Where in hell has Issendai been?
(Image copyright George Tuli.)
Where have I been? I’ve been obsessively pushing “refresh” on a page of Trump news since late September.
It’s the strangest of strange situations to be in. I’m used to running into a narcissist online, watching them, digging back to see how long they’ve been up to whatever lunacy got them on my radar, writing the occasional “OMG did you see what this person did?” post when the ridiculousness piles up too high to not share. This is the first time someone I’ve watched has been on the world’s radar. I don’t have to check someone’s blog or figure out what sockpuppet they’re using today. I just have to enter their name into Google, and Google serves up pages upon pages of terrifying new details that are refreshed by the minute.
And just like the average online narcissist, Trump has a retinue of believers, enablers, bullies, and apologists. The difference is that they didn’t badger the head of their MUSH to give a known rulebreaker another chance. They elected him to the head of the country. A country that, arguably, runs the world.
What in hell, people.
What.
In.
Hell.
I’m about three millimeters to the right of Bernie Sanders, so my reaction to the past several months has been one long primal scream. Over the last week I’ve managed to get out a couple of semi-coherent rants on the inbreath, so hopefully I’m close to being desensitized enough to flail blindly at my keyboard. If the infinite monkeys theory is right, that gives me a non-zero chance of bashing out some articles on authoritarianism and the neurobiology of sociopathy.
But it’s going to take a lot of Bucky Barnes screenshots to get me through.
So, so many Bucky Barnes screenshots.
How have the rest of you managed in our brave new world?
Add a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Oh thank christ you are back.
I’ve taken to (finally) watching the news in the language of the country I live in – not English – because it means that Trump is overdubbed and I don’t have to listen to his voice. I can’t bear it.
The question I’m asking myself is how half the US voting population was taken in by this guy. He’s charming, he’s a narc, most of them are charming when they want to be – I wonder how many people are like those nice people who can never believe your narc parent was so different inside and outside the house, and how many are childhood abuse survivors, either narcs themselves and looking up to him or codependents who thought he was normal? How many people just liked the idea of that guy off the Apprentice, he’ll go up to Washington and knock a few heads together and get this country working again etc?
My view of democracy is really negative at the moment. You know, we’ve got Brexit, we’ve got Trump, there’s a real danger that we’re going to get Marine Le Pen, and none of these people/initiatives is going to make things better for the people they claim to represent, and they’re going to make life hard and scary for everyone else on top. I don’t know where the problem comes from. I want to blame the political class, their lack of leadership, their lack of ability to take hard decisions. Fillon, like Clinton, is a time server in his party, next in line for a go at president, with baggage, but still hanging on despite that. And in the UK, you had David Cameron delegating the political decision with the most complex and difficult to predict consequences to a public vote without any plan for what would happen if he lost, and a laissez-faire internationalist who spent his early career in Brussels (Johnson) arguing for the Leave campaign like he was back at the Eton debating society and arguing Hitler’s side in the dissolution of the Reichstag, just for the fun of showing what a good talker he is. Their actions are determined by their own cowardice, and their hopes for their own careers – not one of them, Cameron, Clinton, Fillon – is showing real leadership. IMO. I think the world gets more and more complex, and people are searching for simple answers to complex questions, because politicians are too scared for their own careers to try and share the actual truth with them. The answer everywhere is that things might be a bit shit, but by making these changes we might well make them a whole lot worse. Then in 4 years everyone will just be that bit more jaded with the whole system, and then we go again…
I come from an ex-industrial area and I remember having trade union leaders who inspired people to be better. To look after each other, to strike to save other people’s jobs, to come together and try and save something that was bigger than any one person. I feel so sad to think that there were people I grew up with who would help you out if you were skint or if your kids didn’t have shoes for school or whatever, people who were poor but still gave money to the church and to beggars and who allowed their proximity to poverty to influence them to be kinder and to give in to their compassion. Now they are being invited to believe that our countries, the richest in the world, are too poor to give a home to refugees, that we have to look after our own first, that there’s not enough kindness to go round and we have to ration it. I wish we had some leaders who would make the case for kindness. Even Angela Merkel’s starting to impose this and that sort of forcible integration stuff on the recently-arrived refugees, nothing major, but just that feeling that you can’t be seen to be too kind. “They’re taking advantage of us, this is why Germany’s having so many terrorist attacks”… when it’s as clear as day that ISIS are committing terrorist acts in Germany precisely to try and foster that feeling, to try and create suspicion between the refugees and the locals and take us all back to believing that we’re not the same, we’re not just all people trying to live our lives and look after our families.
Sorry, I went off on a bit of a tangent there. It just seems one of a piece. The stupidification of the world.
Anyway I would very much enjoy hearing you take apart Trump’s narc behaviour piece by piece if you can bear to look at him for long enough.
Augh, there’s so much in your comment to reply to and I agree with all of it. The insular, fearful, aggressive movement we’re seeing today is a self-perpetuating downward spiral, and the best historical model we have for it doesn’t say how to break out of it. Or rather, it does, but the solution is to have an invading force crush it after the country is too exhausted to keep going.
So let’s not do that.
