(Scott Audette/Reuters)
whyamericalost
4 additions to document , most recent over 8 years ago
| When | Why |
|---|---|
| Nov-13-16 | Original post from which the text in the article was extracted |
| Nov-13-16 | The Source for the original article. Best one of the bunch. |
| Nov-13-16 | Study that inspired the writer |
| Nov-13-16 | Overlay of data sets (death rate and voting rates) |
Added November 13, 2016 at 11:49am
by Terry Elliott
Title: Original post from which the text in the article was extracted
SDAY, NOVEMBER 09, 2016
Reflections on a Democracy in Crisis
Well, it’s finally over, and I think it’s fair to say I called it.
As I predicted back in January of this year, working class Americans—fed up with being treated by the Democratic Party as the one American minority that it’s okay to hate—delivered a stinging rebuke to the politics of business as usual.
To the shock and chagrin of the entire US political establishment, and to the tautly focused embarrassment of the pundits, pollsters, and pet intellectuals of the mainstream media, Donald Trump will be the forty-fifth president of the United States of America.
Like millions of other Americans, I took part in the pleasant civic ritual of the election.
My local polling place is in an elementary school on the edge of the poor part of town—the rundown multiracial neighborhood I’ve mentioned here before, where Trump signs blossomed early and often—and I went to vote, as I usually do, in early afternoon, when the lunch rush was over and the torrent of people voting on the way home from work hadn’t yet gotten under way.
Thus there was no line; I came in just as two elderly voters on the way out were comparing notes on local restaurants that give discounts to patrons who’ve got the “I Voted” sticker the polls here hand out when you’ve done your civic duty, and left maybe five minutes later as a bottle-blonde housewife was coming in to cast her vote.
Maryland had electronic voting for a while, but did the smart thing and went back to paper ballots this year, so I’m pretty sure my votes got counted the way I cast them.
Afterwards I walked home—it was cloudy but warm, as nice a November day as you could ask for—and got back to work on my current writing project.
It all made an interesting counterpoint to the nonstop shrieking that’s been emanating for months now from the media and, let’s be fair, from politicians, pundits, and a great many ordinary people all over the world as well.
I don’t see a lot of point just now in talking about what’s going to happen once the dust and the tumult settles, the privileged finish throwing their predictable tantrums, and the Trump administration settles into power in Washington DC.
There will be plenty of time for that later.
What I’d like to do here and now is talk about a couple of things that were highlighted by this election, and cast a useful light on the current state of US politics and the challenges that have to be faced as a troubled, beleaguered, and bitterly divided nation staggers on toward its next round of crises.
One of those things showed up with rare clarity in the way that many readers responded to my posts on the election.
All along, from my first post on the improbable rise of Donald Trump right up to last week’s pre-election wrapup, I tried to keep the discussion focused on issues: what policies each candidate could be expected to support once the next administration took office.
To my mind, at least, that’s the thing that matters most about an election.
Four or eight years from now, after all, the personality of the outgoing president is going to matter less than an average fart in a Category 5 hurricane.
The consequences of policy decisions made by the presidency over the next four years, on the other hand, will have implications that extend for years into the future.
Should the United States pursue a policy of confrontation with Russia in the Middle East, or should it work out a modus vivendi with the Russians to pursue the common goal of suppressing jihadi terrorism?
Should federal policy continue to encourage the offshoring of jobs and the importation of workers to drive down wages, or should it be changed to discourage these things?
These are important issues that will affect millions of lives in the United States and elsewhere, and there are other issues of similar importance on which the two candidates had significantly different positions.
Quite a few of the people who responded to those posts, though, displayed no interest in such mundane if important matters.
They only wanted to talk about their opinions about the personalities of the candidates: to insist that Clinton was a corrupt stooge, say or that Trump was a hatemongering fascist.
(It says something about American politics these days that rather more often than not, the people who did this were too busy slandering the character of the candidate they hated to say much about the one they planned to vote for.)
Outside the relatively sheltered waters of The Archdruid Report, in turn, that tendency went into overdrive; for much of the campaign, the only way you could tell the difference between the newspapers of record and the National Enquirer was by noting which candidates they supported, and allegedly serious websites were by and large even worse.
This wasn’t the fault of the candidates, as it happens.
Whatever else might be said for or against Hillary Clinton, she tried to avoid a campaign based on content-free sound bites like the one Barack Obama waged against her so cynically and successfully in 2008; the pages of her campaign website displayed a laundry list of things she said she wanted to do if she won the election.
While many voters will have had their disagreements with her proposals, she actually tried to talk about the issues, and that’s refreshingly responsible.
Trump, for that matter, devoted speech after speech to a range of highly specific policy proposals.
Yet nearly all the talk about both candidates, in and out of the media, focused not on their policy proposals but on their personalities—or rather on nastily distorted parodies of their personalities that defined them, more or less explicitly, as evil incarnate.
The Church of Satan, I’m told, has stated categorically that the Devil was not running in this year’s US presidential election, but you’d have a hard time telling that from the rhetoric on both sides.
The media certainly worked overtime to foster the fixation on personalities, but I suspect this is one of those cases where the media was simply reflecting something that was already present in the collective consciousness of our society.
All through the campaign I noticed, rather to my surprise, that it wasn’t just those who have nothing in their heads that a television or a website didn’t put there, who ignored the issues and fixated on personalities.
I long ago lost track of the number of usually thoughtful people I know who, over the course of the last year, ended up buying into every negative claim about whichever candidate they hated, without even going through the motions of checking the facts.
