Why the Trumpian Grotesquery is Happening Now to America
Consumerism and our outpouring of narcissism
Why is the lurch towards Trumpian authoritarianism happening to the United States in the twenty-first century? What's the root of this grotesque affliction?
As with any social development, the causes are bound to be numerous and complex. For one thing, the Republican Party has been only nominally content with modern progressive norms since the civil rights revolution in the 1960s, and that resentment in turn is due to a split between northern and southern cultures in the US that led to the Civil War.
Moreover, the Democratic Party's retreat from progressive values in the 1990s, towards the political center of Clintonian triangulation forced the Republicans to distinguish their brand by driving themselves ever further rightward. The national unpopularity of conservatives' anti-modern policies, too, drove their representatives to cheat in elections (with gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the like), which means Republican politicians face few democratic tests of their merit, so they can indulge in explorations of conservative purity.
But there's also an underappreciated factor which has to do with Trump himself.
Consider some of the criteria the psychiatric DSM-5 uses to test for narcissistic personality disorder, criteria which obviously apply to Donald Trump:
- A grandiose sense of self-importance
- A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
- A belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions
- A need for excessive admiration
- A sense of entitlement
- Interpersonally exploitive behavior
- A lack of empathy
What's interesting here isn't that Trump suffers from this disorder. No, what's interesting is that Trump breaks this disorder's mold.
Consider the difference between your average narcissist and Trump. The average one may indeed have a grandiose sense of self-importance because he or she labours in obscurity. This narcissist may fantasize about being a rich, powerful celebrity, but few could boast that they're genuinely that important unless they've lost all touch with reality.
Trump's sense of his importance isn't inflated. He is rich and famous, and he was president of the United States.
What's the difference, then, between a deluded narcissist who exaggerates his or her specialness, and a narcissist who makes the fantasy a reality, who rules over millions in a political cult of personality?
We should be reminded here of the line from the Batman Begins movie: "If you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely…legend, Mr. Wayne."
Trump's a narcissist who's gone supernova. He's a narcissist who's succeeded in feeding his disorder the equivalent of ten thousand gallons of jet fuel. Trump's narcissism is fed by reality, not just by his fantasy. On the contrary, he's turned much of the world into his fantasy.
Trump, then, is a symbol, not just a man. Indeed, as a man, he's plainly a monster. But that's largely overlooked because of the relevance of Trump's symbolic content to the United States, and to the American-led global monoculture. After all, consumerism turns us all into petty narcissists.
Think of the myopia, for example, of the self-help movement. We want to help ourselves, which means we must think often about petty interests and problems. None of that's ethical or spiritually high-minded. The self-help movement, then, is the spillover from a flood of corporate marketing pitches, an astroturf culture that's good for big business. Capitalism thrives on greed and on the inflated sense of our importance as customers who deserve to satisfy all our desires.
Why do we buy so much stuff we don't need? It's not because we give it all to charity since if we thought so selflessly, we'd have repudiated runaway capitalism on moral and religious grounds. No, we keep the business world afloat with our conspicuous acts of consumption because we're proud of ourselves as individuals. After all, in the modern world that's powered by scientific skepticism and a secular humanistic ethos, we've solved many of our social problems and have progressed without any divine guidance.
We think humanistic pride is a virtue, not a sin. We aim to be self-confident because if we don't love ourselves, we think no one else should love us. And if we're proud of ourselves, we assume we deserve all that merchandise.
Even liberals and progressives who devour the self-help sophistry, or the ordinary consumers who focus on short-term gains rather than on the long-term environmental costs of the late-industrial way of life are implicitly drawn to the symbolic meaning of Trump's ascendancy.
Trump's the god of consumerism.
He's the epitome of capitalistic greed, the quintessence of consumerist myopia. We can pretend we're drawn to higher principles, but our actions speak louder than our words, and consumer society is well-represented by Trumpism.
That is why Trumpism is happening here and now to the US, and why similar authoritarian backlashes are happening across the neoliberal world, from Canada to Israel.
We want our consumer lifestyle to have spiritual merit, and Trump's a compelling figurehead for any such grandiose sense of entitlement. Even Trump's critics and enemies can't take their eyes off him because he's our raging unconscious come to dire life before our eyes. Our most self-destructive tendencies have materialized before us, the Jungian shadow of consumer greed and self-absorption darkening our doorstep.
Trump is us and we are Trump, Republicans and Democrats alike, Americans, Canadians, Australians, and Europeans — all who've made a Faustian bargain with capitalism.
Our yearnings for private gain are symbolized by Trump's dark miracle. We shine the cultural spotlight on the symbols that speak to our unconscious drivers, not just to our flimsy conceits. Trumpism is the mirror that reveals the decrepitude of consumer culture. He's the arch-narcissist that shows how far our petty collective narcissism can go.
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