Part 3: The Spellbreaker
On the first day of July last, President Trump chalked up his latest win in a game of Twitter Chicken, this time against the leftist Mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, causing her to blink and then dismantle the Utopian republic of CHOP (formerly CHAZ) an initiative forced upon her by the president served with a side of poached crow. Some weeks before, Trump tweeted out that, unless the mayor did her job and put an end to the occupation, he would put boots on the ground and do things the old-fashioned way.
‘Take back your city NOW,’ he advised. ‘If you don’t do it, I will. This is not a game.’ Mayor Durkan’s response was defiant but unconvincingly so: ‘Make us all safe. Go back to your bunker.”
Trump likely sensed he’d already won, so let it lie. In the early hours of July 1st, fearing that All the President’s Men were about to descend and rub her nose in it, Durkan — who had described the occupation as a ‘peaceful block party’ which would unleash a ‘summer of love’ — called in the Seattle Police Department to dismantle border barriers, clean up the mess and arrest the would-be seditionists.
The President is good at playing Chicken. As the master of dealmakin
g, he reads opponents well. Despite his disavowal, his sequence of events has about it the tenor of a game, but the kind of game someone like Trump can win without actually doing anything, without intervening in the actually existing world. Increasingly, as his presidency has worn on, even some of his most loyal supporters, including many outside the US who have pinned their hopes of a worldwide national populist revolution on him reclaiming the presidency in November, tend to contemplate such victories in the rearview mirrors feeling like they have lost another of their nine lives.
In late June, such people watched in dismay as Tucker Carlson put on the black cap and pronounced Trump’s re-election chances dead unless he did something fast about CHAZ, the 'autonomous zone' established by BLM in Seattle after the George Floyd killing by police in May. Many of Trump’s voters were becoming increasingly fearful and agitated, yet the president did nothing — at least according to the nation’s leading TV anchor, not long before touted as a possible running–mate this November. ‘He said little, he did less. Some voters felt undefended. Some turned against him.’
But then, with a sudden change in the wind, with one mighty bound, our hero was free, courtesy of his own thumbs. His supporters started breathing again. The maestro had pulled another fast one.
Still, there has been concern that, one of these days, Trump would lose one of his famous games of Chicken, and that the consequences could be calamitous under multiple headings.
Again, it is helpful to recall Victor David Hanson’s comparison between President Trump’s Twitter behaviour and the 1960 incident involving the then Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev who interrupted proceedings at the UN by taking off his shoe and banging it on the desk in front of him. Hanson translated: ‘Don’t mess with me, I’m crazy, I might do anything!’ Trump operates his Twitter account as a way of teaching his enemies that, if they trade toxic tweets with a real badass, they will come off worse. In the Seattle episode, of course, there was a risk of things going beyond the normal stakes of the Twitterzone, threatening to spill over into real life-or-death consequences. In other words, what is a passable strategy for political point-scoring — even winning elections — is to be regarded as a flimsy toolkit for running the biggest democracy in the world.
Trump tweets as if this is the main thing a president does. A presidential strategy that might be dubbed ‘all Tweet ‘n’ trousers’ — or perhaps ‘all Tweet ‘n’ no trousers’ — is entertaining in the same sense as a precarious high-wire act, but there is escalating concern in Trump-friendly circles about the flimsiness of such an approach as a strategy of governance in a time of national — and global — upheaval.
The American writer and computer scientist Jaron Lanier has propounded an intriguing and worrying theory concerning President Trump’s inability or unwillingness to actually do anything about much, while tweeting up a storm. The author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Lanier believes the president is simply addicted to Twitter.
Lanier describes social media as a ‘dopamine farm’ on which users have their thoughts and feelings reprogrammed for the benefit of customers, i.e. advertisers, who spend money in the belief that they will achieve some form of modification in user behaviour or thinking. The result, right now, is societies ‘optimised for manipulation’, where human beings become mere resources for cultivating data, and all kinds of bad actors are slithering around manipulating consumer and electoral susceptibility. Users are being subtly manipulated by algorithms that observe their every move and word, in ways that, because of the sophistication of the invisible behaviourist techniques being employed, amount to something resembling mass hypnosis.
‘Society has been gradually darkened by this scheme by which everyone is under surveillance all the time,’ Lanier told the UK’s Channel 4 News in 2018. ‘And everybody has been under this mild version of behaviour modification all the time. It’s not as dramatic as a heroin addiction, but the principle is the same. It’s made people jittery and cranky. It’s made teens, especially, depressed. It’s made our politics unreal and strange, so that we’re not sure whether elections are real anymore.’
