74 Million: Why? Why?

By Philip Green, Reader Supported News

03 February 21

“In tragic life, God wot,
No villain need be! Passions spin the plot:
We are betray'd by what is false within.”

– George Meredith, “Love’s Grave”

was going to write about democracy from the commonplace standpoint that the U.S. isn’t really much of one, and then segue to some comments about what can be done, failing constitutional amendments, to make it more so. But on reflection, I think that much consideration of that subject would have been putting the cart before the horse. Our problem is deeper than the Electoral College and gerrymandering and the filibuster; and its name is not “Donald Trump.” Or at least it’s not only Donald Trump, it’s also “We the People,” who did not form a “more perfect Union” in 1787, and, as we have been learning to our dismay, may not have done so yet. Meredith was writing about “love;” he could also have been writing about “Democracy.” And its Grave.

The classic discussion of types of government is that of Aristotle, and his most resonant conclusion is that what he called “Polity” was the most practicable form of government, and one of his varying definitions of it is that it’s a combination of two of the three non-virtuous forms of government, democracy and oligarchy, each checking the other; the virtuous forms of aristocracy (rule of the wise) and monarchy (rule by the good) being more or less unattainable. The result, which I prefer to call “representative oligarchy,” is what we have today and have always had, the two tendencies always in conflict but never one totally displacing the other.

Being a self-styled democratic theorist, of course I tend to view “democracy – rule by the people – as the good half of that tandem, and “oligarchy” – rule of the rich – as the bad.

But suppose we stop thinking in those moralizing terms, usually defined tendentiously for the sake of an argument, and look at them in practice. That is, look at how people, the demos, are responding to whatever is the ongoing balance. And then what do we see?

For the last several months we’ve seen the people, seventy-four million of them strong, in action. And what do we find? “The people,” or at least the quite dangerous segment of them who’ve come to the fore in this period, hate democracy. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, the Oath Keepers, the Confederate flag-wavers, the women who swear by QAnon … and everyone who followed them into the breach. I’m not making this up, or cleverly deducing it from their behavior: their hatred of democracy is right out in the open, in every first-hand account of the Insurrection, in what was overheard and in quotes given unabashedly to interviewers. And above all in the down-to-earth political behavior that has supported “Red” state efforts to roll back universal suffrage full-throttle. (See Luke Vogel’s account in The New Yorker of January 25 for copious examples.)

Or, to look at it it from the other side of the Aristotelian coin, what do the seventy-four million think about oligarchy? Answer: it’s fine with them. Doesn’t bother them at all. Don’t drain the swamp, fill it up, drown the whole polity in corruption, makes no difference. They’ve been governed for four years by the most oligarchical, kleptocratic, plutocratic regime in American history, and they’re begging for more of it, no holds barred. And down with Democracy!

So to return to my question: Why? Why? And here I’m going to depart for a moment from all the socio-psychoanalyses of The Authoritarian Personality, The Radical Right, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, etc.; not to mention all indictments of the Psychopathic President, including my own. Not because these analyses tell us nothing at all, as they indeed sometimes tell us a lot about some groups of persons: but first, because we’re in danger of adopting a position in which we look down, de haut en bas, on those somehow lesser beings who lack our own privileged standpoint of pure rationality; and second and more crucially, because they have nothing specific to offer about the actual topic of discussion: Democracy.

Is there something, about democracy itself, and if so what is it, that might lead masses of people to hate it? What makes it so susceptible to anti-democratic demagoguery as to have verged on collapse on January 6th, without any apparent concern on the part of the legitimate authorities?

I think the answer is obvious. Among all the forms of government, Plato’s or Aristotle’s or Rousseau’s or anyone else’s, Democracy is unique in the requirement that the losers of a vote have to be prepared to lose, have to think losing is ok, have to engage in “the peaceful transition of power,” to have to say if only in fake good cheer, “Wait ‘till next year.”

Like the Brooklyn Dodgers, who waited fourteen years for “next year” until they finally came up winning when a speedy left-fielder named Sandy Amoros ran down Yogi Berra’s fly ball slicing into the left-field corner. They didn’t claim they were cheated by the Yankees (five times in a row); they became more rather than less progressive, breaking the racial barrier in Major League Baseball. In other words, they happily played what the psychologist Anatol Rapoport called a “game” – competitive but rule-bound; no knives up anyone’s sleeve. (Well, the Houston Astros cheated, but high tech changes everything, even games.) Because baseball is a game; people don’t get killed over it, not even in Fenway Park.