I also lost track months ago of the number of usually thoughtful people I know whose automatic response to an attempt to talk about the issues at stake in this election was to give me a blank look and go right back to ranting about the evilly evil evilness of whichever candidate they hated.
It seems to me that something has been forgotten here.
We didn’t have an election to choose a plaster saint, a new character on My Little Pony, or Miss (or Mister) Goody Two-Shoes 2016.
We had an election to choose the official who will head the executive branch of our federal government for the next four years.
I’ve read essays by people who know Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump personally, and claim that both of them are actually very pleasant people.
You know what?
I literally couldn’t care less.
I would be just as likely to vote for a surly misanthrope who loathes children, kicks puppies, and has deviant sexual cravings involving household appliances and mayonnaise, if that person supports the policies I want on the issues that matter to me.
It really is that simple.
I’d like to suggest, furthermore, that the fixation on personalities—or, again, malicious parodies of personalities—has played a huge role in making politics in the United States so savage, so divisive, and so intractably deadlocked on so many of the things that matter just now.
The issues I mentioned a few paragraphs back—US foreign policy toward a resurgent Russia, on the one hand, and US economic policy regarding the offshoring of jobs and the importation of foreign workers—are not only important, they’re issues about which reasonable disagreement is possible.
What’s more, they’re issues on which negotiation, compromise, and the working out of a mutually satisfactory modus vivendi between competing interests are also possible, at least in theory.
In practice?
Not while each side is insisting at the top of its lungs that the other side is led by a monster of depravity and supported only by people who hate everything good in the world.
I’d like to suggest that it’s exactly this replacement of reasoned politics with a pretty close equivalent of the Two Minutes Hate from Orwell’s 1984 that’s among the most important forces keeping this country from solving any of its problems or doing anything to brace itself for the looming crises ahead.
Thus I’d like to encourage all the citizens of my country to turn off the television and the internet for a few moments, take a few deep breaths, and think about the tone of the recent election, and to what extent they might have participated in the bipartisan culture of hatred that filled so much of it.
It might be worth pointing out that you’re not likely to convince other people to vote the way you think they ought to vote if you’re simultaneously berating them for being evilly evil with a double helping of evil sauce on the side, or sneering at them for being too ignorant to recognize that voting for your candidate really is in their best interests, or any of the other counterproductive habits that have taken the place of reasonable political discourse in today’s America.
The second point I noticed in the course of the election campaign connects to the one just discussed.
That’s the hard fact that the United States at this point in its history may still be a single republic, but it’s not a single nation—and it could be argued on reasonably solid grounds that it never has been.
Facile distinctions between “red” and “blue” states barely touch the complexity, much less the depth, of the divisions that separate the great urban centers from the rest of the country, and the different regions from one another.
I think it was Pauline Kael who, in the wake of Richard Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972, commented that she didn’t understand how Nixon could have won—after all, nobody she knew voted for him!
The same sentiment is currently being expressed in tones ranging from bewilderment and baffled rage from all corners of the affluent left and their hangers-on among the mainstream media’s well-paid punditry.
The 20% or so of Americans who have benefited from the jobless recovery of the last eight years, and the broader neoliberal economic agenda of the last four decades, very rarely leave the echo-chamber environments where they spend their days to find out what the rest of the country is thinking.
If they’d done so a bit more often in the last year, they would have watched Trump signs sprouting all over the stark landscapes of poverty that have spread so widely in the America they never see.
But of course the divisions run deeper than this, and considerably more ramified.
Compare the political, economic, and social policies that have the approval of people in Massachusetts, say, and those that have the approval of people in Oklahoma, and you’ll find next to no overlap.
This isn’t because the people of one state or the other are (insert your insult of choice here); it’s because they belong to different cultures, with incommensurable values, attitudes, and interests.
Attempts, well-meaning or otherwise, to impose the mores of either state on the other are guaranteed to result only in hostility and incomprehension—and such attempts have been all too common of late.
Ours is a very diverse country.
That may sound like a truism, but it has implications that aren’t usually taken into account.
A country with a great deal of cultural uniformity, with a broad consensus of shared values and attitudes, can afford to legislate that consensus on a national basis.
A country that doesn’t have that kind of uniformity, that lacks any consensus concerning values and attitudes, very quickly gets into serious trouble if it tries that sort of legislation.
If the divergence is serious enough, the only way that reliably allows different nations to function under a single government is a federal system—that is, a system that assigns the national government only those powers and duties that have to be handled on a nationwide basis, while leaving most other questions for local governments and individuals to settle for themselves.
My more historically literate readers will be aware that the United States used to have a federal system—that is, after all, why we still speak of “the federal government.”
Under the Constitution as originally written and interpreted, the people of each state had the right to run their own affairs pretty much as they saw fit, within certain very broad limits.
The federal government was assigned certain narrowly defined powers, and all other powers were, in the language of the Tenth Amendment, reserved to the states and the people.
Over the first century and a half of our national history, certain other powers were assigned to the federal government by constitutional amendment, sometimes with good results—the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws to all citizens, for example, and the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments’ extension of voting rights to black people and women respectively—and sometimes not—the Eighteenth Amendment’s prohibition of alcohol comes to mind here.
The basic federal structure remained intact.
Not until the aftermath of the Great Depression and the Second World War did the metastatic growth of the federal government begin in earnest, and so in due time did the various attempts to impose this or that set of moral values on the entire country by force of law.
Those attempts have not worked, and they’re not going to work.
I’m not sure how many people have noticed, though, that the election of Donald Trump was not merely a rebuke to the liberal left; it was also a defeat for the religious right.
It’s worth recalling that the evangelical wing of the Republican Party had its own favorites in the race for the GOP nomination, and Trump was emphatically not one of them.
It has not been a propitious autumn for the movements of left and right whose stock in trade is trying to force their own notion of virtue down the throats of the American people—and maybe, just maybe, that points to the way ahead.
It’s time to consider, I suggest, a renewal of the traditions of American federalism: a systematic devolution of power from the overinflated federal government to the states, and from the states to the people.
It’s time for people in Massachusetts to accept that they’re never going to be able to force people in Oklahoma to conform to their notions of moral goodness, and for the people of Oklahoma to accept the same thing about the people of Massachusetts; furthermore, it’s time for government at all levels to give up trying to impose cultural uniformity on the lively diversity of our republic’s many nations, and settle for their proper role of ensuring equal protection under the laws, and those other benefits that governments, by their nature, are best suited to provide for their citizens.
We need a new social compact under which all Americans agree to back away from the politics of personal vilification that dominated all sides in the election just over, let go of the supposed right to force everyone in the country to submit to any one set of social and moral views, and approach the issues that divide us with an eye toward compromise, negotiation, and mutual respect.
Most of the problems that face this country could be solved, or at least significantly ameliorated, if our efforts were guided by such a compact—and if that can be done, I suspect that a great many more of us will have the opportunity to experience one of the greatest benefits a political system can bestow: actual, honest-to-goodness liberty.
We’ll talk more about that in future posts.
Added November 13, 2016 at 12:35pm
by Terry Elliott
Title: The Source for the original article. Best one of the bunch.
When the maps run out
I have been thinking about the slipperiness of history, how it escapes our grasp. When we study a war in school, the first facts we learn are the last to be known to anyone who lived through it: when it was over and which side won. Those who do not remember the past may be condemned to repeat it, but hindsight is very nearly the opposite of memory. To remember is to be returned to a reality that was not yet inevitable, to recall the events which shaped our lives when they might still have gone otherwise. [The Dark Shapes Ahead, 2012]
The world is in flames and if you think it’s all the fault of those people — the uneducated, the bigoted — I urge you to think harder.
When the values of social liberalism got hitched to the mercilessness of neoliberalism, it kindled a resentment towards the former among the latter’s losers. The deal was summed up in Alan Wolfe’s formulation: ‘The right won the economic war, the left won the cultural war and the centre won the political war.’ He said that in 1999. It was under Bill Clinton’s presidency that the ‘centrist’ settlement between progressive cultural values and There Is No Alternative economics was consummated. Two decades on, that made Hilary Clinton the dream opponent for a candidate running on the fuel of resentment.
Here’s a stony truth to stomach: today, across the western countries, the culture war to defend the real social achievements of the past half century is grimly entangled with a class war against the losers of neoliberalism.
If we now lose many of the unfinished achievements of the struggles against racism, sexism and homophobia, the Clinton generation of politicians will share the responsibility.
I came home on Tuesday thinking Clinton was going to win, just like I came home in June thinking Britain was going to vote Remain.
It turns out you can spend the best part of a decade talking “collapsonomics”, writing about the dark shapes ahead and the unravelling of the world as we have known it, and still let yourself get lulled into believing the status quo will hold a little longer.
It helps that I voted Remain. I would have voted Hilary if they gave the rest of the world a vote.
Still, the day after the referendum, when everyone was sharing that chart that showed that Remain voters were better educated, it filled me with an anger that stopped me writing. Were so many of you really so blind to the link between education and privilege?
Back before I was that Dark Mountain guy, I worked as a local radio reporter in a city in the north of England. In the newsroom one day I saw a set of figures that are fixed in my memory: among 19 year olds with a home address in the leafy suburban southwest of that city, 62% were in higher education; on the council estates and terraced streets to the northeast, where my sister lives, the number was 12%. A kid from the right side of town was five times more likely to get to university than a kid from the wrong side of town. That’s when I got it: for all the other things it does, the major social function of higher education today is to put a meritocratic rubberstamp on the perpetuation of privilege.
All those posts pointing out that graduates voted Remain, they seemed to imply that the higher you climb the ladder of education, the further you can see, the better equipped you are to make important decisions. But there are truths that are seen more clearly from below. Which side of town would you imagine has a clearer picture of the link between education and privilege?
On Twitter right now, pundits who seem unhumbled by all the ways they didn’t see this coming throw around snapshots of exit polls to prove that this was or wasn’t about misogyny, racism, or a working class revolt.
Start with a different set of numbers.
Last September, the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton published a study that showed that the death rate for middle-aged white Americans had started rising back in 1999. For every other group in the population, the death rate continues to fall. Among middle-aged white Americans, it is those who left education earliest who are doing most of the dying. They are dying of suicides and overdoses, alcohol poisoning and liver disease. The number of deaths is on a par with the AIDS epidemic at its height, but the causes bring to mind another historical parallel, to Russia in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet this American fall has taken place uneventfully, almost unnoticed, even by the gatherers of statistics: by their own account, Case and Deaton stumbled on their findings by accident.
In March, after Super Tuesday, the Washington Post plotted the death data against the primary results. In eight out of nine states, they found a correlation: the counties where death rates for middle-aged whites were the highest were the counties where the vote for Trump was the strongest.
I don’t know how you can look at that and say that Trump’s election is only about racism and misogyny, that it is not also a consequence of something that has been going terribly wrong in the lives of those white Americans with the lowest cultural capital.
