No one
in this world, so far as I know…has ever lost money by underestimating the
intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost
public office thereby. – H.L.
Mencken, 'Notes On Journalism,' Chicago
Tribune (19 September 1926)
On the eve of the November 8 election,
I posted a series of photographs of Donald Trump plying his misanthropic trade on
my Facebook accounts along with a comment in which I confidently asserted the
following:
This is not who America is. This is a distorted caricature
which draws its raw materials from America's Shadow. But in our haste to avoid
the implications of this Shadow, let us not demonize Mr. Trump. He is merely
exposing the seamy underside of American culture. Trump violates the rules by
speaking our unspoken secrets in public. He is not the problem. Trump is merely
the symptom. The real question is whether we are willing to deal with our
pathologies as a people. As of this election, we no longer have the luxury of
denial they exist.
In retrospect, I should have
been a bit more circumspect in my analysis and nuanced in my assertions. As it
turns out, my diagnosis was on target even as my confidence in how would Americans
would respond to it was not well placed.
Maybe Mencken had it right
after all.
The Shadow Comes Out to Play
While Facebook is rarely the
best place for critical reflections, it is the place where ideas can be readily
launched into the orbit of public consideration, as the many purveyors of false
news stories have already figured out. Indeed, a recent study by Stanford
researchers reveals that few of our Millennials appear able to tell the difference. But while hindsight is
always 20/20, my assessment on election eve was blind-sided by a new
development few predicted prior to the election – the birth of a phenomenon called
Trumpland composed largely of
America’s Shadow content.
Carl Jung and subsequent generations
of depth psychologists have taught us that there are no human beings who do not
create a Persona, a facade which we offer to others as the image of who we truly
are and who we want them to believe we are. To do so requires the suppression
of our worst aspects, our Shadow, and the emphasis of our most socially
acceptable characteristics. Think of Procrustes with his famous bed who cut off
the parts of its occupants which did not fit and stretched those who were too
short to fully cover it.
There are no human beings who
do not create Shadow content in the process of building their cherished facades
of Persona. Indeed, Jung often remarked that the brighter the Persona the
darker the Shadow.
While Shadow content is
usually repressed from consciousness in favor of the Persona - our best
qualities displayed for public consumption while serving as a façade to hide
our Shadows, our worst qualities whose existence we deny – Shadow content never actually
goes away. It is when the Shadow is denied and repressed into our
unconscious minds that it becomes the raw material for some of the worst kinds
of scapegoating through projection.
The 2016 election was a
textbook example.
A Poultice to Draw the Toxins to the
Surface
Like every good demagogue, Mr.
Trump served as a poultice for a toxic body politic. A poultice is an old folk
remedy in which a mass of plant material contained in a warm, moist rag is
placed on bruises, stings and infections to draw the poison to the surface and
out of the body.
Human history has had no
shortage of such moments when the toxins of the body politic have been drawn to
the surface through the skills of a competent demagogue and exploited for
political gain. Think the Daisy Girl ads run by LBJ. Think the Southern
Strategy of Richard Nixon. Think Reagan’s Welfare Queens in Cadillacs. Think Pappy
Bush’s Willie Horton. And now think about the flood of bogeymen used to
stimulate the fears of the baby souls of America this past election.
There is
a good reason that Trump has been so regularly compared to the demagogues of
the 1930s in Germany and Italy.
For the sake of fairness, we
must recognize that it is no more accurate to assert that the Shadow qualities
which Mr. Trump so consistently embodied and evoked from his followers are “who
America is” than to deny they are at least a part of who Americans have always
been. It is also fair to recognize that Mr. Trump's opponents evoked their own share of Shadow content from the electorate as a political strategy.
What distinguishes this
election is not that America’s Shadow played a major role. That has been a
constant in every American election since the beginning of the republic. Indeed,
it has played starring roles in every election since the Citizens United decision paved the way for unlimited dark moneys to
fund unlimited anonymous negative advertising.
What is different here is how this
election encouraged the Shadow to not only come out of hiding to be consciously
acknowledged, it invited Americans to actually celebrate the Shadow.
This ought to give all of us
pause for thought when we recognize that historically eruptions of the Shadow
like this often precede a descent into the demonic. Indeed, the analogies
generational cohort historians Strauss and Howe have drawn to this present Fourth
Turning include the Great Depression which preceded WWII and prior to
that the Dredd Scott decision era
which set the stage for America’s last Civil War.
But America has always been this way….
It is also important to note
that some observers of this election have actually applauded the owning of the
Shadow that rode a tide of racism, class resentment and patriarchy to victory.
The essential defining aspects in the rise of Trumpland were race, educational
attainment and authoritarian tendencies. Some observers were quick to suggest
these have always been the dividing lines in America.