And that is the great, to many even, maybe to seventy-four million, the unforgivable weakness, the Original Sin, of Democracy. At the end, The Great Demagogue didn’t offer them the betterment of daily life, didn’t offer more equality, didn’t tell his cohort that stopping immigration had increased their standard of living (it hadn’t). From well before November 3rd right up to and through January 6th, he offered not losing. Because losing sucks, losing is for losers, losing is weakness, and you’re either weak or you’re strong, you can’t be both. And which would you rather be? As George Steinbrenner so helpfully put it, the second-place finisher is the First Loser.

This consideration of Winning and Losing also perhaps helps to explain something else about the seventy-four million: Donald Trump’s seemingly inexplicable appeal to rabidly right-wing women. Women, at least contemporary women, want to be strong rather than weak just as much as men do, though in some cases the context might be different. It was a woman, after all, who was first to break, or try to break, the taboo on bringing guns onto the House floor. As Hobbes suggested, give a woman a gun and she’s as dangerous as a man. His understanding of that turned what should have been Trump’s great weakness into another source of his continuing strength.

In sum, for men and women who follow Trump, at some point political conflict stopped being a game with rules and became a war – with guns. No accident then that “taking away our guns” is the deepest source of right-wing hatred for liberals, along with abortion, in both cases for women as well as men.

Here then, we can return to the orthodoxies of political science, which suggest that along with the family, the most important source of political socialization is the sitting president, whoever that might be. What he has preached is what has been heard by the millions, over and over. This is “the culture war,” the source of his fiercest and most constant complaint. But we have to understand it as a social reality, a material phenomenon. And in so treating it I will also return willy-nilly to a more psychoanalytic analysis of such phenomena: but only in the recognition that I myself am and always have been a privileged white male, who has benefitted and still benefits from being in the position I now criticize and analyze.

To put it simply: after eight years of Clinton, and again of Obama, and now more to come, what does the Right have? As Joy Reid put it on Inauguration Eve, the Right has clearly lost the culture war. Multi-diversity is the name of the democratic game throughout the mass media. The Right’s foothold is reduced to Fox and Friends; going to rallies where songs by celebrities who actually oppose Trump are played without their permission; and relying on internet propaganda and talk radio harangues that consist of unmistakably fantastical and imaginary conspiracies that have no existence at all outside the closed-in world of the deranged; and are well beneath the moral level of hard-core pornography.

What has been lost, what is felt to have been lost more than anything else in the so-called culture wars, is the privileged status of being white. The evidence of this mind-set has been visible for more than four decades. In public opinion survey after survey, White Americans in large majorities have agreed with the statement that Black people have been the beneficiaries of “too much” favorable treatment “too soon” and “too fast.”

Beneath all the rhetoric about “political correctness,” and being looked down on by “coastal elites,” racism is what rings the bell. Racism and concomitantly fear, the fear instilled by a classic instance of projection in which one’s own passion to destroy the other become the threat of the Other to destroy oneself. And in which the self is taken over by the paranoid style of cognition, wherein the very lack of evidence for the Steal and the Conspiracy becomes the most frightening sign of their reality: “We are betray’d by what is false within.”

The Gun must be picked up, and carried openly, into the very heart of the treacherous Democracy. The Insurrection was, among other things, a revelation of all the myriad ways, direct or symbolic, which the underside of America can access to insult, revile, and ultimately be terrified by, its opponents, whom it has turned into invented enemies.

Postscript

It’s impossible to give a complete picture of the current rejection of democracy and embrace of autocracy without emphasizing the central role of theocratic Christian bigotry. In addition to the erasure of African-Americans, there was hardly a Jew to be seen or heard; the sweatshirt reading “Camp Auschwitz” set a tone that received no rebuke, and still hasn’t, from anyone on the Right.

But there is an interesting historical point here. In the 1930s, the role that Whiteness plays today was filled by anti-Semitism. Black people were not the cultural problem that agitated the hysterical Right – they were mostly invisible in the mass media of the time. That position was filled by Jews, the primary subject of all the major hate groups and deranged conspiracy mongers of the time; the Nazi Hitler was their rallying point. As an early version of Marjorie Taylor Greene put it about Sergei Eisenstein during his brief time in Hollywood, he was part of a “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy to turn the American cinema into a Communist cesspool.” Plus ça change ...

Philip Green is Sophia Smith Professor of Government Emeritus, Smith College. Was on the Editorial Board of The Nation for many years. Author of several books, most recently American Democracy: Selected Essays, and Taking Sides: A Memoir in Stories. Blog: takingsides.medium.com.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.