Competing National Myths and the Presidency

I'm reading a flawed but interesting book, Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. The author tells us things we already know, but he does it in a simple and evocative way. So the book is worth reading for that reason alone. One thing the book has done for me is to focus my mind on the essential nature of understanding human behavior ie. that our lives and much of our reality is a construction of narrative and belief. And only some of the time (maybe very little of the time) is belief tethered to fact. Now, I don't usually like to use my blog space to discuss politics, but anyone who knows me personally also knows that on social media over the past four years I have posted almost exclusively about politics, namely one thing: the trump presidency. I have an academic background in political science and international affairs so concern about what a trump presidency might mean and the dangers it might pose was unavoidable (sidebar: In my social media posts I never capitalized the name trump, and never referred to him as 'president' because I considered his presidency to be fake, like him.) In my social media posts I tried not to play Monday morning psychologist, as so many have. Anyone who has seen trump speak for even five minutes could tell that he was an ignorant, petulant man-child, a narcissistic megalomaniac, utterly ill-suited for any position of authority, let alone the office of the President of the United States. Anyone who has followed even a smidgen of his career (on TV and in real estate) understood that he was nothing more than an attention-seeking loudmouth carnival barker and snake-oil salesman. Trump the person, the persona, interested me far less than the potential danger he posed once he took hold of the reins of power. But what interested me most was the nature of his support, what it said about individual supporters (some of whom are friends and family members) and what it said about America as a whole. 

One general comment that I will make about trump's presidency is that it turned out to be far more tragic than I could have imagined. There is a very strong chance that by the time he leaves office in January 2021 more than 400,000 Americans will have lost their lives to the Coronavirus. The majority of these deaths were preventable and trump is unquestionably responsible for most of them, not only through willful negligence, but by actively promoting the spread of illness through disinformation, through his campaign super-spreader events, and now through subversion of the presidential transition. In this respect, (not to mention the many other respects that I will not go into here) trump's presidency was criminal, and far worse than Nixon's. 

So what does Harari's book have to do with trump's presidency? It's helping me get my mind around the fact that in the 2020 election more than 70 million Americans voted for trump in spite of the country suffering Depression-era levels of unemployment in the throes of a pandemic that has claimed almost 250,000 American lives to date and which continues to rage out of control. As he said in 2016, trump almost literally 'shot someone on 5th Avenue and (didn't) lose a vote' but on a much bigger scale. In fact he gained votes from 2016. No, the pandemic is not to blame for his election loss. Most politicians around the world have actually benefited politically from their handling of the crisis, even politicians who substantially botched the job. I am convinced that were it not for his total incompetence and lack of common sense, trump would have been re-elected in a landslide. All he had to do was show a tiny modicum of leadership, responsibility and empathy for his fellow citizens, instead of acting like the pandemic didn't exist, or that a magical cure was just around the corner. But he was incapable of even that. And yet, we still have to confront the fact that a huge number of Americans continued to support him. What accounts for it? This question is critical for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that trump (or Jr.) may try to run again in 2024. How durable is his support?

To understand the answer to these questions, one need only look at the results of the election. They show a country deeply divided seemingly along geographic, demographic and racial lines. Red states versus blue states. The urban, racially-diverse, cosmopolitan, educated coastal states versus the white, rural, uneducated, puritan, central states. Yes this is an oversimplification. There are exceptions, for example the states that flipped in the industrial upper mid-west. But elements like education-level and race are very strong indicators of whether a person will support a Democrat or a Republican.  

However, I think it goes deeper, and this is where Harari's book provides insight. A country is a fictional entity, a constructed reality with a narrative at its core. Or maybe two competing narratives. Maybe the fault line splitting the United States is not really based on race, geography, education, or economics. Maybe it's actually the line separating one story of America from a different story of America that accounts for the split. On one side you have a story that says America is a place built by strong, rugged, hardworking, God-fearing Christians, salt-of-the-earth, fiercely independent individuals. It's a romantic story of nostalgia and tradition that sees freedom 'from' restriction, regulation as the main precondition for achieving personal ends, personal wealth, and happiness. It's a xenophobic, nativist, pastoral American story in which government is fundamentally mistrusted, a necessary evil. On the other side of the divide there's another story of an 'open' welcoming and outward-looking America built by immigrants and slaves who fled or were freed from tyranny and oppression. It's a story of America as a light unto nations, a beacon of social, political and economic refuge, where opportunity means that injustices and discrimination are addressed and corrected, and government, as the embodiment of these values and ideals, is a trusted force for good domestically and around the world. 

If you are a Republican you tend to adhere to the first story of America. If you are a Democrat you tend to adhere to the second. There is very little crossover, except one element: Both stories view America as a meritocracy, a place of opportunity, they just don't agree on how. From a purely political standpoint, demographics and the mere passage of time favors the second story and the Republicans know it, which is why more and more they seek to obstruct the democratic process. 

Competing stories of America explains why so many people seem to vote against their own economic self-interest. Why the poorest most at-risk citizens vote for a party that wants to cut affordable healthcare. Or why people who live in rural states that benefit from subsidies provided by the federal government vote for a party that espouses smaller government. Or why union members vote for a party that supports de-regulation. It's not because they are dumb, as many people said about trump supporters. It's because economics have little to do with it. Voting, as with most decisions that we take, is done viscerally, emotionally, based on narratives and meanings that resonate with us. We take decisions and then we conjure up reasons to justify them after the fact. And even more than this, as Harari's book points out, our stake is planted so deeply in our decisions once taken, so profoundly in the reality that we have chosen for ourselves, that we engage in all manner of intellectual and perceptual contortion, distortion and dishonesty just to avoid cognitive dissonance when inconvenient facts challenge them. Rather than change, we tend to double down. This might go a long way to explain why so many trump's supporters become steeped in outlandish conspiracy theories. It's been said that it's easier to fool people than to convince them they've been fooled.

So if we tend to double down, and trump got even more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, what changed? And why did Biden win this time? The main reason is that more people voted this time than last time. A lot more. And in particular more African Americans, more women, and more young people. More whites voted too, just not more than the other groups combined. Trump knew that if more people voted his electoral goose would be cooked. That's why he tried so hard to suppress the vote. Why he tried to sabotage the postal system. Why, even before a single vote was cast, he claimed that mail-in voting invited fraud, and 'everyone knows bad things happen in Philadelphia'.   

In tribal America with competing narratives, politics has become two hardened sides, us vs. them. But the two sides are like football teams with loyal fans who spend wads of cash on decking themselves out in team merchandise and otherwise have no particular reason to love their team, except that they just do and always have. In this election that dynamic became even more apparent when the Republicans didn't even bother to fashion a platform to run on. The messaging was whatever trump said on any given day. No principles, no policies, no plans, no values, just personal grievance. He was all about the merchandise, the symbols, waved the bible (a book he's never read) and the MAGA flags and wore the hats. He was helped by incumbency which is a powerful force. Americans want to see their president succeed, even a completely idiotic, indecent and incompetent president. They will give him marks, even undeserved ones. They believe that a president should serve 8 years. The political pendulum naturally swings that way. To screw that up you have to be a special kind of political imbecile. The fact that trump lost at all signifies how monumentally bad his campaign was. 

So politics is just storytelling, is that it? The president is the national storyteller in chief? Maybe it's more accurate to say that campaigning is storytelling. If trump could be elected, someone with no experience whatsoever in public service, no knowledge of government (except maybe to pay-off corrupt public officials to promote his real estate projects), it's clear that his supporters did not view his election as the equivalent of a job interview, which is in fact, what it is. You could argue that his supporters thought he was a good businessman and could run the government like a business. That might be true, but would merely demonstrate an ignorance about the nature and function of both government and business. And it would not answer why they still supported him even when it was revealed that he was a failure as a businessman (cognitive dissonance?). It's possible that Republicans supported trump because they wanted someone at the head of government who would in effect hollow out the government, render it ineffectual. But I think that would sell trump somewhat short. What trump was good at was telling a story. He understood how campaigning like a reality TV show was storytelling at its core. He was a more compelling storyteller than Hillary Clinton in 2016, there is no doubt about this. He was completely off his storytelling game in 2020. I believe that was the main difference this past election. Biden, by most measures, was an extremely weak candidate. But he stayed on message. 

The story of America is changing as the population shifts. Those shifts favor the Democrats. Trump's presidency may not have been the last act of a drama that has reached its denouement, but it's coming.