America didn't die. It's having a reality check. The
Trickster came to town and upended the banquet table. He held up a mirror to
what was hidden. Now we must own it- all of it. The country built on native
genocide, racism and misogyny is getting a painfully good look at who we are.
We now have an opportunity to change that.
A blunter version of that
sentiment came from a writer self-identifying as Arab who offered the
following:
[W]e weren’t very excited about a Clinton victory. Nothing
would change. America would continue to think itself a progressive democracy
that voted in first a black man, and then a woman. The demon would continue to
wear a passable face, remain…presentable.
We do not think Trump is any better, but we think a Trump
victory would force the USA to admit to what it has become, and would allow
other countries around the world to react appropriately now that the cover has
been blown…
Face yourselves, see yourselves, and then maybe, maybe,
things will change…
Perhaps. I certainly
understand the sentiments. But I see two problems in these comments.
Reality Checks on American Ideals
The first problem is in the
premise that America was in complete denial of its Shadow prior to an election
that forced us to acknowledge it. That’s an arguable assertion at best.
The America I grew up loving
and which I have spent my life serving was defined by ideals which always served
as “reality check[s]” on its Shadow. It was a country that began with an
enormously idealistic assertion that “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…,” a
standard that has measured all of our clumsy, faltering attempts to actualize that
ideal since it was first articulated by Thomas Jefferson.
The disparity between the
ideal and the actual was always evident to me as a child when we pledged
allegiance to a flag which symbolized “liberty and justice for all” in a Central
Florida which segregated people by race in schools, restaurants and bus
stations. That disparity became particularly noticeable as we lived through the
excruciating process of dismantling America’s apartheid state. And I was hardly
the only one who noticed it.
As a lawyer, I was always
clear that America’s best qualities were summed up in provisions in its
Constitution which promised “equal protection under the law.” I took these
promises seriously. They elicited my best efforts as an attorney to ensure the impoverished
Americans under my care received the best legal representation they could get
even as they and I both knew the system was largely stacked in favor of the
powerful and the wealthy and almost always against them.
As a young instructor of
American Government at the community college where I first taught as an
adjunct 40 years ago, I made no pretensions about the level of perfection of the American
experiment in democracy. My students learned that while our ideals were sublime
and had served as the model for many experiments in democracy around the world,
our own attainment of them had always been a work in progress.
Such a democracy requires
constant critical self-reflection. It requires an educated, well-informed and
socially responsible electorate seeking the common good that Jefferson observed
to be the conditions precedent for a healthy democracy to survive. Even today
my classes always end with the question “Is democracy safe in your hands?” The
responses of my current group of students, many of them members of groups
targeted by the prejudices of Trumpland, were not terribly encouraging after
this election.
In the Shadow of the Eagle
I should hasten to add here
that I do not see my own life experience to be somehow normative for my fellow
Americans. It isn’t. But in my 63 years of life, I have run across enough
people of my homeland with more than a modicum of awareness of the Shadow cast
by the American eagle to say that while denial of that Shadow may be
widespread, it is hardly universal.
Clearly there have always been
uncritical thinkers who are unwilling or perhaps unable to distinguish critique
from condemnation. They tend to see any tear in the sheer, shimmering façade which
touts America as the world’s greatest nation to be cause for alarm. Those of us
who would dare lift the flap of the circus tent up to give the public a glimpse
often become the target for ad hominem attacks.
Such is the lot of the prophet
in every generation.
We have always had our
philistines who have operated out of simplistic mantras such as “My country,
right or wrong.” Ironically those who challenge the patriotism of critics with
this false dichotomy demonstrate their ignorance of the remainder of the actual
quote by Carl Schurz, an immigrant who was ultimately elected to the US Senate:
“…if right, to be kept right; and if
wrong, to be set right.”
But while this kind of
adolescent thinking has perhaps been the mainstay of much of the infotainment
that passes for news today and what many foreigners have experienced at the
hands of self-focused American tourists, it hardly represents the thinking of
most Americans.
Until now.
And herein lies my second
concern with this “reality check” argument.
Not only are these statements
premised in an assertion that America has not previously acknowledged its
shadow, an assertion which is at best only partially true, it also seems to
presume that now that the Shadow has come out to play, it will somehow prompt
the Americans to summon the critical self-reflection necessary to deal with these
cancers in the soul of our body politic.
What I fear is that the exact
opposite will occur. With this election, America’s Shadow definitely has come
out to play.
[Continued with Part III]
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Harry Scott Coverston
Orlando, Florida
frharry@cfl.rr.com
harry.coverston@knights.ucf.edu
If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.
Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.
For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
© Harry Coverston, 2016
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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