All year I’ve been watching sensible respectable well-paid commentators flailing to catch up with the collapse bloggers: these fringe thinkers off the internet, narrators of America’s long decline, people I’ve been reading (and occasionally publishing) for a decade or so, were the one group whose models of reality could handle what was happening.
John Michael Greer lives in the Rust Belt and writes The Archdruid Report, a blog that rolls out every Wednesday, a kind of midweek sermon on nature, culture and the future of industrial civilisation. He called the election for Trump back in January. He is an actual archdruid, as it happens — as well as an SF novelist, a freemason and a self-described ‘moderate Burkean conservative’.
In a series of posts this year, he sketched out a take on the long backstory to this election which goes something like this:
Politics is about how a society deals with the collision between the interests of different groups. The great contribution of the liberal tradition was to show that politics can also be about values — but the corruption of that comes at the point when values are used as a cover for interests.
The policies of globalisation, the deindustrialisation of the US economy and its increased reliance on illegal immigration as a source of cheap labour, were the result of political choices. These choices served the interests of those Americans with salaries and a higher education, while going against the interests of wage-workers. But instead of this collision of interests being negotiated within the political sphere, the results of these policies were presented as inevitable and universally desirable. In particular, any attempt to talk about whose interests were served by the role of illegal immigration was immediately derailed into an argument about values where anyone questioning immigration was accused of racism.
Trump’s campaign played on this in two ways. First, by deliberately outraging the socially liberal values which had become so entangled with the interests of the salariat, he could build a rapport with other parts of the electorate. Then, by focusing on immigration, jobs and protectionism, he gave those voters a sense that their interests might actually have found a political vehicle.
The danger of this kind of analysis is that it downplays the uglier forces on which Candidate Trump fed for his success, the forces which President Trump will embody. But it gives you a sense of how the election can have looked in the Rust Belt towns, to the low income white Obama voters who swung to Trump, in the places where all that dying is going on.
More than anyone else I’ve read this week, Greer seems persuaded that the dangers of a Trump presidency have been overstated. It’s possible to hope that he is right, I suppose — and, meanwhile, to assume that he is wrong and prepare accordingly.
The blogger who goes by Anne Tagonist (or sometimes Anne Amnesia) is less sanguine. ‘What Trump’s boys have for me is a noose,’ she wrote, back in May, ‘but that’s the choice I’m facing, a lifetime of gruelling poverty, or apocalypse.’
Yeah I know, not fun and games — the shouts, the smashing glass, the headlights on the lawn, but what am I supposed to do, raise my kid to stay one step ahead of the inspectors and don’t, for the love of god, don’t ever miss a payment on your speeding ticket? A noose is something I know how to fight. A hole in the frame of my car is not. A lifetime of feeling that sense, that “ohhhh, shiiiiiit…” of recognition that another year will go by without any major change in the way of things, little misfortunes upon misfortunes… a lifetime of paying a grand a month to the same financial industry busily padding the 401k plans of cyclists in spandex, who declare a new era of prosperity in America? Who can find clarity, a sense of self, any kind of redemption in that world?’
When I interviewed Anne for the last Dark Mountain book, I learned a little more about her background in zine writing and travelling and roads protests, working as a street medic, then on ambulances, and from there to medical school and research. She doesn’t write so often, but when she does, what I appreciate is her willingness to puzzle through a question, to include her uncertainties, rather than making a neatly rounded argument.
And that post in May was scorching. It starts with the Case-Deaton death rate study, but seen through the eyes of someone living in one of those counties, someone who has been sitting in with the Medical Examiner:
A typical day would include three overdoses, one infant suffocated by an intoxicated parent sleeping on top of them, one suicide, and one other autopsy that could be anything from a tree-felling accident to a car wreck (this distribution reflects that not all bodies are autopsied, obviously.) You start to long for the car wrecks…
Unlike the AIDS crisis, there’s no sense of oppressive doom over everyone. There is no overdose-death art. There are no musicals. There’s no community, rising up in anger, demanding someone bear witness to their grief. There’s no sympathy at all. The term of art in my part of the world is “dirtybutts.” Who cares? Let the dirtybutts die.
You know, I could just repost every other paragraph of that piece here, but really you should go read the whole thing.
From where I live, the world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that.
Is this OK, I wonder, just bombarding you with a reader’s digest of the apocalypse?
It’s not the apocalypse, of course, it’s just history, but if you thought the shape of history was meant to be an upward curve of progress, then this feels like the apocalypse.
Midway through the night, when the New York Times projection had slipped from Likely to Leaning to Tossup, as I broke open the whisky and let rip on Twitter, my friend Chris T-T replied, ‘I love that your reaction to fear is a splurge of analysis.’
There’s a rawness in the aftermath of nights like that, a sense that the callused outer skins of our grown-up selves have been ripped off. For a day or two, maybe longer, we can feel things with the intensity of children again. (Or as someone in my timeline wrote, ‘The OH FUCK! comes in waves.’ )
It reminds me of the conversations that sometimes happen in the last days of a life, or on the evening of a funeral. In the underworld of loss, we don’t get to bring our achieved identities with us, so there’s a chance of getting real.
The morning after last year’s unexpected Conservative election victory in the UK, I wrote some notes on how to make sense of the loss. As political bereavements go, it looks quaint now by comparison — don’t you feel nostalgic for when the worst thing that could happen was waking up to find David Cameron was still prime minister? But one thing from that post sticks out, the part where I was building on a line from the mythographer and storyteller Martin Shaw: ‘This isn’t a hero time, this isn’t a goddess time: it’s a trickster time.’
