I’m going to pull a 2017 piece from my previous blog, Easily Distracted, and reprint it here. It still sums up my views on Trump. If anything, these emotions have deepened for me. My loathing of Trump goes well beyond the ideological substance of his views or the impact he’s had on the overall nature of American politics. I’ve made a few slight changes to the framing of the essay and added a new paragraph but have kept the core of it as-is.
I wrote it in part to insist that how we feel in political judgment matters and that our feelings are a legitimate point of entry to our thought-out convictions. But also as a response to shallow voices who mocked “derangement syndrome” as if it was a sign of distortion or irrational madness to fixate on Trump. Of course we’re fixated on him: his prominence in national and international affairs is a violation. We should never have had to endure him as a President and we should not have to endure one more minute of him in public life. I would like nothing better than to never think on him again, to have him sink back to being a pustule at the fringes of our celebrity system.
Some years ago, I participated in a shared college-wide reading of Jonathan Haidt’s flawed book The Righteous Mind. Haidt argues that liberal political dispositions, which he views (like other political dispositions) as substantially subconscious and intuitive, are unresponsive to blasphemy or sacrilege, that liberals do not cross-wire deep emotional responses connected to disgust or repulsion to politics, do not have strong notions about the sacred and the profane as a part of their subconscious script for reading the public sphere and political events.
One of my colleagues pointed out during one of our discussions that this observation seemed fundamentally wrong to him–that people can hold things sacred that are not designated as religious, and that many liberals held other kinds of institutions, texts, and manners as ‘sacred’ in the same deep-seated, pre-conscious, emotionally intense way, perhaps without even knowing that they do. He observed that Haidt might be missing that because many liberals and leftists did not feel deeply trespassed against in this way in their own favored institutional and social worlds, and usually looked upon a public sphere that largely aligned with their vision of civic propriety and ritual.
I’m not opposed per se to Haidt’s insistence that some of our political affiliations and reactions stem from deeper, non-conscious cognitive predispositions: I just think he woefully mismaps those findings to real politics, to history, to institutions, and so on. I think my colleague’s point now seems deeply confirmed. Why are so many of us feeling deep distress each day, sometimes over what seem like relatively trivial or incidental information (like Trump pushing aside heads of state?) Because Trump is sacrilege.
Trump is the Piss Christ of liberals and leftists. His every breath is a bb-gun shot through a cathedral window, bacon on the doorstep of a mosque, the explosion of an ancient Buddha statue. He offends against the notion that merit and hard work will be rewarded. Against the idea that leadership and knowledge are necessary partners. Against deep assumptions about the dignity of self-control. Against a feeling that leaders should at least pretend to be more dedicated to their institutions and missions than themselves. Against the feeling that consequential decisions should be performed as consequential. Against the feeling that a man should be ashamed of sexual predation and assault if caught on tape exalting it. Against the sense that anyone who writes or speaks in the public sphere is both responsible for what they’ve said and should have to reconcile what they’ve said in the past with what they’re doing in the present.
Against facts. Against truth. Against knowledge. Against trust. Against honor. Against loyalty. Against law. Against order. Against justice. Against service to something bigger than ourselves. Against kindness.
These are emotional commitments before they are things we would defend as substantive, reasoned propositions. They’re interwoven into how many of us inhabit social class and working life, but sometimes spill over both class and work to connect us with unlike people who nevertheless have similar expectations about leaders and public figures.
Even when we intellectually understand that our sense of the sacred in civic and public life may be dysfunctionally entangled in stifling technocratic arrogance or neoliberal visions of governmentality, even when we believe ourselves to be open to a more carnivalesque or improvisational mode of public leadership, we still have very deep feelings about what’s proper and improper, righteous and demonic, sanitary and repellant. And Trump is violating every intuition, every deep reservoir of feeling we have about how one ought to be a man, a leader, a symbol of our national identity. We are not distracted when we respond to those feelings. In fact, we might be better off to articulate our responses as feelings, as intense and profound and utterly righteous feelings.
Image credit: "Blasphemy" by dbeck03 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.
[. . .] A Universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,
Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,
Abominable, inutterable, and worse [. . .]
Now I understand the meanings of the concept of “against”.