Knocked Sideways: Thoughts on Trump's World 1

All is not well. It hasn't been well for a lot of people for a long time. My reaction is coming in two parts: one knocked sideways and oriented around others' reactions, and the second, forthcoming, that tries to take some more perspective.

How does someone, alone and part of particular communities, respond to Trump's presidency? My tentative answer is that it involves significant reflection and much more action. It requires urgent organizing and unhesitating solidarity. It needs white people to get in line behind and beside people who understood the risks and the history of hate that's now undeniable. This comes before any mulling over or hypothesizing.

Nevertheless, there are some emerging discourses of the whole phenomenon that require comment. 

First, unity-empathy discourses in general, and specifically ones that say Trump people are uniquely deserving of caring consideration, are seriously misdirected. The former are the same as saying "All Lives Matter". What could be a bit of banal humanism, or even benign in other circumstances, is actually a force for marginalization for the very people whose humanity is being dismissed.

As for calls for empathy Trump's voters, imagined as dispossessed white workers, I can't address this better than Jamelle Bouie: who cares what motivated them, they are enabling racism with violent designs. What significance is it that poor southerners supported segregation while maintaining fear of carpet bagging profiteers or Boers marginalized by Anglophile colonialists voted for apartheid? These are just examples of the fact of modern history that people with a little can do enormous harm to those with less. 

Furthermore, as Bouie points out, constructing Trump's support as economic distress, as Michael Moore and others do, ignores the discourses on which it's based. Trump's speeches aren't populist barn-burnings against inequality; they're digressive screeds punctuated by racist invective and obscure revenge fantasy. His supporters don't forgive his excesses; they refer reverently to his wealth and sophistication. 

Maybe some analysts are comfortable discarding what people say in favor of esoteric interpretations of "what's really going on", but I'm a religionist, and while I don't believe people's self image is all that they are, discourse matters, and I can't support an interpretation of it that's only false consciousness. I don't support the idea that "if only they knew", Trump's rich or poor voters would necessarily choose differently.

To listen carefully and critically interrogate one's own biases is an intellectual good, but it can't come at the expense of the political imperative to respond to oppression.

That brings me to the last response I take issue with, and it's not from an opportunist like Michael Moore. It's rather from Glenn Greenwald, who I think is almost always a needed voice in the media. He frames his response in terms of what could have been if only Democratic leaders had listened to him.

He cites Hillary Clinton's endorsement of Obama's security state and the destructive haphazardness he has favored in his war-making. He refers to the fact that she and the rest of the national Democratic party are not just accommodated to finance-capital but dependent on it. Then he imagines a Bernie Sanders like candidate of the True Left™ who would defeat these pernicious orthodoxies and beat Trump soundly. 

I don't dissent from his complaints about Clinton; they're my complaints. But to imagine our purified candidate, Bernie or not, who would have invigorated the voters' better angels is as much fantasy as the hopes that Trump will mature into a Washington change-maker. What voter does he imagine who's drawn to Trump but also worried about illegal surveillance and war-crimes? 

The problem here isn't the probity of his critique but his assumption that his formulas connect to some electorate out there we haven't seen evidence of.  This is because there really are questions we can't answer, with which I'll close with two.

First, there is the question of Trump's voters: just what would he have to do disillusion them? Given the success and vitality of alternatives to journalistic news, how would they know if it happened? Obviously I'm not suggesting everyone in the Trump camp lives in a social media bubble impervious to facts, but to say that their relationship with their leader is truly of the strongman kind not prefigured by the personality cults of Kennedy, or Reagan, or Obama.

The second question is about the silent near-majority of non-voters. I'm not asking this question to excoriate people whom elections have never meaningfully addressed. I don't think it's sufficient to say a principled stand against the system is what people are representing or that it's simply unqualified despair. What might be represented is a different sense of politics with different scopes and negotiations. Given what electoral politics has represented, this that's less known is owed new consideration.

Brutalists' Gold

There's no accounting for taste. But taste does have a particular potential in democratic society. Anyone can look down on anyone else. Those of us without very much can make any judgments we wish of what people do with a lot.

This is part of the appeal of the publicity that surrounded the Kennedys' Camelot, the '80s excess of Robin Leach, and the Real Housewives franchise today. If suddenly the audience had to a lot of money to deal with, we would have some propriety, some restraint and direction about what we did with it. We would have some sense that someone could see us like we see them, even if we are very unlikely to encounter such a change in fortune.

Part of the way many of us exorcise our horror and fascination at the phenomena presented by Donald Trump is through esthetic judgment. We're lucky that before he styled himself as the Mussolini of the outer boroughs, Trump attracted the scorn of discerning New York society for his irruptions on the Manhattan skyline. Tastemakers like Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen have published their torments and slights of Trump's vulgarity and ignorance for us to enjoy in a way where we can be discerning downlookers for just the space of an article. And I do enjoy it. I really do. But not without questions.

The questions I ask are about what work the kind of elitist-populist derision at the new, crass, and  un-rule-following does in a society in transition. Trump clearly thrives on the dynamic of envy and repugnance shown at his stuff, and now he's taking it to the political realm. But is that all there is?

My thinking about the politics of taste is anchored in a different society in transition: Vienna around the turn of the 20th century. Dramatic changes in urban space coincided with major esthetic disruptions. Josef Hoffmann was selling his spare and whimsical housewares and interiors to the upper bourgeoisie of the Ringstrasse. Vienna secession painters were staging a revolt against classical-imperial beauty and pious Christian humanism. The most historically-relevant reaction against this trend is of course its blatant antisemitism. The Nietszchean revulsion at degenerate art shaped the esthetic part of the fascist tradition Trump is nontrivially drawing on.

Obviously, we don't want a part of this in mocking the Trump's taste. Milan Kundera has contributed to an esthetics of the left that deals with the tension between resisting the imposition of kitsch while affirming the people (whatever that means). The well-known formulas of The Unbearable Lightness of Being center on the insight that authoritarian esthetics can't tolerate irony for its resistance to brute power. 

We can certainly criticize Trump's spaces like this. The people hanging around Trump Tower, the Roger Aileses, Rudy Giulianis, and Newts Gingrich, are too scared, too fawning, or too greedy to tell the would-be dear leader that the reason Versailles is a museum today is not one that flatters the French monarchy and that Putin's photo gallery does not read as self-assured masculinity. That basic irony is clearly lost in what Trump makes.

But in the present moment, isn't irony a power form of its own? Doesn't it characterize kinds of preciousness and privilege not far enough removed from Trump's to be wholly something else? So further, is there any use of trying to disentangle and reconnect moral and political thought from esthetic judgment?

If only in the Trumpian moment, I can think of two suggestions. The political world Trump is presenting has no qualities of welcoming or inspiration. It's wholly hostile and totally unreflective. There is neither a place to make a home or a challenge to live differently. Not in the gilt banality of his skyscrapers and country clubs or his racist reimagining of a past that was more modest and decent.

This is a long way from a whole esthetic philosophy, of the left or not, but I think that as much fun as we might have laughing at or laughing off the ugliness and imposition the Trumps of the world represent, it pays to attend to the reasons we feel and use. 

Different Classics

Though it was late for a lot of places, school has just started back up. Fall was in the air, the libraries and cafes were keeping regular hours again, and school was starting with promise of a new year and relief from the heat the summer. I was issued a stack of new paperback course books-some of them are free under some circumstances-and I headed to the first class in which I'm a writing intern. 

The address of the day: the anger of Achilles. The rage at the wounded honor Homer starts his poem is also an initiation rite in college: this is so often the first humanities lecture many students have. It's a fall ritual all its own. I remember mine. It comes when you first start college, and usually repeats in a few courses; it's a touchstone. From there, it's on to the book of Genesis, through Plato and so on.

Quite often, Homer comes at the beginning of the college experience.  Generations of professors and administrators have decided that humanities lessons on justice or rhetoric or cosmology best start out at the moment and within the tradition Homer represents. Why should this be? What gives the classics not just their staying power, but their right of priority in higher education? What is it about modern conceptions of the ancient eastern Mediterranean that makes them the building bases of what higher education is supposed to represent? And could a different reading encounter provide this? 

The reason to ask isn't a concern about Sophocles and Plato staying relevant, but asking if there can be a broader way of thinking about fundamentals of college education that can be "classical" in a different sense. To say that humanities learning has tended to privilege the European, the male, and the ancient- what Western empires said was the beginning and end of higher learning in recent centuries- is to understate things. However, more than only addressing ways that power and age have shaped the humanities, thinking about what priorities are and why can be helpful for people on any part in the breadth of that field. 

Two qualities of the classics stand out: their foundational quality and the way they can portray strange familiarities to Western readers.

The classics have a sense of foundation to commend them: everything from the Italian renaissance to the fake classicism of Washington, DC needs a ready key of interpretation, and so an educated American needs the classics. As true as this is, imagine a different sense of what could be a foundation and how. Why shouldn't every first-year seminar begin with the relationship that the Mecca has to Islamic thought? We could start with the way that al-Shāfiʿī refers to the qibla and the importance of the pilgrimage to Ibn al-ʿArabī.

Some Islamic traditions build on themselves neatly the way the Roman empire turned into the Latin West, producing the same kind of key to understanding a great depth of historical experience. This is of course also true for other putative "diversified classics": the Bhagavad Gita, the epic of Sundiata, the Analects. There are long-experienced life ways that take these fundamental elements and build on themselves to the present moment.

However, it is also the remove from the present moment- placing readers in a context with some common features but a very different moral life- that is part of the importance of the classics. In this, postcolonial literature can be classic. From curriculum-regulars like Chinua Achebe to Cheikh Hamidou Kane and Tayeb Saleh, readers can encounter two of the types of familiar alienation we demand from the classics in that these authors focus on societies very different from ours reconfiguring into ones we know if we have not seen it from the same perspective.

It seems to me part of the point of assigning the opening of the Iliad is to right away send young adults into a world with disturbingly alien values, or one where familiar value-vocabularies have disturbingly alien expression. Part of the pedagogical point in presenting the strangely familiar, in either the classics or in postcolonial literature, involves finding and negotiation terms, of observing different connections and disjunctures of ideas. A literature that disentangles the civilizing mission can serves this purpose of the classics in very different ways than the unfamiliar frames of Homer as met for the first time.

However, I'm not suggesting that looking at these alternatives accounts for the importance of classics in college. In large part, the way the curriculum imparts the classics is to reinforce the idea that Western universities' curation of the past has enduring relevance to the present. Those universities have very successfully sold their prestige and interpretative privileges worldwide, if only a quirky added feature to the promises of future earnings for their alums. 

This is not to suggest that classicists today or before deserve special critique for undeserved privilege. If anything, the barriers to more inclusive kinds of humanities owe more to orientalism and the provincialization of area studies than the designs of scholars who work with mostly Western sources. I mean to say the naming of particular sources and experiences as classic and their importance for initiating critical reading or other core college topics speaks to significant priorities in higher education. But those are not priorities that can only be served one way.