All such behaviour-modification techniques operate on a system of reward-and-punishment; but in social media they involve an added element arising from the nature of the technologies, which employ ‘likes’ and followers to supply rewards, and trolling and abuse as forms of punishment. In traditional reward-and-punishment systems, the negatives and positives are applied more or less equally — bullseyes or electric shocks. In social media, however, the negative predominates. The user is fed a distorted version of reality to push his emotional responses towards irritability and rage. ‘The difference with social media is that the algorithms that are following you are looking for the quickest response, and the negative responses — like being startled or scared or irritated or angry — tend to rise faster than the positive responses, like building trust, or feeling good. The algorithms naturally catch the negativity and amplify it, and introduce negative people to each other.’ This is why, he says, the world seems increasingly insane.
This line of reasoning caused the Channel 4 interviewer to mention Donald Trump. Lanier was surprisingly kind. He had met Trump several times, he said, and, while he always thought him ‘somewhat untrustworthy and a bit of a showman and a bit of a scammer,’ he had a sympathetic view overall: ‘He never lost himself and became so strangely insecure and so weirdly irritable until he had his own addiction, in this case to Twitter. It’s really damaged him. I view Trump in a way as a victim. His character has been really damaged by his Twitter addiction.’
In Addiction by Design - Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, Natasha Dow Schüll demonstrates how the mechanical rhythm of electronic gambling pulls players into a trancelike state, the ‘machine zone,’ in which daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away. Once in the zone, gambling addicts play not to win but simply to keep playing, regardless of cost in any currency. Social media acts in a similar way: the addict becomes hooked, not just on the good part of the addiction experience, but on the whole cycle. The Twitter addict becomes addicted to engagement that is almost always unpleasant. The ‘player’ gets praise or approval — the dopamine hit — and then dives back into the general toxicity in search of another. This is what is happening with Trump, says Lanier. Twitter, like machine gambling, provides an oasis in which the modern man-god finds temporary respite, outside time, space and even his own human identity, from the burdens of life, celebrity or office. The addiction provides a paradoxically safe place in which the negatives and positives are at least somewhat predictable. The losses of the ‘game’, unlike with real life, have at least the benefit of predictability.
There is convincing evidence that Lanier may be right about Trump — that he has indeed been changed by Twitter, that his personality has dramatically hardened since he joined the platform in March 2009. If you track the various appearances by Trump on TV talkshows in the years before and after his engagement with Twitter, you notice an interesting — an alarming — pattern. Just one caveat: Trump started on The Apprentice in 2004, roughly five years before he joined Twitter, and it’s possible that the style and nature of that show may also have contributed to the coarsening of his personality.
There is, for example, a remarkable recording on YouTube of a four-minute excerpt from a 1980 interview, conducted by Rona Barrett with a 34 year-old Donald Trump, in which he addressed the idea that he might one day become president. The man being interviewed is clearly a younger Donald, and yet in ways seems to be a different man entirely. He is fresh-faced, polite, almost diffident, you might even say shy.
The content of what he says is entirely in keeping with the personality that shocked the planet by winning the 2016 election. He spoke about America’s failure to realise its potential. ‘I feel that this country, with the proper leadership, can go on to become what it once was, and I hope — and certainly hope — that it does go on to become what it could and should be.’ Asked if he would like to become president, he replied that he did not think so. He would like to see somebody ‘as the president who could do the job, and there are very capable people in this country.’ The most capable people, he agreed, were not running for office, ‘and that is a very sad commentary on the country.’
Why not him then?
‘Because I think it’s a very mean life,’ he said. ‘I would dedicate myself to this country, but I see it as being a mean life.’ He also believed that people with strong views, ‘maybe unpopular views’, would find it hard to get elected against ‘somebody with no great brain but a big smile’ in the beauty contest that is the modern election. He offered the view that ‘Abraham Lincoln would probably not be electable today because of television. He was not a handsome man and he did not smile at all.’
Trump emerges from the interview as mild-mannered, genial, gentle, courteous, self-assured, but without a hint of braggadocio. He could be faking, but it doesn’t seem so.
Of course, it goes without saying that a gentle man, such as the younger Trump seemed to be, might not be at all suitable to the job of president at any time. Up to a point, the logic of having Trump as president was that he was brave and bullish enough to barge in where others dread to tread. In those four intervening decades, he had grown meaner.
But the problem is not really that Trump is far louder, brasher, ruder and more bullish than he was back then, but that he has become so not due to the attrition of time and age, but because of factors that, while giving him the appearance of a man capable of being sent out to do a man’s job, are really symptoms of a form of weakness.
The real worry may be that, whereas he has acquired the appearance of toughness and invulnerability because of his persona on The Apprentice and on Twitter, he remains, behind the mask, the same diffident, mild-mannered, butter-wouldn’t-melt soy-boy he was in 1980. The problem in other words, is that his tough-talking may be simply that — or, even worse, the symptom of an underlying vulnerability, definable as something like an addiction to trading in abuse. And if that is the case, the far greater problem may be that, one day soon, if someone summons up the nerve to call the president’s bluff, the shoe will be on the other foot, and the world will find itself in more trouble than it ever dreamed possible.
In Literary Taste: How to form it, a long essay written in 1909, Arnold Bennett makes some interesting observations about humanity in general, and character in particular, through the prism of literary style. He posits a contrast between what he calls the ‘matter’ of a man (or a writer) which is to say his character, and, on the other hand, his demeanour. He notes that the gestures and manners of our acquaintances are analogous to the writing style of a favoured author. ‘You know the man who is awkward, shy, clumsy, but who, nevertheless, impresses you with a sense of dignity and force. Why? Because mingled with that awkwardness and so forth is dignity. You know the rough, blunt fellow whom you instinctively guess to be affectionate — because there is “something in his tone” or “something in his eyes.” In every instance the demeanour, while perhaps seeming to be contrary to the character, is really in accord with it. The demeanour never contradicts the character. It is one part of the character that contradicts another part of the character. For, after all, the blunt man is blunt, and the awkward man is awkward, and these characteristics are defects. The demeanour merely expresses them.’
Similarly with a writer’s style. Even with our favourite writers, we sometimes become irritated because they go too far in making a point, are disproportionate, rude, shocking. But something about their best writing causes us to see them in that way always, even though much of the time it may not represent what they write. He makes a distinction between the “matter” and the “style” of a writer. ‘The more you reflect, the more clearly you see that faults and excellences of style are faults and excellence of matter itself. No matter how much the extremes may seem to contradict one another, the true line of the writer’s character is to be observed in the “matter” of their writing.’
There is a common thread, then, in how we ‘read’ people, real or fictional, and this has to do with character. The process is the same in the literary, say dramatic, sense in which we ‘understand’ fictional characters when we see them portrayed in a novel or on a screen or stage, and the way we imbibe the character of a real life person we meet or, in the case of a public figure, observe remotely. In both cases, we use deep-set programmes like intuition, gut instinct, emotional intelligence, to go deeper than the superficial moral discourse around the character, real or fictional. We may not know a neighbour intimately, but we decide from his demeanour, conversation, sense of humour, disposition, willingness to help or oblige on occasion, as well as our general experience of engaging with him, whether we like, believe, trust him. This process is susceptible to a margin of error, but it is rooted in our own life experience, and is generally speaking reliable in proportion to the length and breadth of that experience.
This is generally true: When we are young, we make our minds up quickly about people, and are sometimes wrong; when we grow older, we make our minds up even more quickly and are almost never wrong.
I had never focussed on Donald Trump’s character or Donald trump as a ‘character’ in the public drama of the world until late 2015, when it was already clear that he would be a candidate for the US presidency. Insofar as I had a view of him it was dismissive: He was a loud, brash, businessman, a major TV celebrity, running for president to boost his profile and brand — and had no chance. After several months watching, listening to and reading about him, I had changed my mind. I did so, I believe, because I had seen more deeply into his character. I saw the superficial flaws and quirks, the scrapes he had gotten into. He was indeed loud and brash, you might even say vulgar. He had a history as a horse-trader, a ruthless operator who played to win. He had had a couple of failed marriages and a reputation as a Don Juan. I did not see these factors as significant, all being characteristics that might be noted in about half the male population. I saw other things also: He was warm, genial, funny, charismatic. There was that touch of Elvis about him, especially when younger, of politeness, deference to others. He was passionate about America and this did not seem faked. He spoke intelligently about his country’s people and their problems, about America’s problems. When you checked it out, you discovered he had been saying these things for a very long time, right back into his youth. Above all, he was likeable: I found him compelling, enigmatic, unpredictable, witty, sometimes very wise. He was one of those people, I felt, who might lift your day more than a little if you were to encounter him in an elevator on the way up to your office in the morning. His very being — the physical scale of it, his personality, his line of patter — had the effect of provoking in the neutral and unprejudiced an involuntary smile.
You might be disposed to think — if you thought about it at all — that what has changed about Donald Trump since he was a young man is his demeanour, but in fact it would seem more correct to say that, in approaching his public political life, he has loosened up his demeanour to liberate elements of his character that had not been visible before. And he has done so not as part of the osmotic development of his personality, but in response to his engagement with the world, in other words organically. In the 1980s he was the privileged son of a wealthy family, the product of good schools and military academy; by the time he ran for president in 2016, he was as though a working class roughneck who despised the elite he belonged to. He had often said that, going about New York, it was people like taxi drivers that he found himself gravitating towards, and there is much anecdotal evidence of his affinity with crane-drivers and brickies working on the building sites he visited in the hard hat of the boss. On first sight, it is as though he hardened up his demeanour to harmonize with such men; but on deeper reflection it seems more likely that, by dint of constant exposure to such people and their lives, he extracted over time from his own character the elements which best harmonized with their personalities, their characters, their longings, needs and dreams. You might say that he developed a kind of love affair with the New York working class which in the campaign of 2016 he expanded to embrace the whole of middle America. Since 2016, the Trump brand has gone global.
The general consensus among psychologists appears to be that personality is shaped by early life experiences and tends to stay stable over time. It can be affected by life changes and other circumstances, but this tends to be marginal. For a personality to alter as much as Donald Trump’s appears to have is deeply unusual. It is as though, in coming to the decision to undertake his present task, he realised he would need to roughen up — not merely to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous journaliars, but to send signals to his would-be supporters that he could be their fearless, unflinching champion.
Donald Trump is a man who has always been conscious of doing what works best in any situation. ‘Personality,’ F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, ‘is an unbroken series of successful gestures.’ Trump knows about gestures, about which ones work and which do not. Perhaps he sought, then, to recreate himself with a different set of gestures, to create a ‘mean’ personality to take on a ‘mean’ job. Perhaps, observing the needs of the people showing a willingness to support him, he came to realise that he could not get into the citadel without armour of some kind.
Trump today is gruff, abrasive, rude, aggressive. These characteristics are markedly at odds with the personality he exhibited even two decades ago. It is as though he has constructed a new personality precisely for the purpose of running for president, as though finally coming to the conclusion that no one else was going to turn up, that the only cavalry coming over the hill would be Donald Trump himself.
Trump has an odd sense of dignity, though his demeanour sometimes seems to reject that description. But, growingly over the past five years, his dignity has suggested itself as that of a man who knows he represents others — others who have been shunned and insulted in their own country by people that Trump himself knows to be ‘bad hombres’. This is a matter of character. There is a remarkable similarity between the things he was saying four decades ago, as a startlingly young man, and what he has been saying so loudly and so often for the past five years. He loves his country. He believes the United States has become a bit of a whipping boy in the world, has been taken for a ride by some of its supposed allies. For years he was expressing the belief that the US needed a president whom — when pressed as to specifics — he described in terms vaguely suggesting himself, but still he resisted all persuasion to run for any kind of office, including the presidency. He would not mind, he said, getting involved in some kind of cooperative venture to find a suitable candidate but he had no desire to himself be the candidate. Then he changed his mind, and the story may yet emerge of how he changed it reluctantly, under persuasion from concerned citizens who needed to find a fearless gunslinger to ride into town. (Yes, this is the Q narrative, concerning which I am agnostic.)
There are many ways in which Trump changed, not merely the obvious, roughening aspects. He became a braggart, whereas previously, though always a realist, he had been quiet-spoken and almost self-effacing. He became trigger-happy with insults, always faster on the draw, like a Clint of the tongue or keypad rather than a Smith & Wesson. It is as though he reconstructed himself as a battering ram to be directed at the enemies of America operating from within, of whom there were an alarming number in a multiplicity of ratholes.
When you read exposition of conditions from which Trump is supposed to suffer, such as the ‘Authoritarian Personality Type’ or ‘Abrasive Personality Disorder’, something jumps out: that, although Donald Trump appears to conform to many of the relevant characteristics and symptoms, there is much more to him, much that is mysterious and paradoxical.
In a 1994 academic paper, Abrasive Personality Disorder: Definition and Diagnosis, Stuart B. Litvak, Ph.D. writes: ‘An erudite analysis of Van Vogt's “violent man” is provided by writer Colin Wilson, in his 1983 book, A Criminal History of Mankind. Wilson commonly refers to this character type as the Right Man, an individual who is driven by the “manic need for self-esteem,” to feel he is a “somebody,” obsessed with the issue of not “losing face,” and who is chronically resistant to admitting he is wrong under any circumstances. Wilson posits that individuals such as this can be highly pathological and likely harbour deep-seated feelings of inferiority.’
These, if you are given to reading the cathedral press, would seem to be descriptions of Donald Trump, although the fact that he was, as a young man, entirely different suggests the necessity for a different analysis. Undeterred, the cultural theorists and armchair diagnosticians have been busy trying to pin Trump with something like Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Alzheimer’s, dementia or some other kind of neurodegenerative brain disease. This form of commentary was particularly prevalent in 2017, his first year in office. None of it has stacked up. Trump’s altered personality certainly exhibits some of the symptoms superficially associated with some such conditions (disinhibition, impulsiveness, gross changes in behaviour), but he remains overwhelmingly cogent, articulate and — objectively speaking — balanced. Addressing his rallies again this year, he is utterly astonishing to watch: you have to pinch and remind yourself that he is 74 years of age. Moreover, in the past three years of his presidency, there has been no apparent deterioration in his behaviour: he started mean and stayed mean.
Psychologists tend to say that personality can indeed change over time, but generally for the better. Behaviour can be influenced by a mixture of personality and circumstances. But mostly people tend to become more rather than less agreeable as they age. A 2015 study by Nathan Hudson and Chris Fraley suggested that some people may be able intentionally to change aspects of their personalities through ‘volitional means’, or acts of will. There is no reason to believe that, if this is possible at all, it would not be possible for Donald J. Trump.
Or maybe it was the firing of people as the badass Trump on The Apprentice that coarsened him. ‘I’m actually a nice guy but that’s the image,’ he told talkshow host Conan O’Brien one time. Maybe it was a practice run, a means to a predetermined end . . .
What all this seems to be telling us is something like that the things about Trump that most infuriate people are voluntary add-ons, part of a strategy of self-armouring. He has attached them for pragmatic reasons, but they do not define him. Trump’s character, in terms of his ambitions for his country appears to remain unchanged, even as his face and swagger seem to merge with the ‘character’ he possibly created to reach the White House.
Adapting that brilliant observation of Salena Zito, writing in Atlantic magazine in September 2016, I would say that his own people instantly and instinctively recognise all this — they take him seriously not literally; his opponents and the media, especially the more virulent of these categories, take him literally though not seriously, do not see beyond the brash exterior to the character underneath.
To return to the analysis presented at the outset concerning the concrete and virtual classes, of which — the case goes — Donald Trump is the champion by popular acclaim. There are many slivers of explanation for this odd alliance, but one that explains why the incongrueties are both necessary and heartening. It has to do with the way traditioanl tribes always favoured having a Fat Chieftain because his girth promised that he might make his people as plump as himself. This is why Trump insists, more than anything else, on his wealth not being called into question. It is the source of his power, though not in the obvious way. It is unexpectedly interesting that Trump’s tribe do not resent him for being wealthy. His people look upon the Chieftain’s ample belly and feel reassured. His people have different ambitions, but recognise that Trump’s, in as far as they are not theirs, do not threaten them in any way. On the contrary.
And the envy directed at Trump from people who are not of his tribe but long more than anything to be as rich as he is, is matched by another kind of env directed at Trump’s people, The Deplorables. Just as status is at the back of much of the disorder of the modern world, envy seeping from the cracks caused by the disruption of human society from the operation of Cultural Marxism, Big Tech, Big Pharma, is at the root of much of the bile now coursing through the veins of Western societies. These are the main cause of the new-found enmity between the concrete and the virtual classes, which resides mainly in the envy of the virtual classes for the solidity conferred on the concrete classes by virtue of their tangible, skilled engagements with the world. But, because the virtual classes have for the moment commandeered the levers of cultural control, the ‘war’ being conducted from the left is in large part a battle for a status that depends on power rather than competence of skill, and is therefore underpinned by jealousy and envy of those who possess real tradable skills and are thereby capable of earning their keep. And, of course, as previously stated, it is a battle for resources, above all to deny the concrete classes their earned dividend of the spoils of the coming transformation of the world from muscle and grit to A.I., to cheat them of their inheritance and reduce them to serfs, rotting away in reservations until they die of opioid overdose.
The virtual classes/elites struggle to maintain an unearned status. The concrete classes resent the combination of arrogance and parasitism that characterizes the virtual classes, and have become increasingly resentful on this account. Social media might be deemed the new crucible of the resulting conflict. The subsidized classes get by without status, as they have more or less always done. They are happy to be the human ideological shields of the elite, and believe the relationship thus defined will continue to serve them well.
Much as I would like to claim that I belong to the concrete category, much as I avoid participation in virtual networks, the form of my work deposits me in the virtual categories. Where I deviate from the overwhelming majority of the second category is that I remain unwoke: wokeness is profoundly rooted in the virtual classes, indeed is virtually, so to speak, their exclusive prerogative. The concrete classes are real; the virtual classes think they are real but are fake, parasitical and self-deluding.
What is called ‘education’ is an important element of the mix, though not primarily, or at least not primarily as education. To a high degree, so to speak, the concrete classes tend to have skipped over third-level education. Most members of the ‘elite’ virtual classes will have attended university. Universities still teach — more or less — but it’s no longer the most significant thing they do.
In National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin tackle the vexed question of education in respect of issues like Trump and Brexit. The standard media line for five years has been that people who support these phenomena are ‘uneducated’, which generally tends to mean that they have not been to university. Eatwell and Goodwin argue that, while it is true that people without university degrees are more inclined to vote for populists, ‘[i]t is neither accurate nor fair to portray the people who support national populism as “uneducated” and “thick”.’ Many such people, they add, ‘finished high school, and a far from trivial number went to college, like those one in four Brexit voters who had a degree.’ Similarly, they outline, ‘slightly more than one-third of Trump’s support during the primaries, and more than two-fifths during the 2016 presidential election came from whites who had degrees.’ Among Trump’s most loyal supporters, one in eight had gone to college, whereas three in five had left the education system during or at the end of high school. Many supporters of national populism, Eatwell and Goodwin attest, are people who have decided to pursue educational paths that are technical or autodidactic rather than academic.
The following point is complicated and, to an extent, counter-intuitive, though I may be understood better by people who have read Matthew B. Crawford’s wonderful book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, which explores the qualities of intelligence acquired from working with the hands. The ‘educational divide’ here is not necessarily a matter of knowledge or learning, but of shared values and views of the world.
Eatwell and Goodwin again: ‘Those who have gone to college tend to have a culturally liberal mindset that puts a premium on the tolerance of difference, has little time for social hierarchies and prioritizes individual rights above group identities. In contrast, those who have not gone to college lean towards a more social conservative outlook which places more value on preserving social hierarchies, stability, maintaining order and tradition and ensuring that people conform to the wider group.’
Education, then, becomes a loaded word. University has acquired a mystique which confers on graduates a knowledge status over others that is mostly misleading. The key factor with a university education is not the ‘education’ received in university, but the ‘experience of college education itself’. Eatwell and Goodwin point out that leaving home to attend college occurs at a formative stage in the lives of most young people. ‘Socializing, debating and sharing life experiences in an environment that is filled with liberal students and teachers who come from different backgrounds encourages many young people to absorb a more culturally liberal outlook, which continues to influence their thinking long after they have left college.’ In other words, the experience of ‘going to university’ is at least as much about joining clubs, attending parties, drinking with fellow students, and participating in extra-curricular political activities as it is about attending lectures and passing exams.
People who have not gone through this rite of passage see the world in a different way. ‘Because of their educational background and closely associated values, they share core concerns about how their communities, nations and the West more generally are changing . . . they think in profoundly different ways from graduates and more liberally minded voters on a whole range of issues—such as who truly belongs to the national community, how immigration is changing their country, whether or not Islam is compatible with the West, the position of their wider group relative to other groups in society, the extent to which political and economic groups can be trusted, and whether they feel they have a say.’
These various phenomena could be observed in laboratory conditions in the 2016 US presidential elections. The concrete classes voted for Trump, the virtual and — generally speaking — the subsidized classes voted for Clinton.
Clinton voters amounted to a hidden coalition between the super-rich and the subsistence classes—indeed the subsidised classes have in recent decades been expanded by immigration to create voting fodder to beef up the political power of the elites — in effect, a battering ram to enable the super-rich to retain their piles and privileges while affecting to stand up for underdogs. An irony to be observed here is that, while the lack of education prevalent among the subsidized classes is regarded by the elites as an occasion of pity and ‘more equality’, any evidence of the same deficiency in a member of the concrete class is to be treated with contempt.
One of the things we note on closer examination via this prism is that, though virtual workers tend to be wealthier than inhabitants of the concrete world, this too can be misleading. Trump voters had on average roughly a 15% average income advantage on Clinton voters, but this was mainly because the incomes of the subsidized human shields pulled down the average of the super-rich, thus muddying the picture.
Elite Democrats use the poor, minorities, migrants, etc. as human shields to pass off themselves and their nominally leftist driving ideology as something altruistic, when in effect they have appropriated the subsidised categories to sustain their own parasitical and unsustainable model of reality. While affecting concern for these ‘minorities’ they in truth wish to maintain them in a form of economic enslavement, subsisting — no more: many surviving on food stamps and happy pills — so that they, the elites, can continue to hide behind them, concealing the fact that, in the main, they themselves are in the ‘business’ of creating useless, often damaging ‘products’ (social media chatter, happy pills, debt — to give just some examples) while the Trump voters get out early in the morning to build cars, clean windows, bake cakes and put out fires.
What is called Cultural Marxism is really a form of political armour, in which the pseudo-leftist elites clothe their proxy-warrior client-base, pushing it out into the public arena, grievances to the fore, and then themselves sitting back pretending to give a toss. In the summer of 2020, under cover of Covid, they pushed these useful idiots into the streets of the world’s cities in the hope of bringing about a stasis that would paralyse Donald Trump in his lair in the White House. (This strategy has not succeeded, as the world will observe come Wednesday next.)
These tendencies define an widening divide in the world that no longer adheres to any known understanding of the concepts of Left and Right, but is increasingly predicated on the difference between people who essentially live in several quite different worlds.
And this is the deep and ultimate meaning of the Trump revolution: the back-answer of the dispirited men of America who still want to build and fix things but have gotten on the wrong side of a cultural wrecking ball. Trump is not really about Trump: he is about the Trump tribe.
The late French philosopher Jean Baudrillard in a passage about the modern ‘subject’ in his book Impossible Exchange, talks – ironically, one hopes, but perhaps not – of the ‘liberation’ of the subject through technologies, networks, screens, which cause him to become fractured, ‘both subdivisible to infinity and indivisible, closed on himself and doomed to endless identity’. At some uncertain point of rupture in the not-too-distant past, man ceased to live in reality but moved unknowingly, as though sucked into a black hole, a ‘simulacrum’ of the real, this virtual world made of circuits and networks and pixels and memes, in which it was necessary for man to virtualise himself so as to cease to be a subject in the old sense with an ‘I’ and a soul, and become as a unit of the crowd, the herd. The ‘perfect’ subject today is an individual who has also a mass status — as a particle of the mob outside his window. He is ‘the dispersal of the mass effect into each individual parcel … Or, alternatively, the individual himself forms a mass – the mass structure being present, as in a hologram, in each individual fragment. In the virtual and media world, the mass and the individual are merely electronic extensions of one another.’
Covid has been the crossing. We have crossed the road to move into the simulacrum, carrying all our clutter and kit, sleepwalking through the night to find our new homes in the virtual and waking up in the morning with just the vaguest sense of having moved from someplace else. We enter the simulacrum and become its citizens, and take it for the real. We are as avatars, facsimiles of ourselves, standing outside ‘our’ selves and moving ‘our’ beings about as though pieces on an electronic chessboard or symbols on a handheld video game.
If we listen to Baudrillard, he tells us we have entered a kind of pratfall paradise, crossed the line into a future that is catastrophically utopian. His later work seems to balance on a thin thread between nostalgia for a lost paradise and nihilism predicated on his fascination with the illusion of the simulacrum. His tone moves beyond didacticism and exposition to a kind of celebration of the chaos that obtains, as though hoping that in comprehending our new home we might learn to live in it. The problem he appears to diagnose is something like this: man, a creature who is not built for a resting place, has reached the end of his own misdreaming as to his destination. ‘Too bad,’ he writes chillingly in Fatal Strategies. ‘It’s Utopia.’
The day is now far spent. We have watched this process — some knowingly, some not — for eight months and more. We have a brief window through which to escape back to reality. Only one man is tall enough to reach the catch and open it.
With hindsight it is clear: it was always going to take a Trump, a man who had grown himself a hide thicker than a stampede of rhinos, to break through the culture of contempt in which the American working class has been steeped like plucked turkeys for half a century, and bring their plight, and the plight of their fellows throughout the Western world, to the centre of the political stage. This he has done, but there is one trick left to him: to bundle up the world and hand it back to those it belongs to.
Trump insinuated himself as the Boss who connects, and also as someone capable of disrupting the forces of indifference and contempt. He was the Fat Chieftain writ very, very large, an unlikely antidote to leftist/progressive excesses, effusing an unexpected hope that he might pull the communication cord on the drift of culture and economics towards unreality, in the process saving that portion of the population still marooned in the real.
And what an antidote: A man who had spent his life in the virtual simulacrum and lived by its logic of celebrity and narcissism — making a connection with those left floundering behind in the concrete limbo. Waving out of the black hole, he found his hand clasped desperately and his arm all but pulled from its socket, an extreme symbol of materialism recruited for a spiritual purpose by men and women with nothing left to lose but their dignity and despond.
Maybe it is not as mad as it seems. Perhaps, to put things in prosaic political terms, underneath all his all too obvious flaws and foibles, Donald Trump was an accidental small-r republican of the Matthew Crawford kind, the kind who had existed for centuries in the workshops of the skilled craftsmen who had constructed the world and talked its freedoms into being. These were the men and women who had learned how the world was put together from putting it together again, day after day, the men who checked with a spirit-level to see that all was well, the women who gave birth to the future when they had little to hope with but hope itself. And perhaps, for the same reasons, Donald Trump is possessed also of a small-d democrat’s instinct for signs that the capital-D types couldn’t find with an intermittent fault diagnostic kit on stilts.
What we do not yet know is whether President Trump’s strength and stamina will be up to the task he has volunteered for: no less than drawing the black hole back into the concrete world, restoring real and unreal to their proper balance. Or perhaps we are already long past that possibility and this apparent last ditch rescue mission is merely a hoax of the simulacrum, a sadistic teasing of the jettisoned and forgotten. President Trump’s history and personality, it has to be acknowledged, allows for both possibilities.
In his book on the new left, Fools, Frauds and Firebrands, the English philosopher who died as 2020 was ushered in, Sir Roger Scruton compares the language of the modern left to the concept of Newspeak devised by George Orwell for his novel 1984. Indeed Scruton traces Orwell’s creation back to the sloganeering of the French Revolution, and later the pre-Bolshevik era Russian intelligentsia and Socialist International of the late 19th century. In such quarters, slogans were essential to stigmatising dissidents, revisionists, deviationists and the like, and its success convinced communists that it was possible to alter reality by coining new phrases and words. Repeated use of the term ‘crisis of capitalism’, for example, could be used to bring down an economy; the repetition of ‘democratic centralism’ could insinuate that dictatorship was not in fact dictatorship; the call for and ‘the liquidation of the bourgeoisie’ could conjure the targeted person out of his or her human body, thingifying and isolating him. ‘Newspeak,’ writes Scruton, ‘occurs when the primary purpose of language — which is to describe reality — is replaced by the rival purpose of asserting power over it. . . . Newspeak sentences sound like assertions, but their underlying logic is that of the spell. They conjure the triumph of words over things, the folly of rational argument and also the danger of resistance.’
Scruton describes the process whereby we are invited by words to see someone as an enemy, an untouchable (‘homophobe’, ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ are everyday contemporary examples). Confronting someone as a human being entails giving that person a voice, which means that words must be used as a tool of negotiation, agreement or disagreement, but this use of language is wiped out by the spell word. ‘I make remarks about the weather, grumble about politics, pass the time of day,’ writes Scruton, ‘and my language has the effect of softening reality, of making it pliable and serviceable. Newspeak, which denies reality, also hardens it by turning it into something alien and resistant, a thing to be “struggled with” and triumphed over.’ Ordinary language ‘warms and softens; Newspeak freezes and hardens… does not merely impose a plan; it also eliminates the discourse through which human beings can live without one.’
The world had been under a spell for perhaps two decades, the spell of Cultural Marxism, the culture-based retread/rebore of Marx’s derelict jalopy that shifts his signature resentment from the economic to the intimate. In 2020, this process, already lined up for take-off, was subject to an accelerant. That accelerant was called Covid, now the most toxic and lethal spell-word of them all.
In 2020, the Western world was visited by a spectre of pure evil. The pursuit of an unseen goal was seen to move the political apparatuses of multiple nations in ways that seemed to defy the senses, understandings, experience and credulity of whole swathes of their populations. Other elements fell in line, voluntarily signing up to what rapidly emerged as the probationary period for a life of serfdom. Still others rubbed their hands in glee: the hour had come round at last when the march through the institutions had rounded the final corner. The nature and dynamic of this evil is a long story, another article, a book, a library of books. My purpose here is to say something about the meaning of all this as it impacts upon Donald Trump, and in turn about the way Donald Trump may, may not or ought to impact upon the world over the coming four years. My purpose is to draw the world’s attention to the true meaning of next Tuesday.
I am assuming he will win by a thousand miles. If he does not, we may as well get our affairs in order, for the end of everything we have treasured in our lives in this civilisation is in sight. But I do not think America is that crazy — not yet.
Trump is the vaccine, the elixir, the antidote, the chemotherapy, the enema. He is the greatest, most potent, most hopeful enemy of the virus of Cultural Marxism, which, unless he succeeds in destroying it and inoculating America against it, will in short time reduce the entire world to a version of Prague on August 21st 1968. He is the Spellbreaker, the man whose destiny it is to pull the world back from the edge of the simulacrum, and restore it to something like sanity.