Why? Why has Trump, of all people, evoked such devotion from so many Americans who should know better? Why do so many decent Americans identify with a man who is so blatantly indecent? What's at stake for them? What part of their souls have they surrendered to him? Why is the prospect of a Biden presidency so horrifying for them? What explains it? Is it a kind of mass hysteria, like a bank run or stock market panic?
I've been writing here for years about my theory of "ontological dizziness". To summarize, people whose identities are rigidly embedded in traditional cultural meaning narratives are deeply shaken when those narratives are shaken. Do you remember that scene in The Matrix when Neo takes the pill and learns about the Desert of the Real, there's that moment of vertigo, and we all feel it with him. That's a metaphor for ontological dizziness–when we realize that our map of reality doesn't map, when what we accepted as real is revealed not to be.
But this kind of thing happens all the time in a society where technocapitalism is in a continuous process of subverting or "maps". The question is how you respond to the dizzying rate of change. Some adapt and move on, and those who are particularly callow and superficial do it with greater ease than those who are more deeply rooted. Others with deeper roots don't find it so easy. And so when the traditional narrative, the narrative that they were acculturated into, starts to crumble, they grab onto anything near at hand that will steady them and give them some relief from the vertigo they feel. Depending on the degree of vertigo, this inclines them in varying degrees to become vulnerable to the seductions of demagogues or cult leaders.
So clearly something like this is going on with the most devoted of Trump supporters, but I still come up hard against how unlikely it is that someone so fundamentally unattractive and oafishly crooked should be able to pull off this scam. What accounts for it?
If you were yourself unattractive and oafishly crooked, it would make sense that he would be your guy, and clearly many of his supporters fit that description. But so many are not that. They are honest, decent people in distress, and the extremity of their distress has put them into a state of soul that makes Trump into this mammoth transference object.
Jung's idea of the 'shadow' explains it best. The shadow for Jung is the part of our psyches that lives suppressed in the shadows as taboo. It's the part of us that our acculturation–or superego–defines as unacceptable behavior or attitudes. When we see others who behave in shadowy or taboo ways or express shadowy or taboo attitudes, we have powerful negative emotional responses to it. When they are people who have low social status, we unload our judgmental contempt on them, but when they are people who have high status, they give us permission to behave or express the taboo in ways we were ashamed to do before.
One is not truly an adult until one learns how to own his projections, but this is not something most people do because so much works against it. The churches, when they function in a healthy way, help people to do it. The scriptural admonition to remove the beam in one's own eye before the splinter in those we would judge is the basic precept. But hardly anyone does it, and Liberals are no better at it than Conservatives. But nobody–nobody–sees clearly if he has not found a way to own his negative and positive projections, because we otherwise demonize those who are not demons or put onto pedestals those that they really don't belong on them.
Trump is the Nation's shadow for a cultural superego that is defined in the mainstream media by the cosmopolitan Left. In its most extreme form, this superego is defined by the politically correct Hollywood or Silicon Valley Left, which is very much the superego of technocapitalism. There is something truly soul-deadening about any kind of priggish, moralistic thinking and judging, and the priggishness of the politically correct, technocapitalist Left is particularly noxious and soul-deadening. And the decent folks among Trump supporters see its deadliness and for good reason are outraged to be judged by such a callow standard.
And so if I'm a decent person who is a Trump supporter, whatever ambivalence I might feel about my vestigial racism or doubts about my religious beliefs or about any of the negative elements that have shaped my acculturation, it is blotted out in the fury I feel about being judged by these callow, moralistic, Liberal techno-idiots who have absolutely no idea about how impoverished their souls or shallow their judgments. How dare they judge me! I'm a good person, and they, despite their exalted image of themselves, really are not. If they are so wrong about me, they must be wrong about nearly everything. If the choice is our team or their team, I'm doubling down in support of mine. No room now for doubts or ambivalence.
Add to this that because of the "great sort" they probably never meet Liberals who are more kind and understanding than they are condescending and judgmental, and mostly they talk to others online or in coffee shops who share their outrage in being judged, it's understandable that they should want to double down.
All this was true before Trump. And whatever Trump might be, he is cunning in a kind of feral way. He smells opportunity, and I think when the story is fully told, we will learn of a man who ran for President to promote his brand while never expecting to get elected. But he learned after a few political rallies that he had tapped into this suppressed fury. To his surprise, he became the Shadow in Chief, the supreme transference object onto whom aggrieved traditionalists could project all their repressed emotion, including the racist complex that is the legacy of many of their ancestors. All that had become taboo since the 1960s, but that doesn't mean it's not lurking there in the shadows. And Trump, as the Nation's Big Daddy, has given huge swaths of the American public permission to bring all this repressed energy out into the open, and it's intoxicating for everyone.
Trump clearly was exalted by it, in fact it's the only thing about being a politician that he liked. He felt all this repressed emotion being directed toward him, and it energized him, and he quickly learned that this was something that he could work with in ways that other conventional politicians could not. He quickly realized that this was the biggest opportunity for the biggest con in American history. His power came from tapping into and stoking the darkest recesses of the American Shadow, and it is fitting that we should see it on full, unrepressed display January 6.
Because Trump plays this role as transference object for his followers, it's impossible for them to see the man for who he is. It's as Percy Sledge sings when a man loves a woman–
If she is bad, he can't see it
She can do no wrong
And turn his back on his best friend
If he puts her downWhen a man loves a woman
Spend his very last dime
And trying to hold on to what he needs
He'd give up all his comfortsAnd sleep out in the rain
If she said that's the way, it ought to be
When a man loves a woman
I think this is the only thing that explains the intensity of blind devotion that Trump receives from his supporters. If you're not in love, it's easy for you not to get it. Really? Him? And if someone you love is in love with someone bad, all you can do is hope that they snap out of it before it's too late. Because you know there's no talking them out of it.
Now some reading this essay might accuse me of demonizing Trump, and all I can say is that I believe that when we look back on him ten years from now, I am confident that while I might be wrong about some details the accumulated evidence will support my basic judgments about him now. I think I see him very clearly, but I am, of course, open to be proved wrong. Are you?
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