November 13th, 2016
11-13-2016What Comes After Denial? Thoughts on Donald Trump's Movement
[caption id="attachment_15795" align="alignleft" width="196"]
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Source: Amazon)[/caption] In writing about the evils of genocide and totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt insisted on the effort to understand. “To understand totalitarianism is not to condone anything, but to reconcile ourselves to a world in which such things are possible at all." Understanding means making our knowledge of totalitarianism meaningful. Understanding is a “strange enterprise,” and an “unending activity” by which we “come to terms with and reconcile ourselves to reality, that is, try to be at home in the world.” But why should we make totalitarianism meaningful? Why reconcile with evil? Arendt argues that by making totalitarianism “meaningful," understanding “prepare[s] a new resourcefulness of the human mind and heart.” In understanding, we take the other person's point of view. We don't abdicate our power to judge, but we do seek to make sense of that view, to see the world from its perspective. When I seek to understand I broaden my own view of the world and come to know my own view of the world as partial. This is why “Understanding is the specifically political way of thinking;" in understanding I take "the other fellow’s point of view!" and thus enter into political dialogue. The election of Donald Trump as President needs to be understood; we need to enter into a political dialogue with the people who are angry. We need to listen to them. Listening does not mean agreeing. We may find them wrong. But we need to listen and we need to reconcile ourselves to a world in which people who don't like Trump, who find what he says offensive and rude, would nevertheless take the risk in making him President because they are desperate to break up and destroy the corrupt system of power. My remarks here are an effort at such an understanding. Continue Reading Roger Berkowitz's essay "What Comes After Denial?" on Medium
Amour Mundi: On Love, Language, and Listening
"The unthinkable has happened. So we must ask, among other things, why was it unthinkable? How could we not see what was happening? In asking these difficult questions my thoughts keep wandering to Hannah Arendt. As the waves of grief begin to subside, there is an emergent and almost overwhelming feeling of moral responsibility. Time is necessary to think what has happened, but in the meantime we can call upon those voices that give us perspective in a time of collective loss and mourning. After 9/11 we reached for W.H. Auden, after this Presidential election we reach for Bertolt Brecht. We reach for those who Arendt wrote “keep the storehouse of memory” and create the words we live by. We need language so desperately right now—language, and listening, and a new collective imaginary." Continue Reading Samantha Hill's essay " Amour Mundi: Reflections on Love, Language, and Listening" on Medium
The Smug Style
Emmet Rensin argues that the main reason Donald Trump won is the "smug style" of liberals, elites, and democrats. A large part of the pro-Trump vote was driven by resentment. But it was not simply racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and xenophobic resentment as so many liberal elites are insisting. The most important resentment driving the Trump vote is a resentment of the pretentious and holier-than-thou derision that elites have for the rubes in the rural hinterlands. When Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters deplorables, and when she doubled down and said only half of them are deplorable, she not only lost the election. She expressed a basic bigotry that is now second-nature to many elites of both parties, but especially of the liberal elite. It is a bigoted prejudice that says that people who don't share their views on systematic racism, patriarchy, rape culture, open borders, and universal health care are dumb. The elite does not see this is a policy debate, but as a matter of the intelligent informed and good people of the coasts and the uneducated, stupid, racist, and deplorable people in the middle. Responses to the election that double down on this smug style and insist that the vote for Trump proves that people are racist and more will only further drive the justified resentment of the people. The first step in responding to the Trump victory is for liberal elites to examine their own illiberal prejudices. —RB
"There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for them.... The smug style is a psychological reaction to a profound shift in American political demography. Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent. The white working class in particular saw even sharper declines. Despite historic advantages with both poor and middle-class white voters, by 2012 Democrats possessed only a 2-point advantage among poor white voters. Among white voters making between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, the GOP has taken a 17-point lead." Suffice it to say, by the 1990s the better part of the working class wanted nothing to do with the word liberal. What remained of the American progressive elite was left to puzzle: What happened to our coalition? Why did they abandon us? What's the matter with Kansas? The smug style arose to answer these questions. It provided an answer so simple and so emotionally satisfying that its success was perhaps inevitable: the theory that conservatism, and particularly the kind embraced by those out there in the country, was not a political ideology at all. The trouble is that stupid hicks don't know what's good for them. They're getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that've made them so wrong. They don't know any better. That's why they're voting against their own self-interest. As anybody who has gone through a particularly nasty breakup knows, disdain cultivated in the aftermath of a divide quickly exceeds the original grievance. You lose somebody. You blame them. Soon, the blame is reason enough to keep them at a distance, the excuse to drive them even further away. Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy."Form more information visit: http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberalism