This is a complex
and disconcerting query, one Americans ought not sweep casually
under the rug. Donald Trump’s grotesque authoritarianism
did not arise mysteriously, spontaneously, out of nowhere,
without history, ex nihilo. On the contrary, it was
the evident and even predictable result of a society too-frequently
bereft of reason-based decision-making. In essence, the thoroughly
beaten-down America that suffered a presidentially-incited
insurrection on January 6, 2021 was a nation afflicted.
Even now, even
after suffering Mr. Trump’s most sorely palpable and
continuously lethal derelictions, America remains, as a society,
widely averse to serious learning or intellectual obligation.
Unsurprisingly, it is a “horde” directed nation,
one susceptible to utterly deranged conspiracy theories and
vulnerable to assorted violence-oriented antipathies of the
“mass.”
CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND
OF THE TRUMP HORROR
“The mass,”
said 20th century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’
Gasset, “crushes beneath it everything that is different,
everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.”
Embracing Trump, and in a plausibly fatal deference to Ortega’s
“crushing” force, the intellectually un-ambitious
American not only agreed to wallow lazily in nonsensical political
and cultural phrases of a glaringly naked emperor, he/she
also accepted a shallow national ethos of personal intellectual
surrender.
Queries continue.
How shall such incomprehensible behaviors be explained most
sensibly and gainfully? At one level, at least, the answer
is obvious. Under Donald Trump, America was no longer a society
sincerely wanting to value knowledge, education or learning.
For four dissembling years, led by a retrograde man of commerce
who never read books – indeed, who very proudly and
conspicuously read nothing – America became a quintessential
“know nothing” country. This meant, inter
alia, a nation that wittingly and shamelessly spurns
intellect and truth.
For variously
intersecting reasons, the docile Trump minions had sought
desperately to keep themselves “anesthetized.”
This sordid search outlasted the Trump presidency. It continues
to this day.
There is more.
In their active form of complicity with individual and collective
self-destruction, surrendering Americans were not passive
victims. Rather, they insistently held themselves captive
by harboring a lengthening string of false presidential reassurances
and by clinging to endlessly mindless Trump simplifications
of multi-sided problems.
There were generic
antecedents. In her magisterial two-volume work, The Life
of the Mind (1971), political philosopher Hannah Arendt
already highlighted the “manifest shallowness”
of historical evil-doers. In so doing, she hypothesized that
the most critically underlying causes of pertinent harms were
neither evil motives nor common stupidity. Instead, she concluded,
controversially but convincingly, that the root problem is
a literal thoughtlessness, a more-or-less verifiable human
condition that makes any unsuspecting individual subject to
the presumed “wisdom” of clichés, stock
phrases and narrowly contrived codes of political expression.
Who are these
individuals? There are, of course, many who will be “susceptible.”
Always. This does notmean only those men or women who lack
a decently respectable formal education. Significantly, in
Donald Trump’s fragmenting America, just as it was earlier,
in the Third Reich, well-educated and affluent persons joined
forces with ritualistic gun worshippers and vulgar street
fighters. The unseemly alliance had a purpose. It was created
as a tactical measure, to meet certain overlapping objectives.
In the end, as
we may learn from both history and logic, each faction would
suffer grievously alongside the general citizenry.
Both sides, therefore,
were destined to “lose.”
In the future,
a similar sort of loss could be existential and irremediable.
In the future,
it could include a nuclear war.
THE LITERAL ABSENCE
OF THOUGHT
For Hannah Arendt,
the core problem was always a tangible absence of thinking.
In her own learned and lucid assessment, menacing evil is
not necessarily calculable according to some specific purpose
or ideology. For the philosopher, it is deceptively commonplace
and plausibly predictable. Evil, as we may learn from Arendt,
is “banal.”
There is more.
Fundamentally, the “mass man” or “mass woman”
(a Jungian term that closely resembles Hannah Arendt’s
evildoer) who cheers wildly in rancorous presidential crowds,
and who chants whatever the articulated gibberish of the particular
horde, prefers whatever is easiest to memorize. This means
favoring a constant flow of empty witticisms over any meaningful
insights of logic or science. Living in a commerce-driven
society that has been drifting ever further from any still-residual
“life of the mind,” this susceptible American
became the perfect “recruit” for Trumpian dissemblance
or conversion.
There is more.
It was in stubborn defiance of meaningful thought that such
persons mounted their twisted attack on the Capitol of the
United States. The ironies are unassailable; they are also
worrisome in the longer term.
This “obedient”
citizen, often like his unregenerate representatives in the
Congress, has no use for study, evidence or critical thinking
of any kind. And why should he/she? Der Fuhrer, the nation
was promised, would do each person’s “thinking”
for him.
Could anything
have been more “convenient?”
With Arendt and
Jung, the core culprit of anti-Reason is fully unmasked. This
“banal” malefactor is the once-still-individual
human being who ceases to be an individual, the one who wittingly
becomes the reliable enemy of intellect and the correlative
ally of thoughtlessness. Following such antecedent triumphs
of anti-Reason here in the United States, it becomes more
easy to understand the hideous rise and seeming political
survival of former American President Donald J. Trump.
Most ominously
in all of this American decline is that Reason remains widely
out of fashion. No matter how compelling and expansive the
evidence of Trump’s myriad derelictions became, millions
of dedicated or “base” adherents stayed steadfastly
loyal to Der Fuhrer. Faith, not facts, are what matter most
to these willfully self-destructive Trump adherents. For them,
the familiar Third Reich phrase “I believe” is
all that counts. For these dutiful hordes, “I think”
remains wholly unknown or distinctly subordinate.
Back in the eighteenth
century, Thomas Jefferson, chief architect of the U.S. Declaration
of Independence and a future American president, exclaimed
with an unhesitating erudition: “I have sworn upon the
altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny
over the mind of man.” US President Donald Trump, “learning
only in his own flesh,” swore an oath of “eternal
support” for such an insufferable tyranny. Earlier,
he had returned from his June 12, 2018 Singapore summit with
Kim Jong Un declaring that the calculable risks of a bilateral
nuclear war had now been removed. This was because he and
Kim had fallen “in love.” Later, on a different
subject, Trump offered his own personal assessments of assorted
drug efficacies against the Corona virus.
These assessments
were de facto instances of crimes against humanity.
Simultaneously,
Trump responded to authoritative science-based prescriptions
– the ones to which Americans actually ought to have
been listening all along – with glib dismissals, capricious
denials or a recognizably open unconcern.
For the United
States, Trump’s stream-of-consciousness excursions into
gibberish and incoherence represented far more than just a
national embarrassment. At a time of palpable biological “plague,”
such presidential declensions became insistently and immediately
life-threatening. In law, they came very close to becoming
genocide-like crimes.
In essence, America’s
political processes and institutions were pitifully inadequate
in dealing with this former president’s most chaotic
instincts. Still, till the end, a large portion of this afflicted
nation continued to display near-infinite forbearance for
Trump’s inane and potentially tragic commentaries. This
forbearance endured even after the Trump-inspired assault
on America’s Capitol. The resultant withering of a declining
nation’s heart and mind pointed unerringly to existential
threats. While various mega-death scenarios of relentless
pandemic were the most plainly far reaching and immediately
credible hazards, the more “normal” dangers of
war and terrorism had not simultaneously disappeared. Today,
these dangers persist. They are more urgent than ever before.
Now, in the United
States, a new president is left to pick up the pieces, a task
including repairs to a Trump-fractured corpus of foreign and
strategic policies.
AN UNPHILOSOPHIC
SPIRIT
America’s
most insidious enemy during the suffocating Trump Era should
now be easier to recognize and uncover. This foe is an unphilosophical
national spirit that knows nothing and wants to know nothing
of truth. Then facing unprecedented and overlapping crises
of health, economics and law, sizable elements of “We
the People” felt at their best when they could chant
anesthetizing Trump-inspired gibberish in mesmerizing chorus.
“We’re number one; we’re number one, “these
Americans shouted out reflexively, even as their country’s
capacity to project global power withered minute by minute,
and even as the already ominous separations of rich and poor
had come to mimic (and sometimes exceed) what is discoverable
in the most grievously downtrodden nations on earth.
“USA; USA”
– the amplified cry of a people who confused gibberish
with true patriotism.
Most alarmingly,
among manifold catastrophic American declensions, the Trump-wounded
American nation allowed itself to be led by a visibly ignorant
pied piper, by a would-be emperor who was “naked”
from the start and who finally managed to bring the United
States to fearful levels of suffering. In this connection,
the Corona Virus pandemic was not of his own personal making,
but this relentless plague became infinitely more injurious
under President Donald J. Trump’s unsteady dictatorial
hand.
