October 30, 2023
IT'S EMOTION, NOT THOUGHT:
A Failure to Communicate: Jeff Sharlet's new book is a stark and dispiriting dispatch from Trump country. (Matt Hanson, 30 Oct 2023, Quillette)
Sharlet is not the first writer to point out that Trump's followers support incoherent policy initiatives, offer incongruous facts and figures, and believe contradictory ideologies. Inconsistencies like these are legitimate points of criticism of course, but Sharlet cautions that using facts to challenge muddled premises and conclusions is only useful up to a point. You can't argue someone out of something they weren't argued into in the first place. Those trying to understand and explain the appeal of Trumpism, he writes, often miss that its social power flows downward from the exhilaration of spectacle and sensation."What I felt most, flowing around me," Sharlet notes after a 2016 Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio, "was something like happiness. A sense of freedom. Permission." When an elderly man near him snarks about having "dibs" on the first protestor and his wife rolls her eyes and beams ("Oh, Gene!"), Sharlet perceives what's between the lines: "The joy of punching, real or imagined, is the ideal of action, an inner feeling made incarnate." In Sharlet's view, Trump supporters "are not afraid of the full range of human emotion: not just the manufactured hope of a political rally but also the lust, the envy, the anger of our bluntest selves, transformed by a mighty plane and the man inside ... into something greater."
Or, as Hoffer put it:
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden...We join a mass movement to escape from individual responsibility, or, in the words of an ardent young Nazi, 'to be free from freedom.' It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 30, 2023 12:00 AM