When people like John Berger (one of my heroes) were young, it was a real thing to believe in the heroic revolution that Marx had seemed to promise. Today, the only kind of revolution that is plausible is a foolish one, one where we accidentally stumble into another way of being human together, making a living and making life work. (And whatever that might look like, it doesn’t look like utopia.)
I wrote that thinking of the weird cameo role that Russell Brand had been playing in British politics: not thinking of him as a candidate to lead a trickster revolution, only as a clue to the motley in which change would need to come in a time like this.
I’m pretty certain it was Ran Prieur, another of the collapse bloggers, who put me onto the idea of Trump as trickster, but the best treatment of that thought I’ve found is Corey Pein writing for the Baffler.
He starts with the story of Allen Dulles, later the director of the CIA, who recruited Carl Jung as an agent during World War II to provide insights on the psyche of Hitler and the German public. ‘Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the Allied cause during the war,’ Dulles wrote afterwards. We do know that, in an essay in 1936, Jung had written, ‘the unfathomable depths of Wotan’s character explain more of National Socialism than all [proposed] reasonable factors put together.’ (As Pein goes to some lengths to acknowledge, such thoughts are quite a stretch for the early 21st century western imagination: if you’re struggling, try telling yourself, ‘Obviously Jungian archetypes are just metaphors,’ and then remove the ‘just’ from that statement.) If Wotan could be awoken in the collective psyche of a nation, Jung added, then ‘other veiled gods may be sleeping elsewhere.’ Which is how Pein comes to Trump:
Just as Hitler was not known to crack wise from the podium, Trump’s stump speeches do not call to mind ‘storm and frenzy.’ Trump is no Wotan, no berserker — he is a wisecracker, adept in the cool medium of television. He represents an entirely different Jungian archetype — namely, the pan-cultural mythological figure of ‘the trickster,’ who arrives at moments of uncertainty to bring change, often of the bad kind.
Pein is being a little unfair on the trickster here, I think. Lewis Hyde gives a subtler account in his marvellous book, Trickster Makes This World. He identifies trickster as a low status character within the local pantheon of a culture, a mischievous messenger boy, a nuisance under normal circumstances, but who takes on an altogether more important role in moments of deep cultural crisis: when those who hold high status within the existing order of things are helpless, trickster can shift the axis, find the hidden joke that allows the culture to pass through into a new version of itself.
If you’ll grant that such uncivilised ways of thinking could help us make sense of political events, I’ll tell you that Donald Trump is a shadowy parody of a trickster. That takes me to something the poet Nina Pick says in a conversation in the latest Dark Mountain:
We’ve lost the power of metaphor. You can see it in American politics at the moment for example; there’s a deficit of imagination, of the imaginal life, of myth… and without that level of myth and of metaphor I think we start to get lost as a culture.
When we lose sight of myth and metaphor, we don’t leave it behind, we just become unaware of the ways in which it is still at work in our culture.
Or, as Martin Shaw, who set me thinking about all this, would put it:
The stories that we are being fed now are not myths. They are what I would call, toxic mimics. But when we are deprived of the real thing, we will take even an echo and grab on to it. So in other words, the most horrible lies always have a little bit of truth in them.
So there you have it, that’s my hot take: Donald Trump is a toxic mimic of Loki.
At this point, there are a couple more things we need to talk about, before I try and leave you with some blessing for the dark times that are gathering around us.
There’s something more to say about the work that lies ahead, if it’s seriously the case that we are in territory where archdruids and zine writers and collapse bloggers and mythtellers are the ones who still have maps that seem to make sense.
If there is any meaning left in a word like fascism, then let’s call Trump a fascist.
Heck, even John Michael Greer’s first take on the Donald’s campaign, back in the summer of 2015, was that it ‘is shaping up to be the loudest invocation of pure uninhibited führerprinzip since, oh, 1933 or so.’
But it’s worth lingering over that ‘if’… Words like ‘fascist’ are mostly used these days as a stop to thinking, a shorthand that saves us the work of knowing our enemy.
Anthony Barnett walked this line in an essay for Open Democracy, the night before the election:
It is essential to be able to distinguish between different kinds of evil and judge them accordingly… As a rule, therefore, never talk about ‘fascism’ or ‘Stalinism’ in political or polemical writing… They are used to mobilise an attitude that pre-empts scrutiny. And even interest. If something is fascist we should be able to ask what kind it is and how bad it might be, but the concentration camps make such an approach taboo.
‘For the first time,’ he goes on, ‘I break the rule.’
And if the hesitation adds force to his doing so, it also leaves room for a qualification. Trump is a fascist, Barnett writes, but unlike Hitler, he does not have financiers, storm-troopers or an organised movement. What he now has is the office of President of the United States and a seemingly compliant legislature.
Another line of caution about the Hitler comparison comes from another of Anne Tagonist’s essays — written just after Super Tuesday, when she was already taking the likelihood of a Trump presidency seriously — in a genre she calls ‘clumsy writings about why history doesn’t work the way you think it does.’
The systematic study of mass behaviour, she points out, is largely a post-World War II phenomenon.
In 1945, Germany was in ruins, the world had entered the atomic age and the cold war, Americans were starting to realize exactly how many civilians had been exterminated in “labour” camps, and yet no consensus narrative had emerged how such an unthinkable sequence of events could have happened… The Third Reich was a very good reason to go out and learn more about how humans behaved in groups.
And so, with the contributions of Adorno, Arendt, Milgram and others, within twenty years, an intellectual consensus emerged about how Nazism had come about, how it had achieved such adoration and power, and how it enlisted so many Germans in the systematic perpetration of horrors.