And after there’s been a massive blood letting against the chosen group of scapegoats… no, let’s not.
I was watching Richard Grannon talk about this the other day and I liked his analysis. He has the working class US population as the unwitting victim and then Trump coming in as the new abusive narcissist boyfriend – like the victim has lots of problems, life is really difficult, they’re desperate for help – and then the narc spots them and swoops in, spots their weaknesses, and starts saying all the right things, love bombing them, and making them feel good. I can really see how attractive that would be if the alternative is the liberal elite telling you don’t you know there was a financial crisis, it could have been like the Depression, you should be grateful things only got as bad as they did and not a lot worse.
I totally feel the impulse to just constantly refresh the news search on google.
I’m trying to speak up more politically on Facebook. I have several friends from my former church on there, and I’m tired of them controlling the narrative.
My firm belief that humans are basically good under several layers of bad teaching is not holding out.
I know how much fear-based influence our church has over the people who are still members, but it frustrates me that they won’t stop for a second and give their beliefs a deeper consideration.
The second day after the Muslim ban, one of my friends posted a meme that everyone should just calm down because nothing that the president has done has harmed you or your family or you friends or taken anything from you. I replied that it was untrue for me, because my husband is an immigrant, and he has applied to remove the restrictions on his green card, and that process has now been slowed down for all permanent residents, not just the ones in the countries listed in the ban, and that we now have a lot more stress about leaving the country, because who knows what country will be banned next?
I was un-ironically told that “innocent immigrants have nothing to fear” like, I sincerely believed that line would never be seriously uttered outside of a non-subtle movie about facist regimes. When I attempt to point out that a great many legal immigrants had been affected, I was told that I only have standing to address how I, personally, have been affected because “everything else is hearsay” in the additional comments, people were cheering on my friend, for “standing up to a lefty bully” and “not being made to feel guilty” -_-
Long comment short, I no longer believe that under all of the ignorance and nonsense evangelical christians basically want to help people. I’m firmly leaning towards the belief that they want a consolidation of money, power, and privilege for white christians and no one else.
The second day after the Muslim ban, one of my friends posted a meme that everyone should just calm down because nothing that the president has done has harmed you or your family or you friends or taken anything from you.
“First they came for the socialists…”
It’s boggling that this is what politicized Christianity has turned into. The religion is saturated with love-thy-brother and turn-the-other-cheek and endless reminders that selfishness is the path to damnation, but it took to authoritarianism with terrifying speed. In retrospect, we’re going to see the 80’s as the decade when it all went sour.
(Hippies used to be huge on Christianity. Godspell was very, very hippie and very, very Christian. So was Jesus Christ Superstar, in a less innocently trusting way. My not-even-remotely hippie parents had a copy of a hippie Bible called The Way. Christianity used to be full of sunlight. Does anyone else remember that?)
I’m sorry the ban has made your husband’s life harder. And I’m sorry your church and friends aren’t living up to their own ideals. That sounds miserable. But please, keep speaking out–you’re one of the few gaps in the fence they’ve built around themselves.
Just to be clear, my husband and I are both white, and he is from an English-speaking country, so we’re not currently targets of the ban, and he is in the country right now, we just had to apply after a certain amount of time to change the status on his green card. The process does take a while, which is why they typically give you a 1-year extension on it, but now it’s taking even longer than usual.
He was planning a trip back home this summer, but now he doesn’t want to leave until his new green card is in his hands, regardless of the extension, and given how everything happened overnight with the current ban, we’re wondering if more bans are coming as reprisals against other countries if they are seen to “snub” our thin-skinned leader.
But thank you for the supportive words. I haven’t heard them from my church friends, and I don’t expect to hear much from my former church.
On the bright side, I have cut my mother out of my life, after finding your website and doing more research on narcissists in general, so I have less stress than I would have otherwise! (She is, of course, a rabid Trump supporter)
The assumption that the people reading the meme have no Muslim friends, no refugee familt members, no coworkers from the seven contries is breathtakingly insular. And that’s part of the problem, becauae I suspect it’s true for most white evangelical US Christians.
It kind of says something that one of the things this election has done is spurred my whole immediate family to join the bloody Satanic Temple and start helping build a local, offline chapter to foster community and solidarity.
I’m ex Catholic and keep tabs on the Pope, and I’m cautiously optimistic about the focus on taking refugees the new one is trying to turn the Catholic Church to… But in an American context, the only Christian faiths I see standing up and trying to center that sunlight are the traditionally black churches, because there’s such a strong tradition of social justice in their theology. (See here, Rev Barber.) It’s been like that my whole life.
I mean, there’s the Unitarians, but they’ve always felt to me, with my own baggage, too focused on tolerance and being accepting to feel like they’d stand up and have my back if things got scary. And, well, atheist and all, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in things – – or rather, it doesn’t mean I don’t believe in people. I have morals, I want to organize, and it feels like the Christian denominations have by and large bought right the fuck into the right and thrown their organizing that way, so. Hell with not liking to join things; I’m setting a seed of laughing, deadly serious belief under the band of religion of my own.
I’m so sorry about your husband. Best wishes to you both.
