The Root of the Madness

[ecosophia]

It occurred to me yesterday, while mulling over various symptoms of our ongoing national nervous breakdown, that there's a very simple explanation for it all:  a very large number of people in our well-to-do classes have accepted the New Age notion that they create their own reality, and taken the next step -- the step that leads to madness -- and convinced themselves that they create everyone else's reality too. 

Do you remember, dear reader, the aftermath of Trump's election in 2016? A great many of his opponents immediately insisted that those who voted for him could only have been motivated by racism. I originally put that down to Democratic propaganda, but it was more than that. When I pointed out to people who were spouting that particular line that they were wrong, and offered them a good deal of evidence that they were wrong, they didn't argue or challenge the evidence or anything -- they just got a thousand-mile stare in their eyes and insisted again that the people who voted for Trump could only have been motivated by racism.  It was eerie. 

It took quite a while for me to realize that these people thought that they, not Trump voters, got to decide why Trump voters voted the way they did. The reality that Trump voters are human beings, with their own values, needs, concerns, and motives, simply didn't exist for these people. The bleak economic landscape created by policies that benefit our well-to-do classes didn't exist for them either, and articles that talked about that harsh reality -- here's a recent one, and here's another -- made no impression, because that wasn't the reality they chose to live in. 

I had another brush with that during the debate I had here on Dreamwidth with Michael M. Hughes, one of the leading figures in the soi-disant "Magic Resistance." One of the points I tried to make in that discussion was that the magical workings he was teaching people to do were bunny-slope stuff, inadequate for the purpose he had in mind. His response was to insist loudly that no, they were powerful magical rituals. At the time I was baffled, because they weren't; there are plenty of technical details that you put into a magical working to make it powerful, and his had none of those; furthermore, he was limiting himself to techniques that can be used by complete beginners, which again is a pretty fair demonstration that we're talking about the bunny slope. I realize now that he seriously thought that his workings were powerful because he said they were.

Take a look across the battered and smoking wasteland of our national consciousness and you'll see the same thing over and over again: a good many members of the comfortable classes have lost track of the fact that they don't get to decide what the universe will be. Violent rioters and arsonists are peaceful protesters, for example; why? Because we say they are, that's why. 

I was about to write the words "that way lies madness," but we're much too far along the curve for that. A significant fraction of the well-to-do in today's America have lost their last fingernail grip on reality and are insisting that the universe is whatever they want it to be. Since reality doesn't know or care in the least what they think about it, this will not end well. 

Comments

[ecosophia]

I considered that possibility, of course, but I really think something beyond ordinary bad faith, lying, and confusion is involved here. Ordinary bad faith and lying are goal-directed -- people use them to try to achieve something -- and ordinary confusion is usually amenable to the repeated impacts of reality, e.g., "Something must be wrong, I keep getting whacked upside the head."

The really odd thing about the state of mind I've discussed here is that it's so self-defeating. The Democrats could have neutralized Trump easily, and would be headed for a landslide victory this year; all they had to do is listen to the voters and figure out why so many people who voted for Obama in 2008 turned around and voted for Trump in 2016, and then craft an appeal to them. Instead, their behavior has been the single most important incentive driving people into Trump's arms. For four years now I've watched former liberals look at what the Democrats have been doing and decide that, as little as they like Trump, he's better than what the other side has to offer. "Vote Republican -- They've Got Their Problems But The Other Side Is Insane" is a sentiment I've been hearing over and over again.

The other point that I tried to make here, which I don't think you caught, is that the problem isn't party-based, it's class-based. Just at the moment, a very large sector of the well-to-do are backing the Democrats, because the Republicans no longer support what used to be the bipartisan consensus that benefited the middle class at the expense of the working class. I suspect working-class Democrats are much more in touch with what's actually happening.

[kevintaylorburgess]

"I considered that possibility, of course, but I really think something beyond ordinary bad faith, lying, and confusion is involved here. Ordinary bad faith and lying are goal-directed -- people use them to try to achieve something -- and ordinary confusion is usually amenable to the repeated impacts of reality, e.g., "Something must be wrong, I keep getting whacked upside the head.""

I've sometimes wondered if the privileged classes might want Trump to win for some reason. Of course they won't admit to it, even to themselves, but that just makes the output look all the more like it's the ravings of lunatics.

[(Anonymous)]

In that I’m entirely inclined to agree with you - though note that the “uncomfortable” classes are mostly politically disengaged!

If we think of America as composed of four classes - working (though frequently out-of-work) people, small property owners, credentialed professionals, and large property owners - the core of each party is the expression of the interests and outlook of a wing of one of the middle classes (conservatism for small property owners, liberalism for credentialed professionals,) with large property playing an ideologically flexible role to ensure its bread gets buttered no matter what. Each party also gets some votes from certain groups of ordinary workers (racial minorities, white Evangelicals) on the message that the other guy personally hates them, but without the promise of actually improving their condition.

When evaluating changes to these coalitions - and the changes are real and important (for instance the decline of organized labor, which was an important part of the Democratic coalition; collapse in church attendance among self-described evangelicals are currently doing strange things to the right) - it’s important to pay attention to the details rather than the showy exterior. Trump presents himself as a champion of the working man while his fellow billionaire, Mitt Romney, patently did not - but the people that voted for Trump were nearly an exact mirror of those who voted for Romney, except that there were more Romney voters. (No, really! It’s just that the Obama => Clinton dripped was greater.) So I think my major points of disagreement are:

1) The Democrats’ questions should be about voters who went from Obama to no one at least as much as those who went from Obama to Trump. (Some of this overlaps, some not.)
2) The Democrats are in fact on track to probably win in November. Of course we will see, but I’m not seeing macrodata (or even my own anecdata) that appreciable numbers of people are switching D=>R in response to Democrats being “too crazy” over baseline individual churn.
3) Trump has not broken with commitments that prioritize the middle over working classes. Tax policy, court appointments, and basic policy commitments all follow the basic bipartisan and/or Republican approach to these issues. Trump’s base is a middle class one. During the primary, however, he signaled a willingness to ally with the petit bourgeois base of the party over the bipartisan haute bourgeois on some issues (though note still how tax policy and judicial appointments are still friendly to a haute bourgeois agenda.) This, alongside a belief that he’s too erratic to manage the US empire, has caused a clear shift in support among the haute bourgeois towards the Democrats this and last cycle, who saw complaisant allies in Clinton and Biden.

As for the left of the Democratic Party, the Sanders wing, they did in fact mobilize a greater amount of working-class support in the primary than their rivals, and since I’m in that wing myself obviously I’d say that we have more of a grip on reality (but I would say that, wouldn’t I? Not very good evidence.) But note that this is also mostly a professional class phenomenon: it is the segment of the professional class that wants its primary alliance to be with workers rather than with the haute bourgeoisie. This would be a huge realignment, but by failing the primary we also failed the proof of concept that we could pull it off by mobilizing enough disaffected voters. Similar left-populist movements in the developed world (Podemos, Syriza, Corbyn’s Labour) also failed. So obviously we have our own strategic choices to review.

Sorry if this is overlong, or either obvious or obviously wrong, but I figured there wasn’t a tweet-length way to signal both my agreement and disagreement. (And I do think decreases in sanity levels do have something to do with how, yes, comfortable types of all ideological persuasions find themselves confined to literally tweet-length expressions.)

(When you get to the level of individuals this schema becomes useless, of course.)

[(Anonymous)]

One thing to keep in mind is that the workers usually have side businesses. Usually? Almost always. At least in the rural areas and the small city I live near.
You work at the gas station AND babysit your neighbor's kids while they sleep because she's on nights. Or cut a few cords of wood to sell. Or fix computers.
Or change folks' oil. If you don't have a small business right now, you have in the past and will again in the future. A couple hundred bucks from that business is the difference between just barely scraping by and some commercial luxuries in life for most of us.

BoysMom

[(Anonymous)]

"If you don't have a small business right now, you have in the past and will again in the future. A couple hundred bucks from that business is the difference between just barely scraping by and some commercial luxuries in life for most of us." - Agreed.

[(Anonymous)]

On reading this very thoughtful post I immediately thought of what you've been saying the past 5 or more years. I've shared it with numerous friends (Dems or leftward) with apparently not even a single glint of understanding, if they even read it: https://blog.usejournal.com/why-trump-is-likely-to-win-again-23e56ccff95b

One piece of this nut puzzle I can't place though, is how QAnon fits in, unless it's just what it appears to be becoming, a resurgent Evangelical end times cult currently being used for fun and profit by an assortment of characters like Bannon and alt-right 4chan mages and 🐸.

Waiting excitedly for The King in Orange.

[ecosophia]

QAnon has the sticky fingerprints of military intelligence all over it. The people who are behind it are using exactly the same M.O. that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) has been using for decades to lead UFO believers by the nose, so the Pentagon can continue to use "UFOs" as camouflage for the latest secret military aircraft tests. The Pentagon is one of Trump's major sources of support in Washington officialdom -- they're sick and tired of being used as errand boys by the State Department/CIA nexus that ran the show in the Obama years and backed Clinton --so my working guess is that some "retired" military intelligence personnel cooked up QAnon as a way of firming up Trump's support in certain demographics and spinning the collective dialogue on social media to their advantage.

[(Anonymous)]

That makes total sense, ughhhh. The precursor Anonymous (2011-2015 or so) from which QAnon replicated it's organizing strategies, was infested with informants from every 3-letter type agency on the planet. So intel groups were already in place in their forums and chat rooms. Using public IRCs to run ops didn't work out so well (because on the Internet some do have the means to determine if you are in fact a dog...) I guess analogous to posting magical workings on public sites where they can be easily messed with.

[(Anonymous)]

"Vote Republican -- They've Got Their Problems But The Other Side Is Insane" - The other side cares too much about pronouns to actually listen to poor people.