We had a system custom-built to explain the Nazis, that explained the Nazis. A side effect is that now, every large-scale bad social movement looks a bit like the Nazis.
Remember, she is not making this argument to tell us there’s no need to worry, this is Anne who also wrote that ‘What Trump’s boys have for me is a noose.’ What she is getting at is the danger of readying ourselves to fight the last war. Literally.
Actual historians don’t tend to think history repeats itself, or if they do, they find celebrated yet incomplete examples that don’t assume the world began a century ago and only one bad thing every happened in it.
But OK, let’s say that this is our January 1933.
We don’t know the shape of the war that could be coming, nor how that war will end, and not only because we cannot see the future, but because it hasn’t happened yet: there is still more than one way all this could play out, though the possibilities likely range from bad to worse.
Among the things that might be worth doing is to read some books from Germany in the 1920s and 30s, to get a better understanding of what Nazism looked like, before anyone could say for sure how the story would end.
Another thought, from that post I quoted at the start, written four years ago, on a journey I made in search of cultural resilience:
If someone were to ask me what kind of cause is sufficient to live for in dark times, the best answer I could give would be: to take responsibility for the survival of something that matters deeply. Whatever that is, your best action might then be to get it out of harm’s way, or to put yourself in harm’s way on its behalf, or anything else your sense of responsibility tells you.
Some of those actions will be loud and public, others quiet, invisible, never to be known. They are beginning already. And though it is not the bravest form of action, and often takes place far from the frontline, I believe the work of sense-making is among the actions that are called for.
I notice that there is a part of me that would like not to be serious, that would like it to be secretly a bluff, a puffing of the ego, when I say that it feels like there’s a new responsibility landing on the ragtag of thinkers and tinkers and storytellers at the edges, one edge of which I have been part of over these last years. And for sure, this is only one map I’ve been sketching, others will have their own that may or may not overlap.
But the way it looks from here tonight, the people who are meant to know how the world works are out of map, shown to be lost in a way that has not been seen in my lifetime, not in countries like these.
I am thinking of one of the smartest, most thoughtful commentators on the events of this year, whose analyses have helped many of us make sense of what Brexit might mean, the director of the Political Economy Research Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London, Will Davies. In an article for the Washington Post, a week after the referendum, he drew the parallel to the Republican primaries. He too had picked up on the Case-Deaton white death study and the correlation between mortality rates and Trump support.
‘Could it be that, as with the British movement to leave the EU, Trump is channelling a more primal form of despair?’ he asks. But as the article approaches a conclusion, the despair seems to have spread to its author. ‘When a sizeable group of voters has given up on the future altogether… how does a reasonable politician present themselves?’
All of this represents an almost impossible challenge for campaign managers, pollsters and political scientists. The need for candidates to seem ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ is as old as television. Now it seems that they also need to give voice to the private despair of voters for whom collective progress appears a thing of the past. Where no politician is deemed ‘trustworthy,’ many voters are drawn toward the politician who makes no credible pledges in the first place. Of course government policy can continue to help people, and even to restore some sense of collective progress. But for large swaths of British and American society, it seems best not to state as much.
As I read them, these are the words of a person who is running out of map, though one who gets closer than many to seeing how deeply the future is broken, how far the sense of collective progress is gone.
While the victorious political centre of the Clinton and Blair era has gone on insisting that everything is getting better and better, some of the smartest thinkers on the left have recognised the breakdown of the future and responded by setting out to reboot it, to recover the kind of faith in collective progress that made possible the achievements of the better moments of the twentieth century.
If their attempts have struggled to gain traction, one reason may be that the left is better at recognising the economic aspects of what has gone wrong than the cultural aspects, which it tends to ignore or bracket under bigotry. There are great forces of bigotry at work in the world, they will have taken great encouragement from Trump’s election and they need to be fought, as they have been by anti-fascist organising in working class communities, again and again. As a teenager in the northeast of England, my first activism was going out on the streets against the British National Party with Youth Against Racism in Europe. Still, without pretending that they can be neatly disentangled, there are other aspects of what has gone wrong that belong under the heading of culture, besides racism and xenophobia.
In the places where it happens, economic crisis feeds a crisis of meaning, spiralling down into one another, and if we can only see the parts that can be measured, we will miss the depth of what is happening until it shows up as suicide and overdose figures.
Without a grip on this, the left has struggled to give voice to those for whom talk of progress today sounds like a bad joke. And yeah, maybe Bernie could have done it — he’d surely have been a wiser choice for the Democrats this year — but the thing is, we’ll never know. Meanwhile, across the western countries, too often, the only voices that sound like they get the anger, disillusionment and despair belong to those who seek to harness such feelings to a politics of hatred.
This is where I intend to put a good part of my energy in the next while, to the question of what it means if the future is not coming back. How do we disentangle our thinking and our hopes from the cultural logic of progress? For that logic does not have enough room for loss, nor for the kind of deep rethinking that is called for when a culture is in crisis. But that is another story, and a longer one even than this text has become, and I must get up in a few hours’ time to go talk about that story with a conference full of hackers.
On Wednesday morning, the snow was falling hard. Before I finally got to bed, I had given my son breakfast and taken him to kindergarten, pushing his buggy through the snowstorm. Last time we had snow, he was still a baby wrapped inside a pram: now he is fifteen months and discovering everything. After dinner that night, he danced with me and we laughed together like fools.
I want to say that this is also history, though it doesn’t get written down so much: the small joys and gentlenesses, the fragments of peace, time spent caring for our children, or our parents, or our neighbours. These tasks alone are not enough to hold off the darkness, but they are one of the places where we start, one of the models for what it means to take responsibility for the survival of things that matter deeply.
Fifteen months and every day now he is playing with new words in his mouth. I can see the time coming when the words become sentences and questions, when he starts to want the world explained to him.
‘How can I get through it?’ a friend asked.
This was earlier that morning, before the snowstorm.
‘We’ll get through because we have to,’ I wrote, ‘the way we always have, one foot in front of another. Hold those you love tight. Be kind to strangers.’
‘I’m really not looking forward to telling my kid he lives in President Trump’s country,’ another friend wrote.
‘Our kids are going to be the ones who get us through this,’ I told her. ‘That’s how long this journey will take.’
What am I doing here, I wonder now? I don’t even live in America. Though somehow we all live in America, because it fills our ears, spills out of screens and teaches us to dream. But also because we can feel it coming, see the same gaps widening in our own societies, watch the same complacency or helplessness on the faces of the old leaders and the ugly smiles of those who are sure their time is coming.
Everyone who said they knew what they were doing has failed. How badly things turn out now, we can’t say for sure. But there is work to be done.
I finished this on Friday night and sent it out to readers of Crossed Lines, my occasional newsletter. I got a lot of requests to put it online, so here it is. If you want Crossed Lines in your inbox in future, here’s the sign-up page. If you want to know more about my work, here’s my personal website. John Michael Greer, Ran Prieur, Anne Tagonist, Martin Shaw and Nina Pick have all appeared in the pages of the Dark Mountain journal which is available in physical and digital forms. Thanks for reading.
Added November 13, 2016 at 12:43pm
by Terry Elliott
Title: Study that inspired the writer
Photo
Something startling is happening to middle-aged white Americans. Unlike every other age group, unlike every other racial and ethnic group, unlike their counterparts in other rich countries, death rates in this group have been rising, not falling.
That finding was reported Monday by two Princeton economists, Angus Deaton, who last month won the 2015 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, and Anne Case. Analyzing health and mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and from other sources, they concluded that rising annual death rates among this group are being driven not by the big killers like heart disease and diabetes but by an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids.
The analysis by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case may offer the most rigorous evidence to date of both the causes and implications of a development that has been puzzling demographers in recent years: the declining health and fortunes of poorly educated American whites. In middle age, they are dying at such a high rate that they are increasing the death rate for the entire group of middle-aged white Americans, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found.
The mortality rate for whites 45 to 54 years old with no more than a high school education increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 to 2014.
“It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” wrote two Dartmouth economists, Ellen Meara and Jonathan S. Skinner, in a commentary to the Deaton-Case analysis to be published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Death rates are rising for middle-aged white Americans, while declining in other wealthy countries and among other races and ethnicities. The rise appears to be driven by suicide, drugs and alcohol abuse.
Sources: Anne Case and Angus Deaton; PNAS
By The New York Times
“Wow,” said Samuel Preston, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mortality trends and the health of populations, who was not involved in the research. “This is a vivid indication that something is awry in these American households.”
Dr. Deaton had but one parallel. “Only H.I.V./AIDS in contemporary times has done anything like this,” he said.
In contrast, the death rate for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continued to decline during the same period, as did death rates for younger and older people of all races and ethnic groups.
Middle-aged blacks still have a higher mortality rate than whites — 581 per 100,000, compared with 415 for whites — but the gap is closing, and the rate for middle-aged Hispanics is far lower than for middle-aged whites at 262 per 100,000.
David M. Cutler, a Harvard health care economist, said that although it was known that people were dying from causes like opioid addiction, the thought was that those deaths were just blips in the health care statistics and that over all everyone’s health was improving. The new paper, he said, “shows those blips are more like incoming missiles.”
Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case (who are husband and wife) say they stumbled on their finding by accident, looking at a variety of national data sets on mortality rates and federal surveys that asked people about their levels of pain, disability and general ill health.
Dr. Deaton was looking at statistics on suicide and happiness, skeptical about whether states with a high happiness level have a low suicide rate. (They do not, he discovered; in fact, the opposite is true.) Dr. Case was interested in poor health, including chronic pain because she has suffered for 12 years from disabling and untreatable lower back pain.
Dr. Deaton noticed in national data sets that middle-aged whites were committing suicide at an unprecedented rate and that the all-cause mortality in this group was rising. But suicides alone, he and Dr. Case realized, were not enough to push up overall death rates, so they began looking at other causes of death. That led them to the discovery that deaths from drug and alcohol poisoning also increased in this group.
They concluded that taken together, suicides, drugs and alcohol explained the overall increase in deaths. The effect was largely confined to people with a high school education or less. In that group, death rates rose by 22 percent while they actually fell for those with a college education.
It is not clear why only middle-aged whites had such a rise in their mortality rates. Dr. Meara and Dr. Skinner, in their commentary, considered a variety of explanations — including a pronounced racial difference in the prescription of opioid drugs and their misuse, and a more pessimistic outlook among whites about their financial futures — but say they cannot fully account for the effect.
Dr. Case, investigating indicators of poor health, discovered that middle-aged people, unlike the young and unlike the elderly, were reporting more pain in recent years than in the past. A third in this group reported they had chronic joint pain over the years 2011 to 2013, and one in seven said they had sciatica. Those with the least education reported the most pain and the worst general health.
