“Fox News and Breitbart have done to our parents what they said video games and Marilyn Manson would do to us.” -Internet meme
“It’s easy to fool people when they’re fooling themselves.” -Mysterio, Spider-Man: Far From Home
The phrase “reality-based community” was, tellingly, first meant as a pejorative. During the George W. Bush Administration, journalist Ron Suskind spoke to a Bush White House insider who said “guys like me [Suskind] were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ […] ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” This sort of attitude led to a backlash among liberal critics of Bush, who started calling each other “Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community.”
Of course the implication of such a comment is that the Bushie in question (assumed by many to be Karl Rove) was aligning himself against reality. But the Bush Administration were a sober council of sages compared to the Trump Administration and the “conservative” movement, which at this point is less a political party with a voter base and more a voter base with a political party. If they define themselves in opposition to their opponents, the modern Party of Trump are clearly proud members of the fantasy-based community. And I find it a bit ironic that many of these folks are older people who now get most of their information from AM radio and Fox News, and these are the same people who told me as a kid that listening to heavy metal and playing Dungeons & Dragons was going to destroy my sense of reality and ruin my life.
Even so, the other reason that ‘reality-based community’ is a pejorative is the secondary implication that people of a certain background are no more prepared for reality than the conservatives. You see this in the often hysterical reactions of liberals to the corruption of Trump government and their deliberate flouting of “rules” that were mostly created by liberals for the benefit of liberals. They see Trumpniks acting like they didn’t say what they just said and accuse them of “gaslighting” or attempting to destroy their own sense of reality. In truth, Trumpniks and other conservatives could care less about brainwashing liberals, because they could care less about liberals.
Only people who have access to the same information pool as everybody else but doubt the objectivity of reality have any reason to fear “gaslighting.” I have sometimes been accused of having the attitude “everyone else is an idiot except for me.” Well, the last few years of “gaslighting” from various sides have only made my self-concept stronger than ever. In some respects liberals are no more fond of objective reality than “conservatives,” it’s just that since they were in charge for so long, that their assumptions about reality were easier to take for granted, and their conflicts with reality are not as violent as those of conservatives. Or, Stephen Colbert was wrong when he said “reality has a liberal bias.” It’s not that reality has a liberal bias. It’s that conservatives have a bias against reality.
The human psychology needs fantasy. Fantasy expands our sense of the possible. And this is a major advantage that conservatives have over liberals. Liberal Democrats only operate in terms of the existing structure without seriously trying to change it. They’re the ones who keep saying, “politics is the art of the possible.” For conservative Republicans, politics is the art of the impossible: either forcing some idea that should not work or ought not to be tried (like a state abortion ban that defies Roe v. Wade) or simply preventing Democratic or bipartisan legislation that would have been possible before they made it impossible. Republicans don’t think in terms of the existing terrain. They seek to shape the terrain. They go beyond what is accepted, and don’t care if anyone says “that’s impossible” or “that’s evil.” The problem is that defying conventional wisdom means that you don’t care if your idea really IS impossible or impractical.
In some cases, fantasy is an expression of despair. It is an emotional assessment that reality is never going to get any better. According to studies after the 2016 election, 9.2% of people who had voted for Barack Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016. A lot of people, through no fault of their own, are not doing well in this improving but weak economy, essentially the same economy that they used to attack Obama but are now praising under Trump. They look at the world, in some cases through media that get a lot of hits from sensationalism and conflict, and see their country in decline and the things they took for granted slipping away. And they see Republicans doing nothing about this and some Democrats actively assisting this process. For them, reality is the enemy. Anybody who is “realist” is the enemy. They have given up on sensible politics and want the razzle-dazzle of grievance and revenge fantasy.
A certain element of hypocrisy is of course at the base of this but what we are seeing in the Trumpnik is a deeper and far more active commitment than simple hypocrisy. Most of our basic “beliefs” are simply a collection of learned behaviors and impressions that don’t necessarily go together, for example “I am a good Christian” and “I like big butts, and I cannot lie”. It is very easy for most of us to be hypocrites. But when one’s hypocrisy is pointed out, most of us respond by either changing outward behavior to correct one’s public image, or, perhaps unconsciously, change inner motivation to match one’s self-image. In the short term at least, the Trumpnik does neither. When confronted with evidence of his self contradiction, rather than change his position the Trumpnik carries on and refuses to acknowledge the contradiction.
Perhaps the primary example of this psychology in fiction is in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, when Winston Smith is brought in to be interrogated by O’Brien of the Inner Party.
“An oblong slip of newspaper had appeared between O’Brien’s fingers. For perhaps five seconds it was within the angle of Winston’s vision. It was a photograph, and there was no question of its identity. It was THE photograph. It was another copy of the photograph of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford at the party function in New York, which he had chanced upon eleven years ago and promptly destroyed. For only an instant it was before his eyes, then it was out of sight again. But he had seen it, unquestionably he had seen it! He made a desperate, agonizing effort to wrench the top half of his body free. It was impossible to move so much as a centimetre in any direction. For the moment he had even forgotten the dial. All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.
‘It exists!’ he cried.
‘No,’ said O’Brien.
He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.”
Orwell called this “doublethink.” Liberals call it “gaslighting.” I call it “trying to have it both ways.”
The genius of this is that the alternative-to-being-right are, within their own camp, far more efficient at brainwashing than Orwell’s Inner Party. For O’Brien to destroy Winston’s mind, he had to completely control his perceptions and subject him to prolonged torture. But Trumpniks, with access to the same reality and information as the rest of us, happily brainwash themselves.
This is how Ben Shapiro can (accurately) say that “facts don’t care about your feelings” and say this in service of a movement that is built around the motive “my feelings trump your facts.”
Another aspect of this psychology is what is commonly called tribalism. Ayn Rand:
“If men accept the notion that reason is not valid, what is to guide them and how are they to live?
Obviously, they will seek to join some group—any group—which claims the ability to lead them and to provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means. If men accept the notion that the individual is helpless, intellectually and morally, that he has no mind and no rights, that he is nothing, but the group is all, and his only moral significance lies in selfless service to the group—they will be pulled obediently to join a group. But which group? Well, if you believe that you have no mind and no moral value, you cannot have the confidence to make choices—so the only thing for you to do is to join an unchosen group, the group into which you were born, the group to which you were predestined to belong by the sovereign, omnipotent, omniscient power of your body chemistry.
This, of course, is racism. But if your group is small enough, it will not be called “racism”: it will be called “ethnicity.”
So, when Trump says that the judge in a civil case against him is necessarily biased because he’s (a US citizen) of Mexican heritage, this makes perfect sense to him; the idea that a judge has to review the facts in a case that may not favor Trump is less a reality than “Mexicans are necessarily bad.” For the Trump-rationalizing Christian, rather than the logic being “I am a good Christian because I believe X things”, the Trumpnik says “whatever things I believe are right BECAUSE I am a Good Christian.” The Party member can say “Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eastasia” one day and then “Oceania has ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia” the next day and back again the day after that because the point is loyalty to whatever the Party wants you to believe at the moment, not bourgeois legacies like “facts” and “reality.” The true believer resolves the threat of self-contradiction by remaining loyal to some greater good like God or Country or the Party, no matter what external contradictions present themselves as a consequence. The problem however is that the individual’s loyalty is still subjective, and the external contradictions still exist. When we talk about faith in God, which God are we talking about? And when we talk about faith in Trump… which Trump are we talking about?
I’d talked to one person on social media who said that she voted for Trump and was doing so again because he isn’t a Republican OR a Democrat. Which is in a way true. But try telling Republicans that. I have mentioned more than once that to understand Trumpism, you have to figure out how Trump can get the support of both David Duke and Sheldon Adelson. Duke is an arch-anti-Semite. Adelson is an arch-Zionist. They can’t both be right about Trump. Either Trump is lying to at least one of them, or, far more likely, they are both lying to themselves about what Trump really wants.
I remember back when Jon Stewart was still hosting The Daily Show, and wondering if President Obama was some kind of “Jedi Master” playing 3-D chess with his opponents and we couldn’t see the whole strategy. Well, as it turns out, Mitch McConnell is a lot better at strategy than Barack Obama. But Obama at least had enough intelligence that you could justify projecting him as a super-genius. To project Trump as a super-genius requires a lot more effort on your end.
And projection is what this is all about. To a given Trump supporter, Trump is just as much a blank slate for their aspirations as Obama was to liberals, only that much more so because the disconnect from reality is the whole point. Trump allows them to believe that Mexico will pay for the wall, or gravity makes things fall up, or 2 plus 2 is the square root of 13, and to say that these assertions are lies and fantasy is to miss the point, because to these cultists, who see reality as the enemy, Donald Trump is the living example that bullshit works. Donald Trump has proven his entire life that you can lie throughout your entire career, indeed, that your entire life can be a lie, and you can still get away with it and even prosper.
Republicans who are not necessarily true believers simply assume that Trump has some magic power to avoid social sanction, blanking out the point that they give him that power by rationalizing, and thereby tacitly approving, his actions. Trump doesn’t care that white nationalists explicitly endorse his agenda, because “a lot of people agree with me.” Presumably a lot of people who aren’t white nationalists.
I had mentioned a while back that if Trump announced tomorrow that he is a woman undergoing the process of transition, then every Republican in Congress would fight for a pair of garden shears to be the first one to castrate himself on the grounds that masculinity is now “gay.” I can say this because they have done the equivalent of such on a repeated basis. The latest twitstorm, where Trump told non-white American Congresswomen to “go back where you came from” is simply the latest example. We already see after just a few days that the storm is blowing over and Trump’s rating with Republicans is actually increased, because the respectable cloth-coat Republicans have gone to the floor to come up with more polite wording, to complain about the alleged anti-American and anti-Semitic positions of “progressive” Democrats, to say that Trump was referring to anti-Americanism in action rather than asserting that if you’re of a certain bloodline you can’t be American. It is an attempt to convince the outside world – but especially oneself – that we didn’t all see what we just saw.
I mean, up to a point, the more well-spoken Republicans had done a decent job in creating a distinction between Trump’s racism towards the Democrats and legitimate critique of their positions, but then when Republican spinmeister Kellyanne Conway was interviewed by reporters on the subject, she referred to the Democratic “Squad” as “the dark underbelly in this country” and when reporters asked which country the women were supposed to back to, she asked one of them, “what’s your ethnicity?” Oh, so now we’re playing “I’m not racist, I’m just questioning your worth on the basis of your ethnic origin.”
At this point to deny that Trump is a racist is to not only defy reality but to defy the English language. It is to assert that vowels are a Socialist plot and consonants are all Muslims out to destroy Christianity.
This is the issue with living on faith as opposed to facts. The argument is that faith allows us to tap into the universal values from some supernatural realm outside the subjectivity of human fashions and politics. But in practice faith itself is a subjective value, and the sacred texts are subject to interpretation, and sometimes that interpretation is called “crusade” or “jihad.” But at least the sacred texts exist as a matter of record. When the focus of your faith is a demented, elderly man-baby with the attention span of a fruit fly on meth, it becomes that much harder to find a stable value. If you wish for a leader who will “provide some sort of knowledge acquired by some sort of unspecified means”, then you would get more stable guidance as a henchman of Two-Face or the Joker. Rather than defending an eternal set of values and expecting their leader to conform to it, Republicans hold their Leader as the standard of value, which is consistent only in its negativity. And the practical consequence of that is that no matter how much Republicans claim to not be a stupid and racist party, their actions brand them as The Stupid and Racist Party, because that’s what Trump and his pack of jeering redcaps want, and without those people, Republicans won’t even have the shrinking voter base that they do now.
Which gets to one more aspect of living in the fantasy-based community. In abstract philosophical terms, Trumpniks seek to deny reality, but in practical terms what they want is to dodge responsibility.
Even this week, when the redcaps at a Trump rally chanted “Send her back!” at Ilhan Omar, they thought “that’s what Trump said!” And when Trump was called on it, he was like, “well, that wasn’t me, that’s what the crowd said!“
Trump in particular has coasted most of his life by threatening things without having to go all the way. He wants the benefits of a social arrangement without having to truly commit to it. Just ask his ex-wives. Why do you think he never has locked Hillary up? Because it would attract too much attention from people who would see he really did want to establish fascism in America. Like, Chuck Schumer might use harsh language or something.
The Trumpnik wants to assert that he can chant at the rallies without being a willing servant of evil. That one can align with a declared racist without being a racist, because after all, Hillary would have been worse. That he can align with a movement that wants to ghettoize women, dissidents and minorities without declaring his allegiance against his own friends who may be women, minorities or people who disagree with that movement.
Again, more sensible Republicans had played this “having it both ways” strategy in the past and it had worked to a point. The architects of the “Southern Strategy” may have been racists, or at least willing to use racism for political purposes (which may be even more cynical) but racism or white supremacy was not the be-all and end-all to them. Racism was a means to an end. The old conservatives aimed to control government to accomplish certain greater goals, like protecting this country from Russia.
Well, the redcaps like Russia, and prefer Putin’s society to contemporary America. Racism may have been a means to older conservatives, but to the Party of Trump, it is the end in itself. Older conservatives may have wanted government to enforce certain policies like fiscal conservatism, but to the Trumpnik, government exists only to inflict suffering on the people they hate. And in Trump, they have a dealer who gets high on his own supply. Because he craves attention and adulation even more than racism, he says the most evil and disgusting things in public because he knows it will get attention, and his movement, which is much less a political party than a fan club, eggs him on and responds in an even more evil and disgusting manner, knowing that this will get a rise from Trump’s enemies, who they see as their enemies. And in this hatred, they reinforce their own us-against-the-world romance.
But even if these guys got their Whites Only America (or an America where only white men had the franchise), climate change is parching the fields, threatening the coastal cities and causing “freak” storms to be less and less freakish and more and more common. Anthropogenic climate change is a fact, and it is exacerbated by the policies that Trump and his cronies want. You can’t wish that away, or use the magic power of government force to change the consensus and say that consensus dictates reality. The Russians had a government that declared that political consensus was reality. It got them Lysenko, pollution, declining birth rates and Chernobyl.
And even in “consensus reality” actions have consequences. You can’t retain the “soft power” of America as leader of the free world if you hate freedom at home, persecute asylum seekers and show in your foreign policy that your government under Trump is at best completely unreliable and at worst, Putin’s gimp. You can’t treat the queer community and non-whites the way the Nazis treated Jews and Slavs and not expect them to mobilize against you. You cannot align yourself with hate without provoking hate in return, any more than you can devour your cake and still have it in front of you. You cannot create some sort of Kantian distinction between the phenomenal realm of your morality as demonstrated in action and the noumenal realm of your self-assigned virtue and good intentions.
And that is because the rest of us are not living in a magical land of dogma and wishes. We are living in the real world of actions and results.
The longer this Tijuana Donkey Act of a presidency goes on, the more pathetically obvious it is that it continues only because the Republican Party wants it to, which means that the longer this goes on, the more they, not Trump, are the issue. Third-party voters, independents, and Socialists who align with the Democrats purely for practical reasons do not have the same illusions about the duopoly as establishment Democrats, but if they want to avoid becoming a “third” party themselves, those Democrats need to realize that the Republican Party has declared war on them and respond appropriately, if they want to retain their own power and privilege, which is of course all that they care about.
And if they don’t, we still have a largely non-partisan structure of judges and law enforcement agencies that is continuing to investigate not only Trump but some of his acquaintances. The “deep state” (which prior to Trump was simply ‘the state’) let these people indulge themselves because they were not really a threat to the system, but as they have continued to abuse the privilege more and more, more and more people are realizing how much of a threat they always were.
You cannot declare yourself to be at war with reality without reality striking back. You cannot say “the rules don’t apply to me” – or even worse, “your rules don’t apply to me, but my whims are law for you” – without abandoning reason and civilization. At that point all you have is force and fraud, and that boils down to who has the biggest gang. And the whole reason for “conservative” demographic fear is the inner realization that they are not the biggest gang, and have not been for a while. And if Republicans thought things were bad in 2018 when they lost the House, continuing to antagonize the rest of the country will make things that much harder for their Party in 2020 and for Donald Trump’s legal position whether he gets impeached or re-elected.
Of course, that’s the ultimate example of Trumpniks wanting it both ways. They want their boy to be Jesus, but you can’t really be Jesus until you’re crucified.