Nonetheless, even
now, the champions of anti-Reason in America still rise to
defend their Fuhrer, sometimes on the basis of vague and easily-discredited
conspiracy theories. Trump did not create this growing plague,
we are reminded by these champions. He was, rather, just another
victim of unavoidable biological circumstance. So why keep
“picking on” this innocent and brilliant man (“a
very stable genius”)? Instead, let us stand loyally
by his enduringly sagacious counsel.
Sound familiar?
Recalling philosopher
Hannah Arendt, such determinedly twisted loyalties and explanations
stem originally from massive citizen thoughtlessness. Though
Donald Trump was not responsible for the original biological
menace of “plague,” he still willingly weakened
the American nation’s most utterly indispensable medical
and scientific defenses. It is worth mentioning too, on this
particular count, that meaningful national defense must always
entail far more than just large-scale weapons systems and
infrastructures.
Looking ahead,
for example, this country has far more to gain from a coherent
and science-based antivirus policy than from a patently preposterous
“Space Force.”
Earlier, Thomas
Jefferson, Chief architect of the Declaration of Independence,
observed the imperative congruence of viable national democracy
with wisdom, learning and virtue. Today, however, many still
revere a former president whose proud refrain during the 2016
election process was “I love the poorly educated.”
Among other humiliating derelictions, this perverse refrain
represented a palpable echo of Third Reich Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels’ 1935 Nuremberg rally comment: “Intellect
rots the brain.”
A NATIONAL ANTIPATHY
TO SERIOUS THOUGHT
Americans remain
polarized not only by race, ethnicity and class, but also
by inclination or disinclination to serious thought. For most
of this dreary and unhappy country, any inclination toward
a “life of the mind” is still anathema. In irrefutable
evidence of this preference, trivial or debasing entertainments
remain America’s only expected compensation for enduring
a shallow national life of tedious obligation, financial exhaustion,
ill-protected health and premature death. This sizable portion
of the populace, kept “safely” distant from authentic
personal growth by almost every imaginable engineered obstacle,
desperately seeks residual compensations. For the most part,
these are revealed in abundantly silly slogans, promises of
status-bearing affiliations, or other manifestly deranging
promises of Trump Era political chicanery.
Even at this “post
Trump” eleventh hour, Americans must learn to understand
that no nation can be “first” that does not first
hold each individual “soul” sacred. At one time
in our collective history, shortly after American Transcendental
philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau,
a spirit of personal accomplishment actually earned high marks.
Then, young people especially, strove to rise interestingly,
not as the embarrassingly obedient servants of destructive
personal power and raw commerce, but as the proud owners of
a unique and personal Self.
Alas, today this
Self “lives” together with increasingly unbearable
material and biological ties. Whether individual Americans
would prefer to become more secular or more reverent, to grant
government more authority over their lives, or less, a willing
submission to multitudes remains this nation’s most
unifying national “religion.” Regarding the pied
piper in the Trump White House, many Americans came to accept
even the most patently preposterous presidential claims of
enhanced national security.
This from a president
who was himself the conspicuously servile marionette of his
Russian counterpart.
This from an American
president who came to resemble The Manchurian Candidate
on stilts and steroids.
Credo quia
absurdum, said the ancient philosopher: “I believe
because it is absurd.”
Upon returning
to Washington DC after the June 2018 Singapore Summit, President
Trump made the following statement: “Everybody can now
feel much safer than the day I took office. There is no longer
a nuclear threat from North Korea.” Prima facie,
it was a ridiculous assertion, one so blatantly foolish that
it ought to have raised incontestable “red flags”
wherever there still remained some residual scintilla of human
Reason.
Immediately.
But it’s
not just America that remains subject to dictates of anti-Reason.
Unseemly crowd-like sentiments like those of the Trump-era
have a long and diversified planetary history. We are, to
be fair, hardly the first people to surrender to crowds. The
contemporary crowd-man or woman is, in fact, a primitive and
universal being, one who has lazily “slipped back,”
in the words of Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’ Gasset,
“through the wings, on to the age-old stage of civilization.”
This grotesque
stage is not bare like the stages of a farce by Irish playwright
Samuel Beckett. On the contrary, this stage is littered with
the corpses of dead civilizations. What else ought to have
been expected of societies governed by the “horde,”
the “crowd,” the “mass?”
Indiscriminately,
the mass defiles all that is most gracious and promising in
any society. Charles Dickens, during his first visit to America,
observed portentously back in 1842:
