuidQroQuo-gate for lack of a better nickname. And props to the I.C.I.G., Michael Atkinson, whose grownupness nobody is talking about.
I would amend Vonnegut's dictum to say that all life for the key players in the GOP is middle school. When I watch people like Kevin McCarthy, Devin Nunes, Rudy Juliani and other GOP figures, we are not seeing adult independent thinkers or even high school conformism, we are seeing emotionally stunted humans who unite in their shared grievances and hatred of those who set the cool standard by which they come up short.
I call it middle school because that's when kids find out that the world is unfair, that there are social hierarchies, and that more often than not they are not ranked among the cool kids. Middle schoolers in this sense went to high school, but never really graduated in the emotional/social sense. They don't reject the social hierarchy as silly or irrelevant for the living of their lives; rather they struggle to rise in the system and then humiliate the high school types who sneered at them. So emotional middle schoolers are deeply angry people who don't reject social hierarchy but seek to be vindicated by succeeding in it and once they obtain power to use it to defeat the smug "high schoolers" who didn't take them seriously back in the day.
The key motivation here is anger and resentment coupled with ambition. Middle Schoolers are wannabe cool kids who never made the grade. There are lots of good reasons to reject the smug conformism of the high schoolers, but resentment-driven ambition is not one of them. We all cheer for Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite, but guys like Stephen Miller and Richard Nixon are not Pedro. Pedro was never going to be cool and he didn't want to be, and what makes Nixon and Miller not Pedro is the way that a bilious resentment of their un-coolness has been the driving force in their lives
For Conservatives the cool kids = Liberals. Liberalism in both the cultural and political spheres has defined what is cool and what is not. If you are the kind of person who is angry because life is unfair, who shakes his fist at God because he cannot understand how he let's bad things happen to good people, then that part of you is stuck in emotional middle school, whether you're liberal or conservative. But this kind of anger and resentment is particularly endemic to conservatives, because in most high school cultures it's never cool to be ideologically conservative.
And even if you went to a high school with a conservative culture, as Brett Kavanagh did, you quickly learn that your ideological conservatism is outside the mainstream, and so the same kind of besieged resentment at one's discovered un-coolness that characterizes the middle schooler becomes normative. You can be smart and sophisticated, as Kavanagh is, and still be an angry, resentment-driven middle schooler. I was willing to give Kavanagh a break about something that happened thirty years ago, especially if he was able to show he could deal with it as an adult, but he lost me when he proved himself to be a middle schooler in his ridiculous tantrum before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
To be an ideologue of either the left or right is by definition to be not a grown up. If resentment drives your ideology, you're a middle schooler; if conformism drives it, you're a high schooler. But while, of course, it's possible to be conservative and a grown up, it's easier in American society to be Liberal and a grown up. Why? Because the most important thing about being a grown up is to understand and accept the world as it is, and as Colbert pointed out, reality has a liberal bias. All he really means by that is that to be an American it's easier to be a liberal without being self-consciously ideological about it. Liberal values, for better and worse, are American commonplaces; it's the air we breathe.
That does't mean you have to be happy with it, but Liberalism defines reality in the way that reality is defined by any social imaginary. And while Liberalism, like any social imaginary, has profound limitations, there are healthy and unhealthy ways to transcend or move beyond them. The Steves Bannon and Miller represent the unhealthy path, Martin Luther King, the healthy path. And so while I believe the movement forward is dialectical, dialectical in our situation means moving beyond Liberalism while integrating what is best in it. That's something that has to be effected in the cultural sphere, not the political.
For the individual, the goal obviously is not to be either a middle schooler or a high schooler, but to become a grown up, but few people really achieve genuine adulthood. It's possible to be conservative and an adult, but conservative middle schoolers cannot accept reality as defined by the Liberal Order and they often feel a compelling if not obsessive need some to live in an alternative reality of their own. But they've got nothing except a nostalgic fantasy. They justify this on what they call principle, perhaps spiritual, perhaps constitutional, perhaps Libertarian, and there might be good grounds for their alternative view, but it's the rigidity of their imposing it and expecting others to conform to it that is the mark of their arrested development. It would be comical except that their anger energizes a destructive, delusional politics that drags the rest of us along with them.
Trump's development, of course, was arrested at an even earlier stage. I wrote this piece about his primal narcissism last May. A primal narcissist is someone who who has not successfully negotiated the transition from the infantile experience that he is the center of the world, that all he has to do is shout and the teat will appear, that the world is essentially there to submit to his every whim. This was dramatically brought into view this week with his insistence that his now notorious quid pro quo conversation with Zelensky was perfect, that there was nothing wrong with it.
I believe he's sincere when he says it. Deluded, but sincere. I think that part of Trump's charisma lies in his believing his own b.s. He is a gaslighter who has gaslighted himself. If you're a middle schooler or careerist high schooler who has no deeply grounded convictions and is dependent on some authority to tell you what to think, it's pretty hard to resist someone like Trump. He, of course, has no convictions either, but it's not his convictions that entrance you but his unrepressed willfulness, which passes for a kind of perverse strength.
For the primal narcissist there are two fundamental aspects to reality--there is the part of it that submits to him and the part that does not. The part that does not submit is something that must be conquered in some cosmic Fichtean struggle to impose one's will upon it. The primal narcissist must destroy whatever opposes him, whatever refuses to be an extension of his will. King Lear, as I point out in the May post, is, until his experience on the heath, a classic primal narcissist.
American political and economic leadership is replete with pathological narcissists. Andrew Jackson, Steve Jobs, and Bill Clinton are exemplars in this respect. But there's something special about Trump, something so extreme, so over the top that the establishment social imaginary has so far found no way to contain him. Clinton was/is a narcissist, but he was also able to understand the real world as something apart from himself, and he was able to operate competently in it. I think that's the difference between Trump and Clinton. With Clinton, there was a separation between the naricissist and the sophisticated realist. With Trump there is no separation. People used to talk about how Clinton compartmentalized. With Trump there are no compartments, only the raw, undiluted narcissism.
Trump has a certain animal cunning, and that has worked for him in worlds where middle school rules apply--e.g., New York real estate, the casino world, reality TV, etc. But he is astonishingly ignorant and uninterested to learn about how the world really works outside the small, crude worlds in which his cunning has enabled him to advance. This was apparent to everyone who knew anything about him before he ran for president. He was a joke, a grifter, a con man who was driven by some deeply disturbing need to be seen as a winner, to have others' adoration. He was a clown that only the people who think People magazine is good journalism took seriously.
And yet so many people took him seriously. Until his election, I had not known that middle school had undone so many. Ok. Middle Schoolers get a vote. That's democracy. But usually middle schoolers sooner or later understand that their limited understanding of the world is inadequate and they bow, even if resentfully, to the adults and the conformist high schoolers who actually know how to competently operate in it. That will eventually happen with Trump's supports except the most unhinged of them. The question is to what degree he has damaged what is left of the Liberal Order and its institutions in such a way that he has prepared the way for someone far worse.
But in the short term, it looks like, finally, the bubble is about to burst, the trance to end, and the law of political gravity to be restored. It had to happen sooner or later, because reality always asserts itself sooner or later. Quite frankly I'm amazed it has taken this long. (The story of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering should be fascinating when it finally comes out.) But in politics it's never primarily about what's right or wrong, real or delusional. It's about social psychology and whatever the processes are that get the collective imaginary to that tipping point where things begin to move to some inevitable conclusion. I thought the Muller report would get us there, but, sadly, it had little impact on the broad social imaginary. It feels like with QuidProQuo-gate we may finally have reached it.
Now what? Our problems are cultural not political. The basic cultural conditions that made Trump a possibility in the first place are still there. We are suffering from collective ontological dizziness, and that is a condition that can find no cure in the political sphere. The Liberal Order is still in a state of lost legitimacy. We must go with it because something is better than nothing, and we need some kind of order, and the liberal order is despite its profound flaws the best thing available.
Rank-and-file Democrat politicians and most of those running for president are high-schoolers in the Vonnegut sense. When any of them are interviewed, I fast forward on my dvr because they are just spouting whatever the coolest high schoolers have determined are the talking points. Joe Biden is a classic high schooler. I doubt he's ever had an independent thought or independently derived conviction in his life. But there are exceptions. I'm impressed with Adam Schiff. He's one of the few I can bear to listen to. I also think Elizabeth Warren is a grownup, but I don't know if she has what it takes to restore legitimacy in the political sphere. Joe Biden will certainly not do that. He's just a more likable Clinton. Trump may have done the Democrats a favor in bringing his Beltway insider aspect into focus. The sooner he drops out the better.
I supported Bernie in '16, and, despite his significant limitations, I would do it again if it were '16. But he doesn't seem to realize that he's fulfilled his task, and it's time for him to pass the baton. He role was to change the conversation by legitimizing a social democratic, i.e., New Dealish, political agenda. He's done that. Now it's time to move aside.