Crisis Cult for the Death of the American Dream

A Post-Election Autopsy

Election Night 2020 was an X-ray into the soul of America, revealing much about who and where we are. Over seventy-three million Americans voted to re-elect Donald J. Trump, a sociopathic con-man who has lied constantly, beaten the drums of white supremacy, treated the Presidency a cash cow for his personal brand, gutted environmental regulations, waged war upon democracy itself, and led what may be the most tragically incompetent national pandemic response in the world. Nonetheless, our fellow citizens, neighbors, colleagues, family members, and friends voted to re-elect him for a second term. This collective madness reveals the deepest and darkest maladies afflicting life in the United States.

The MAGA Crisis Cult

It is true both that the United States of America is an empire in decline and that this reality is maddeningly complex. The economic shocks of 2008 and 2020 swept across our nation like giant scythes, sending tens of millions into unemployment, distress, and the avaricious private health insurance market. And yet most folks do not have a trenchant analysis of the global political economy. Frightened and confused, the masses yearn for a great leader to offer simple explanations and promise a renaissance of the American Dream. With the blissful exuberance of consumer culture, President Trump offers assurance that the future remains bright and that we are all still millionaires in waiting. ‘You have been ripped off,’ he tells us. ‘Liberals, leftists, women, Muslims, Blacks, immigrants, and other despised groups have taken your slice of the pie.’ Armed with the tools of digital mass communication, Trump has become the first great cult leader to speak daily and directly with the multitudes of subjects who have become trapped in his warped reality bubble.

Ignorance

Anti-intellectualism and anti-cosmopolitanism are deeply rooted in America’s cultural DNA. The Neoliberal Era of the past five decades has witnessed an assault upon public education and the project of creating an informed, critical citizenry. The entertainment and consumer industries have assiduously manufactured ignorance andinfantilized the intellect of the American public, whose politics have come to reflect the values of reality television rather than civic duty. Although Americans read rarely, what we do read is increasingly tailored by social media platforms to reinforce narrow tribal worldviews.

White Supremacy

White supremacy is another term for ‘divide-and-conquer’ that lives deep within the American cultural DNA. The sinking demographics — whites, Evangelicals, men, and all things MAGA — look perennially to hang their hats on white identity, which they falsely believe cannot be taken from them. Trump leads the party of white grievance, which basks in what W.E.B. Dubois called the psychological wages of whiteness — relatively preferential treatment by police, courts, employers, banks, etc. — and devotes much of its political energy to stymieing prospects of equal justice under law and policies that might contribute to the health and wellbeing of Black people.

In 2016, the majority of white women voted to elect an anti-feminist, misogynistic man who brags about sexually assaulting women and is credibly accused of more than a dozen rapes. In the 2020 election, Trump increased his share of white female voters who identify with their aggrieved husbands and kick down at those lower on the social ladder to preserve the relative privileges that white supremacy affords them.

Masculine Dishonor

American culture constructs masculinity in such a way that most men cannot possibly satisfy its requirements. Masculine honor requires that men live with dignity, which is achieved through public respect and the ability to take care of one’s family. Throughout the neoliberal era, a downward-spiraling job market has demeaned and degraded us. The quick-succession shocks of 2008 and 2020 hobbled millions accustomed to earning enough money to pay the bills, put dinner on the table, and engage occasionally in leisure. Honor thusly thwarted, men have sought to re-fortify themselves through gun culture, religious patriarchy, and puerile facsimiles of traditional masculinity that include refusal to wear a facemask during a pandemic. Crippled by his own masculine deficiencies, Trump has weaponized this dynamic to manipulate millions of piteous men who are prepared to harm or kill on his orders.

Neoliberalism = Egotism

Egotism is the defining quality of Neoliberalism. It is the antithesis of spirit. Egotism narrows our attention to the self and its interests, cutting us off from the wider world of beauty and fellowship. Egotism has perhaps never been more purely and publicly evidenced than in the figure of Donald Trump. Trump is purely transactional. He relates to others not as persons in any holistic sense, but rather as things to manipulate and dominate.

Asked to give reasons why they support this President, many cite the extra hundreds of dollars in their tax return or the lower rate of tax paid by their business, accepting these small pecuniary bonuses as acceptable compensation for the abdication of ethical and moral reasoning that Trump champions.

A term used to describe the ruling ideology of American society, Neoliberalism was first implemented at scale during the counter-revolution of the 1970’s and punctuated by Ronald Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers’ strike in 1981. Now highlighted by the U.S.’s failed response to the coronavirus pandemic, neoliberal ideology entails a view of human nature that is essentially private, competitive, and voracious in its appetites. Society, in this view, is nothing more than a collection of individuals pursuing their own private interests. Civic duty, social responsibility, and the common good are sentimental traps for suckers and losers.

Tribalism

According to the late media theorist, Marshall McLuhan, who back in the 1950’s coined phrases such as “the global village” and “the medium is the message,” we are re-tribalizing involuntarily in response to the revolution of digital communications technology. Whereas the age of print gave rise to individualism, we seem now to gravitate toward group-oriented identities and worldviews. Rather than expanding and diversifying our exposure to information as promised, social media platforms effectively enclose many of us into narrow information bubbles.

In the wild, primate societies nearing carrying capacity often cleave in two. Facing off against their counterparts on the other side of the new territorial border, alphas signal to their troops: ‘get behind me if you want to live.’ Standing on the losing side of two generations of class warfare, seeing the social safety net disintegrate, and watching whole parts of the country break off from the once-massive middle class ice sheet before melting into the vast sea of poverty and despair, a prison yard mentality has taken hold. American politics is a professional wrestling show, heel vs. face, the ‘real Americans’ vs. the ‘others’.

Failing to see that the show is a put-on but the violence is real, the President and his followers create community by inflicting cruelty upon their enemies. Similar to the images of southern whites cheering on public lynching and torture, Trump’s rallies (encouragement of violence against journalists), rhetoric (‘Mexicans are rapists,’ etc.), and policies (the Muslim ban, family separations, kids in cages, etc.) bind his people together.

Facing Our Demons

Although a majority of the electorate had good enough sense to vote to replace Trump with someone else, we are evidently a nation in deep trouble. Once the new President is installed, the Crisis Cult, Ignorance, White Supremacy, Masculine Dishonor, Egotism, and Tribalism will all remain. Together, these maladies have proven powerful enough to hijack rational thought, cripple public institutions, and incite murderous violence. There will be no silver bullet to cure these ailments, no light switch to flip and make it all go away. Our only path out of this predicament is to come to terms with the decline of our empire and imagine the changes that might allow us to deal intelligently with it:

· We can combat our ignorance by recognizing and challenging the entertainment and consumer industries that profit by infantilizing the popular intellect, and by committing ourselves to quality public education as indispensable to an informed and critical citizenry.

· Appreciating White Supremacy for the powerful ideology that it is, we might pry at it with the strategies and techniques that have been successfully developed to de-program cult members.

· Egotism may be the most intractable problem that we face. It can only be treated with love, compassion, and the evocation of wonder and awe.

· Together with these treatments, the tragedy of masculine dishonor requires the provision of productive outlets for masculine energies: plentiful and genuine opportunities for all men and women to earn their living and respect.

· Although tribalism may be our destiny, it need not lead to civil war. As our forebears have done in the past, we too can tame the markets that profit by stoking our divisions and hatreds.

Each of these maladies requires informed, dedicated work. We likely cannot successfully deal with any one until we begin to deal with them all.