Well, I’m bisexual and transgender, so I’m pretty spooked. What in hell, indeed.
Also, and this might be surprising given a lot of what this blog is about, I usually try to avoid armchair diagnosing in a lot of situations. It’s one-part “I am not a therapist” and/or “I don’t even know this person” and one-part “people throw around ‘narcissist’ and ‘sociopath’ and ‘bipolar’ as synonyms for ‘jerk’ way too much.” (I don’t think most of the commenters here do that, for the record. But in general, people do.) But the current U.S. president reminds me a lot of a former boss I briefly worked under–the words he uses, the intonations he uses, the accusations he throws out–a man who I do suspect has narcissistic personality disorder.
It’s the reality denial that most strikes me, I think. My former boss would tell you one thing on Monday, then the complete opposite on Tuesday, and he would maintain that his position had never changed. I think it’s quite possible that he sincerely believed that, too. Having seen it up close and personal, and having suffered from it, albeit for a blessedly short period of time, I find it fairly terrifying.
Terrified fistbump.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the different senses of diagnosis lately, and I think a thing that is applicable both to Trump and to other examples of whatever-you-call-it is that I might not know what is actually going on in their head in the sense that would be appropriate for someone addressing them and their problem personally (also, like, I’m a software QA but not your brain software QA), but that their external behavior is consistent with a certain pattern which has implications regarding how they can be expected to act in future.
Them’s the intellectual words. Inside my head there is… screaming.
*fist bump*
“their external behavior is consistent with a certain pattern which has implications regarding how they can be expected to act in future.”
Yes, which is useful for determining how I, myself, should act. (Really, I think it’s useful for all of us in determining that, but I speak only for myself.) Both proactively and reactively.
Like those above, I am delighted to see you back. Living in a blue bubble in a blue state, I have been dodging news, being kind to people who need it and funneling money to organizations that will help. Also postcards to politicians – the message is right out there, the pictures on the front are my artwork, and the smaller size keeps me firmly on-message. These steps keep sanity closer, but may not actually help the fight.
I think doing anything right now is helping. I’m thinking of starting a letter-writing campaign myself
I live in a bluer part of a swing state, but it’s not so solidly blue that I don’t meet Republicans. This means that I know there are many fundamentals we agree on. (They hate corporate welfare and care about the environment, for instance; you just have to phrase things in a way that appeals to their mindset.) My advice for staying sane and making change: Think and act locally. That’s what the Republican Party’s been doing for years, and that’s why they have all the power now. One little campaign can make a huge difference in your town, your county, your state. States’ rights are still a thing. They’ve never been used exclusively or even mostly by the right-wing.
Even so-called political “experts” are pretty clueless about this — I saw one say healthcare couldn’t be done on anything but the national level, but I had health insurance through my county before the ACA. Which took it away. And thanks to the state I live in, I couldn’t get a replacement. If the ACA’s repealed — or even if it’s not, since it does let people fall through the cracks — you can organize for county-based health insurance and then take that up to the state level.
Give yourself specific times when you look at Trump stuff. Like, an hour every Tuesday. Otherwise block it out and go local, and restrict even that unless it’s your job. All of us driving ourselves nuts doesn’t help anyone.
So glad to see you back! Was a bit worried.
Personally I’m shocked at how well I’ve managed since E day. For some reason I actually kinda felt it would go that way. And, I had so many exciting things happen this year I purposely blocked out as much as I could and refused to get very emotionally invested. I just needed to be happy and enjoy all the wonderful things that happened in my life.
There is one other thing that has helped me cope, and it might sound alarmist so I apologize in advance, but I have felt for a long while that there just wouldn’t be meaningful change without hitting bottom first. Honestly, I’ve been rather disappointed in the lack of progress the past 8 years. I have felt like we’re the frogs in the pot, with the temperature rising so slowly we just sit there until it’s too late too get out. So I’ve decided that maybe this is the catalyst that will ignite passions enough to bring about true progress. I think it could be scary and dangerous and even horrible for a while, but I try to convince myself it will eventually be all worth it. I didn’t vote for it, but I am trying to feel a sense of optimism to get through each day.
In a similar vein, I see a new more partisan spirit, now that we know how bad it can truly be. When I think that Lindsey Graham has a good point about something, that’s a thing. I don’t know though, maybe that’s the end game. If by some miracle someone else manages to end up in charge, that person is likely to be pretty popular, as long as their ideology isn’t too extreme.
The Republican party is so fouled up that I don’t have hope for any of them. If they do remove Trump (and Pence, please), they’re going to try to keep his base by moving rightward, albeit in a more genteel manner than Trump.
Meanwhile, the Democrats need two things:
1. A message and vision that isn’t “We’re not Trump.”
2. A fiery, charismatic speaker who makes emotional appeals.
Without emotional appeals, the left is fucked. The right has won through emotion–through thundering that we’re under assault from People Who Are Not Us, and we need to circle the wagons and fight. That’s primal. You don’t get through that with Elizabeth Warren-style blithering about facts and logic. (I <3 Elizabeth Warren, but compelling she is not.) You get through it by making an equally emotional appeal, by thundering that our ways are under attack by People Who Are Not Us and that we need to circle the wagons and fight for the American Way. Then we redefine People Who Are Not Us and the American Way to target bigots and political opportunists without tarring everyone on the right.
You start a campaign against Trump's lies with emotional appeal as well as intellectual arguments. Which was more powerful--discussion of why Clinton's use of a private email server was a national security hazard, or "Trump the bitch" and "Lock her up"? Right. You can have both. The right has both, the left has only one, and we've seen where that gets us.
Isn’t one of the defining factors between right and left though? Paranoid thinking is a right thing according to everything that I have read. The left tends toward logical and accepting. I know that also makes us weak but what is the price of adopting the right’s approach of loud paranoiac rhetoric?
I also don’t know who there is to do it. Newsom maybe? Harris? Does it have to be a man? A white man?
According to Bob Altemeyer, it’s possible to have an authoritarian left. I can’t imagine it, but there you go…
Instead of “paranoid fascist rhetoric,” think “Captain America at his speechifying best.” Bold, sweeping emotional appeals. The most memorable parts of MLK’s “I have a dream” speech are along the same lines. MLK’s grammar and vocabulary are waaaay above what I’d recommend nowadays, but the sections of repetition and the emotional appeal are there.
It doesn’t have to be a man, but most of the major spokespeople should be white. Because American race politics.
ETA: The Left started the circle-the-wagons rhetoric last year with claims that America was under attack from a narcissistic authoritarian and his band of neo-Nazis. Nothing so succinctly stated, of course… but it started to inch toward rallying-cry form during the protests. Protesters weren’t afraid to say, “Not in my America.” The trick is to find a Democrat politician who’s willing to be that pithy.
I’ve heard the argument that the left can be authoritarian, but I find that difficult to imagine. Narcissistic, yes. I’ve seen plenty of that.
Oh, and I think such a person also has to be male because American gender politics. This election was crushing to me because it felt like we had our fingers on the edge of the pit and then we were kicked all the way to the bottom again. Also, I’m not sure I want to have this discussion again, but there was a lot of disappointing gender conflict stuff going on within the left and I feel like there is a shocking lack of respect and support for women there. That may have been the biggest blow of all for me. Did you see the meme that said “sometimes you need an old white man to save you” in reference to a certain candidate? It was fandom themed so a bunch of people shared it on my FB feed without a single thought as to what it was saying. So now I’m thinking, hey, yeah, a bunch of you are still a bunch of sexist assholes, so maybe we really won’t get anywhere if we don’t just admit it and acknowledge that a man has to do it. It’s a rough spot mentally, and more than anything it’s made me feel like I just need to live my life the best I can and screw the big picture, which is also crappy because I’m privileged enough to do that.
So, yeah, I’m still processing — and not really even that this guy is in power, but that so many Americans though this was the way to go — including people that were supposedly on the left as long as there was a white man in the running but then refused to support the other candidate or went to the other side when that was no longer true.
This, 100%. I don’t care if you use the logic and the facts to get to your conclusion, they are NOT the rhetoric you need to be centering. Especially because this is a moral crisis we are in, NOT a crisis of strategy.
At the end of the day, we are asking: what collateral damage to our citizens is acceptable from our state and federal governments? (I’m in Texas. We are SCARED for our neighbors and ourselves. And angry.) What price is acceptable for the goals we aim for?
We fucking need to make people think about that. We need to make people sit up and think about what is moral and what is decent, according to non theocratic definitions of those terms. Otherwise we lose.
Texan liberals know this, by the way; if you look at the rhetoric of, say, my own Congressman Lloyd Doggett that framing is exactly where he’s gone. Other Dems here too, now that they’re hearing that Texan liberals will support them if they go hard and strong and moral, and to hell with polite. I don’t know what’s going on with blue states, but the framing and tacks that politicians are going with in Texas are giving me some heart–as is the fact that groundswell resistance here is rising fast and becoming reflected in our polls.
I’m glad you are back.
I exist in a state of disbelief these days. I’m trying to remember how disappointed I was when President Bush was reelected, and I just can’t recall it. I noticed that he’s like every bad boss I ever had, and I developed this theory that this is why so many people voted for him. This is their experience of what a leader is. They mistake crass compulsion for confidence and leadership because that’s what they’ve always seen in charge in the workplace.
On the plus side, I’m fitter than I’ve been in years as my anxiety disorder has decided to channel itself into exercise as an outlet (it has an OCD manifestation — I figure that if it’s gotta go somewhere, that’s a good place).
Seriously though, I missed you and this place.
I’d say I can’t understand the mindset of Trump voters, but I have been conned by narcissists before.
On the other hand, I just don’t get it. My dealings with narcissists have been in much smaller communities (family, church), and I always felt that their success was at least in part from their ability to control the narrative.
On a national stage, it just seems obvious to me. The insecurity, the bullying, the scapegoating, I keep wondering what his supporters see?
But the amount of his supporters who label all negative news as “fake news” is truly terrifying to me.
I’m feeling something I’ve never felt before after an election -and there’s been a bunch of them: Terror. No, not fear.
I keep trying to remind myself of historical events-even recent history in the ’60s when it seemed this country truly was tearing itself apart, the cities were burning down, the assassinations, Vietnam was killing and maiming so many-and we still have the two longest wars in our history continuing. I read the news from around the world daily. (Surely I must be on some kind of Watch List.) We actively recruit terrorists through our hubris masquering as “Foreign Policy” where one percent of our population carries out one hundred percent of the killing and are told, “Well, you volunteered.” Economic conscription is not “volunteering.” Are we creating a Warrior Class? Note the increasing militarization of LEO.
Not helping alleviate my terror.
Grasping at straws like mid-term elections. Recognizing the inherent tension between the three branches of government, the checks and balances, the historical hard left turns, later hard right turns, back and forth. Not helping.
The Fourth Estate by and large reflects the increasing partisanship over the last few decades. This does not serve us well. And reactionary Rupert Murdoch scared the shit outta me in the 80s: Why is this Aussie buying up all these initially small US news outlets? Surprised? No. The economy is undergoing the most profound transformation IMO since the Industrial Revolution.
This is not who we are: Over 2.5 of us did not vote for His Malignancy. A lot didn’t bother to vote-yeah, I know, the Electoral College, two unpopular candidates, indifference, too busy trying to put a roof over their heads working multiple jobs, etc. Nonetheless, every single day all over this planet people are dying for the right to vote. I don’t know this country, the people, the reactionary mindset, the lack of active political involvement or even care: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” but on steroids, cocaine, and high octane hatred.
I’m frankly terrified, not into submission but into necessity: If this is what it takes to get our collective asses off them, perhaps something resembling a Democratic Republic will eventually emerge.
But I’m not holding my breath.
Damn. I’m terrified.
I haven’t read all the comments yet, I’m just so excited that you’re back & wanted to welcome you! Hooray!
Oh oh oh, you’re back, I am so glad! I am queer and my spouse is a (white, Canadian) green card holder and recent immigrant, and given the recent political situation and an already tense situation with my conservative family of origin, this has been an… Interesting several months.
Like, getting abandoned on the side of the road in a DC suburb the night before the inauguration, because I gambled that being my grandmother’s golden child would keep us safe if I accepted her offer to stay with them for the Women’s March after months of love bombing. We live in Texas, so this was a bit hairy, but I called a bunch of friends and secured other lodgings and heeeeey, that’s one more family bridge burnt!
I have been running myself off my feet trying to manage crowd dynamics and public opinion and mobilize people who don’t recognize these patterns to do things and push back, and… Well. It’s a hell of an interesting time to be an inveterate observer of human behavior, I can tell you that. Not, I think, that you don’t already know that.
Fuck. I’m terrified and scared and angry and drained, but it’s hard to recharge properly and take a break while the line needs held so badly. It’s not just that the man is so clearly abusive and that half the nation seems to have fallen for it while the rest of us panic and mobilize in white eyed, terrified recognition; it’s that he seems to be so easily manipulated by anyone with a marginalized population they’d like to crush and an axe to grind. His triggers and his levers are so obvious to me and, it seems like, half the journalists and three quarters of the historians on the Internet; why the hell are so many people refusing to listen?
I mean, I know why. That doesn’t make it less frustrating.
Anyway. It’s good to hear from you. I come back and read your archives sometimes just to hear from someone who gets it, as an antidote to gaslighting and a balm for chapped emotional regulation and empathetical expression.
Hi. It’s good to hear from you. I hope you’re taking care of yourself better than me. I hope you are taking steps to stay safe.
The day after the election it just gut hit me the terror I was feeling? I bet this is what the (Reactionary?) Right has been experiencing for at least the last 8 yrs. Feelings don’t subsume to logic so I agree the Left needs to develop a strong, likely short and yeah, even trite appeal to emotion. Ideally, finding a solid Center would be great-but I’m not about to even fantasize about that outcome. I live in a geographically large, isolated, impoverished area and am listening very carefully to what the “local” conservatives are saying in response. Interestingly, it’s hard to find people who will even admit they voted for the Cheeto-and this area dependably votes against their own best interests. Demographically it would seem they would be his hard core base.
We gotta find Common Ground. Currently it feels like a period of disorientation-I don’t think the Right in this area even expected him to win-they’re reflecting a “Huh. OK, so what now?” a Watchful Waiting mode. I was speaking with a friend out west in Denver the day after the election and asking how the hell did this even happen? She said,”Just get out of Denver and the ranchers are his supporters, the Right Wingers-and they voted for him.” But still overall, this country continues to become more urban, darker skinned etc.-and poorer. What impact has the increasing chasm of economic disparity had on the election? Certainly here this is a huge factor; people really struggle to just survive. I’m talkin subsistence hunting, fishing, trapping. They don’t believe anyone “feels their pain” nor are they invested in politics beyond the petty squabbling that goes on locally. The kids have to leave the area to make a living or have any kind of job opportunities at all. The small family owned businesses as well as the very few large industrial employers have sunk into oblivion over the last 30+ yrs. Growing larger (economies of scale) didn’t help them remain solvent-small family owners businesses that provided a reliable source for generations are gone/bankrupt. I watched this occur and I’m “not from here, are you?” It’s been heartbreaking to observe. These people are tough, hard working and have an attachment to this place, a tap root that runs deep-Like the song says,
“I come from down in the valley where mister when you’re young
You grow up to do just like your daddy done…”
This election outcome didn’t happen over night-I see a direct line back to St. Ronnie and the rise of the Evangelical Right. (Remember “Faith Based Initiatives?”) Since then, IMO the country has lost a Moderate/Center and been dragged further to the Right: The Democrats for the most part are now the Republicans of 40/50 yrs. ago. So what does Common Ground even mean at this time? I don’t understand the mindset of his voter base but I want to. I need to. Specifically, what are their fears? What’s beneath the anger? What are the overarching themes? Here, my impression so far summarized in a single word is “Betrayal.”
And ya know what? They have been. That hurts-deeply. Yeah, a “moral crisis” for sure.
Doing nothing for me is not an option. I don’t want to change the world as I did as a young idealistic person. I want to help create a community, a county, this area people love so deeply where we can ALL live. Betrayal needs an antidote-as does Hopelessness.
Any thoughts, ideas etc. are appreciated. What are you all seeing? I doubt anyone of you lives as remotely as I do and if I’m feeling a Blast Wave/Wind, what is it like where you are?
Yep, it’s a dash of cold water to realize we’re just starting to feel how the right has felt for eight years.
I try to flip things around and ask myself how I’d feel if a Democrat did the same as whatever Republican is being char-grilled at the moment. It’s humbling to realize how often I’m okay with it. There have even been points where I was dead-set against, say, a Cabinet nominee, until a news show said the Dems sort of liked him, too, and without knowing a thing about their reasons, I softened up. It’s because I trust that the Democrats share my interests and values, so I’m willing to cut them some slack when they do something that looks like it’s against those values. ‘Splain to me why doing that is okay, Bernie, I’m listening.
It’s why I was all right with Hillary even though she wouldn’t have been my first choice. If Hillary was as frothing as Trump and the Republican candidate was reasonable, would I have been able to vote Republican? Probably not. Even if the Republican was infinitely better suited for office, I would have to assume that they were a threat to civil rights. Right-wingers who voted for Hillary have my respect, because they’re sacrificing some of their own interests when they take that leap of faith.
Finding a center worries me. It’s possible, no question about it. We’d have to give up hard-won progress to the left, though, in a country where the left has been tracking rightward for so long that like you said, our left is many other countries’ right. (And, said a European who commented on it, the American right would be on a governmental hate group watchlist.) Clearly it’s necessary to find that center, but I dun wanna. I so dun wanna.
You’re bang on about the roots being in the rise of the Evangelical Right. Far-right evangelicals have been planning this day for decades, from quiet efforts to get far-right people into jobs in medicine, to the slow erosion of reproductive rights at the state level, to homeschooling curricula designed to train kids as far-right activists. https://www.autostraddle.com/i-was-trained-for-the-culture-wars-in-home-school-awaiting-someone-like-mike-pence-as-a-messiah-367057/ was so chilling that I couldn’t finish it, because how do you fight a movement like that?
Ack, got to get back to work.
Thanks for the link. It appears the Westboro Baptist Church may well have been the batshit spokespeople iceberg analogy of the underground Evangelical Right. The rise of powerful “Think-tanks” like the American Heritage Foundation proliferated rapidly (but quietly) around the time of St. Ronnie. They developed a long term, slowllly, beneath the radar extreme philosophy and strategy which this article illuminates. Substantial monies were funneled through these benign sounding (tax exempt money laundering) organizations. They started by “picking off” incumbents or challengers in smaller races-much as Rupert Murdock initiated his campaign to control the media by buying up small markets. I wondered what the hell was up with their ability to massively out-spend the other candidates. They were spending large $$ (that could actually be traced) typically being spent by experienced candidates with slicker campaigns. Same with the judiciary. That’s a helluva way to make contacts, elevate their profile while hiding their extremeism from everyone else but the like-minded. They also gained control of the Language; ex: instead of being “anti-abortion,” they re-branded themselves as “Pro Life.” These emotionally laden, either/or propositions underscore George Orwell’s emphasis on Language use as a Tool Of Obfuscation. With this came the emphasis on “soft” issues; rather than focus on the economy, employment, Campaign Funding, corporate welfare etc. the issues were reconfigured as Quality of Life/Moral Disintegration/Hysterical narratives such as, “They’re TAKING OUR GUNS!” Little by little, inroads were made into slicing off “pieces” of legislation (think ex: Roe v. Wade) rather than full frontal assualts on the Law. Now they wanna repeal Dodd-Frank: Even recent history is lost and context is bastardized. Add “Them immigrantz are all potential terrorists” Nationalized Fear Factor despite the reality US Terrorism has overwhelmingly been home grown. “But there’s more!” as the ads promise-I thought Preppers, Conspiracy Theorists etc. were fringe nutters. Guess not.
It seems to me we’re now in Cult Territory: “We’re special: We and our children have a god given agenda” is so deeply embedded in the next generations they are fulfilling their “obligation” by promoting overt bigotry etc. masquerading as “The Moral High Ground” utilizing lots of emotionally laden appeals to “reason.” They “just want what’s Right, Just and True-according to the Constitution.”
Politcal candidates have gradually become “required” to audition and be vetted by the same Extreme Right. Deargawd, this makes the JFK and “installing the Pope in the White House” quaint by comparison. And the rest of us are “Libtards” for even questioning these assertions of “false news” “alternate facts” as opposed to objective realities. (George W kicked in that door with “Truthiness.”)
It seems to me we’re dealing with an “Alternate Reality.” Feels like a contemporary “Crusade” with an ethically bankrupt leader easily “bought” by simply pandering to his ego and his “useful idiot” ability to divet and distract.
Yk, when His Travesty told the audience of black Americans, “what have ya got to loose?” he wasn’t speaking to them; he was addressing his base-and these people were simply a vehicle for that message. And the Evangelical Right have used tactics right out of the Personality Disordered Bible: “Create a problem” – then ride in to save the day, using a vehicle so outrageous it screams “Look at meeee!”
I gotta think on this. Thanks.
Everyone’s comments are wonderful, and I come to the end of them thinking, “That, that, all of that, yes.” And often, “Ouch.” Or “fuck.” And then I have too many thoughts to organize and type up, so I don’t reply. But: You all are awesome.
There’s one thought I want to toss into the ring, and that is: Empathy is a competitive disadvantage.
Empathizing means you’re willing to entertain another set of beliefs, one potentially hostile to your interests. It opens you to the possibility of accepting different beliefs, which weakens your affiliation with your current group. For social animals, group = power, so this is no small consideration. It opens you to the possibility that you’ll come to think badly of yourself, which is painful to healthy people and crippling to the unhealthy; and for healthy people, the solution is to take actions that undermine the foundations of your current power structure.
And on the primal level, it’s really, really hard to empathize with someone and then smash them in the face.
This recognition is built into our biology. As tensions rise, empathy drops. The only differences between healthy and unhealthy people are where the tension threshold is and how far empathy falls. Because sometimes, face-smashy is the only solution.
What’s also built into us is a preference for the status quo. A healthy system is better than a sick system, but a sick system is better than no system at all. For example, when a small band divvies up food, the higher-ranking people get more than the folks at the bottom, but the folks at the bottom do get some food. The system would be unsustainable otherwise. If the system does break down, no one is obliged to give anyone food, so anyone who can’t seize food for themselves starves. If the people at the bottom were powerful enough to seize food from the people at the top, they wouldn’t be at the bottom, so it’s in their interest to keep the system going. Because we’re social animals and group is power, this applies to the distribution of attention, respect, prestige, and validation as well. And because humans operate poorly when they’re miserable, we have dozens of ways to convince ourselves we’re happy with things as they are.
We make great victims.
The people who rise to the top come in two flavors: those who are excellent at empathy and persuasion, and bullies. Bullies have the competitive advantage. No empathy means no self-doubt and no hesitation to smash faces. It also means tactics based on empathy and persuasion are useless against them.
What we’re seeing now is a bully who’s doing his best to insulate himself in a bubble of other bullies. Fortunately, we don’t have to go up against him directly. Democracy is one of the purest illustrations of how group is power, so if we can deprive him of enough group support, he’ll go down. And most of his followers aren’t naturally bullies. They can be empathized with and persuaded.
…Unless they’re armored with group beliefs that disdain empathy as a competitive disadvantage.
YES. Yes. This is exactly right, it’s exactly why I’ve been pushing all or nothing rhetoric and this-is-an-emergency and quit-thinking-about-concerns-of-his-base so hard. Because the left keeps stopping to employ empathy in the hopes that what goes around will come around, and the far right has been practicing using that as a weapon to bite for… Well, honestly, pretty well as long as I’ve been alive, and certainly since I was old enough to follow politics.
Many people who have a high empathy threshold, as you put it, want badly to think that people who disagree with them are in the end still good, reasonable people arguing in good faith. This is especially true in the current American left because, well, diversity and inclusion have been our strengths again for decades. We exist as a coalition of diverse people who come together despite our differences.
The problem comes from this habit of assuming that anyone who disagrees with you must have a rational point. I’d argue has been partly furthered by lazy media outlets concerned about appearing to fail to be inclusive, and also habitually falling into the trap of “reporting both sides” instead of evaluating the available evidence and taking a stand. I think the left hasn’t been partisan or confident enough for a long time, and that’s partly because we as a nation don’t know how to recognize and respond to cases where there are not two equally right or moral points of view.
So the problem has been: leftists try to convince the right by listening more, by trying to be more reasonable, by pre emptively yielding ground as a show of good faith. That’s what you do to build relationships and heal conflict when you genuinely do have two reasonable parties who are interested in finding common ground. It unfortunately does not work when one party is not actually interested in extending empathy back or listening, and instead of taking concessions as gestures of good faith to be returned, it just takes that ground and pushed further.
We’ve been playing a nationwide game of Prisoner’s Dilemmas for decades, and the Republicans have switched to Always Defect as their strategy for decades while Democrats play Always Collaborate and tell themselves they are playing Tit For Tat. It’s just not so.
So I’m optimistic now about rising partisan spirit and rhetoric. As I see it, the difference between the way the Right felt under Obama and the way I feel now is that Obama fucking ran on a campaign of listening to the right and trying to build consensus, and it got him obstructed at every turn in ways that factually hurt Americans over and over again. The difference between me and Johnny Right Wing is that the things he feared were not only lies, they were things Obama explicitly promised not to do, and so had every serious presidential Dem candidate in twenty years. The things I am afraid of are things Mr. Trump has been promising openly that he will do to me and my neighbors, that he ran on a platform of carrying out. Damn right I am afraid, and I won’t be made ashamed of that.
When someone tells you they are going to hurt you, believe them!
(Incidentally, I know exactly what an authoritarian left looks like–that would be Communism under Stalin and Mao, where the rhetoric of the left is used to fuel a very similar cult of personality. The tactics are actually pretty similar to the authoritarian right, but the rhetoric and how people are being asked to identify themselves is different. That’s what people usually are referring to, anyway.)
Er. For context, I am banging this drum so hard because I’m thinking about the tactics that have had success with my family, particularly my mother, who… Let’s say I recognize a lot of her tactics and cognitive distortions from Down the Rabbit Hole and leave it at that.
Being nice to her when she hurts me does not get me anywhere. What’s worse, it gives her ammunition when she tries to enlist public opinion from other family members and from mutual contacts to shame me into becoming the bonsai person she wants to have as her daughter. (I mentioned being my grandmother’s golden child growing up, but I’ve always been my mother’s scapegoat.)
I tried for literal years to get her to change her behavior by trying the tactics I would use with a reasonable person who made a mistake, by trying to gently hold her hand, by trying to have conversations with her about her behavior. A lot of this was tied to my queerness, because she was and is not comfortable with that and has panicked and shouted me down (and then engaged in copious gaslighting) no matter how non-confrontational I try to be when it comes to talking about, you know, my actual life.
It did not work. I think I finally gave up on it when DOMA went down and living with my partner, who is Canadian and who I’d always been long distance with, was suddenly an option. So I decided to stop treating her bullshit to her face like it was rational and do things like cut contact with her, tell my other family members exactly what she said to me, and ask them to justify her behavior or quit harassing me about it. I started harrying her support system by pointing out how appalling her behavior was and imposing consequences in the form of not cooperating with her demands for behaviors that shored up her feelings, like visiting for the holidays or pretending we were fine.
What do you fucking know? That changed things for the better some.
So that’s what I mean by increasing partisanship being a good thing, is my point. Meeting in the center to me means angrily pointing out that this administration is illegitimate and the things it wishes to carry out are un-American and unacceptable. It means constantly drawing attention to the shameful behavior of elected Republicans–yes, as a class, unless they act and vote in obstruction–and shaming them and anyone who supports them. It means being unyielding in our criticism and giving no ground to some theoretical silent center.
As far as I’m concerned right now, centrists are like my sister and my dad, who are trying to tell themselves that they can support “both sides” even though both parties involved are not behaving the same way and one is actively being abusive to the other. If we appeal to them, we let them continue believing in that status quo. If, by contrast, we make it clear that the abusive party’s behavior is unacceptable, we can draw support away from them.
I know I’ve emailed with Issendai before, but for whatever reason I cannot find the email address. Does anyone know it or have it handy? I came across an estranged parent writing into an advice column and wanted to share it! I’ll put the link here, but not sure it will go through.
It’s Letter number 2 and the OP comes into the comments to try to defend themselves.
http://www.askamanager.org/2017/07/our-staff-chat-all-day-long-and-its-messing-up-their-work-my-daughter-rejected-me-for-a-job-and-more.html
Oh yeah, I read this one. And she’s so hostile in the comments that you can see exactly what the deal is.
Yes from their very first reply you got it!
Oh, hey, Dr. Coleman gets a shout out in the comments.
(Completely unnecessary side note: I enjoy Alison Green’s advice by and large, but the commenting requirement that all letter writers must be treated with kid gloves–which, to be fair, is my highly subjective assessment, and assuredly Alison would describe her stance as simple politeness and respect–drives me a bit nuts. Especially re: the “update: is the work environment I’ve created on my team too exclusive?” writer, who I think is beyond reaching.)
OMGoodness that letter! She let plenty of quite terse comments through moderation though on that original letter & update. But I agree totally, that letter writer not going to see the light.
@SLR,
Yes, that is true–I think the voice of the people was strongly against that letter writer, for understandable reasons, and people were harsher than usual. But still really polite, by internet standards, really.
I think the letter writer, or someone posting saying they were the letter writer, said they were getting into therapy. So perhaps I’m wrong about that. I hope so.
I’ve been on that site for a while now and she fosters a very polite culture among the commentariat. She does a great job pulling things back if others haven’t yet done it for her. It’s a refreshing little corner of a corner of the internet, very similar it seems to the commenters here. Really quite civilized!
I didn’t see their comments at all on the update! I’m going to check!