The least educated also had the most financial distress, Dr. Meara and Dr. Skinner noted in their commentary. In the period examined by Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case, the inflation-adjusted income for households headed by a high school graduate fell by 19 percent.
Dr. Case found that the number of whites with mental illnesses and the number reporting they had difficulty socializing increased in tandem. Along with that, increasing numbers of middle-aged whites said they were unable to work. She also saw matching increases in the numbers reporting pain and the numbers reporting difficulty socializing, difficulty shopping, difficulty walking for two blocks.
With the pain and mental distress data, Dr. Deaton said, “we had the two halves of the story.” Increases in mortality rates in middle-aged whites rose in parallel with their increasing reports of pain, poor health and distress, he explained. They provided a rationale for the increase in deaths from substance abuse and suicides.
Dr. Preston of the University of Pennsylvania noted that the National Academy of Sciences had published two monographs reporting that the United States had fallen behind other rich countries in improvements in life expectancy. One was on mortality below age 50 and the other on mortality above age 50. He coedited one of those reports. But, he said, because of the age divisions, the researchers analyzing the data missed what Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case found hiding in plain sight.
“We didn’t pick it up,” Dr. Preston said, referring to the increasing mortality rates among middle-aged whites.
Ronald D. Lee, professor of economics, professor of demography and director of the Center on Economics and Demography of Aging at the University of California, Berkeley, was among those taken aback by what Dr. Deaton and Dr. Case discovered.
“Seldom have I felt as affected by a paper,” he said. “It seems so sad.”
Added November 13, 2016 at 12:47pm
by Terry Elliott
Title: Overlay of data sets (death rate and voting rates)
(Scott Audette/Reuters)
A few weeks ago, following the Republican Iowa caucuses, I pointed out an eerie correlation in the voting data. It seems that Donald Trump performed the best in places where middle-aged whites are dying the fastest.
That wasn't a fluke. The relationship between white mortality and Trump support is real, as the fresh results from Super Tuesday confirmed.
Here are scatter charts to visualize this connection in nine of the 11 Super Tuesday states. Each circle represents a county. The horizontal position of a circle represents the white death rate in that county for people ages 40 to 64. Counties toward the right have higher rates of white mortality.
The vertical position of the circle represents the percent of votes that went to Donald Trump on Tuesday in that county. The higher the circle, the more votes for Trump. The size of the circles represents the size of the population.
(I left out Minnesota — sorry Rubio fans! — and Alaska because there weren't county-level voting results for me to compare to death rates.)
The red line on each plot summarizes the relationship between white deaths and Trump support. In every state except Massachusetts, the counties with high rates of white mortality were the same counties that turned out to vote for Trump.
We're focusing on middle-aged whites because the data show that something has gone terribly wrong with their lives. In a study last year, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton pointed out that mortality rates for this group have actually been increasing since the '90s.
That fact becomes more alarming when you look at the context. Over the past decade, Hispanic people have been dying at a slower rate; black people have been dying at a slower rate; white people in other countries have been dying at a slower rate.
What is going on, then, with death rates for middle-aged whites? Case and Deaton aren't sure, but they argued that alcohol abuse, suicides and the opioid epidemic have something to do with it. The rate of fatal "poisonings" for instance — a category that includes drug overdoses — more than tripled among middle-aged whites since 2000.
Economic struggles have likely contributed as well. Case and Deaton also found that the increase in the death rate has been driven by people with less education. For those without a college degree, the economy in recent decades has been increasingly miserable. This may explain why some have turned to self-destructive behaviors, such as drug and alcohol abuse.
The people I've been describing — this distressed, dying demographic slice of America — are similar to the people who tend to vote for Trump, according to phone and exit polls. Trump supporters are mostly white; skew older; and are less likely to have college degrees than other Republicans.
Perhaps this is no coincidence. As I wrote in December:
[I]t is nonetheless striking that Trump’s promise to "Make America Great Again" has been most enthusiastically embraced by those who have seen their own life's prospects diminish the most — not [only] in terms of material wealth, but in terms of literal chances of survival.
It's true that life was once better in many parts of America. In the late '90s, not only was the death rate for middle-aged whites lower, but median wages for non-college workers were higher. Since then, globalization sucked away many more manufacturing jobs, and the Great Recession gave an extra kick to places that were already in decline.
To investigate the relationship between white mortality, economic anxiety and Trump support, I looked at which economic characteristics in a county made people more likely to vote for Trump on Super Tuesday. These included:
- The middle-aged white death rate (non-Hispanic whites, ages 40 to 64, in 2011-2014)
- The change in the middle-aged white death rate from early 2000 to present
- The death rate for middle-aged Hispanics and nonwhites
- The percent of people employed in manufacturing
- The change in the percent of people employed in manufacturing
- The median income
- The growth (or decline) in the median income since 1999
- The percent of people working
- The change in the percent of people working since 1999
- The percent of people with a bachelor's degree or more
- The urban or rural character of a county
Even after controlling for these other factors, the middle-aged white death rate in a county was still a significant predictor of the share of votes that went to Trump.
Here's how to think about it: Say that County A and County B are roughly identical, except for the death rate of their white, middle-aged residents. County A's death rate is in the 75th percentile — meaning that the middle-aged whites there are dying faster than in three quarters of other counties — while County B's is in the 25th percentile. Between these two economically similar places, County A would give an extra percentage point to Donald Trump in the primary.
Three other characteristics stood out as highly statistically significant:
- The fraction of people with bachelor's degrees. All else held equal — including the death rates — places where people were more educated were less likely to vote for Trump. This effect was large. About a seven percentage-point increase in the fraction of people with BAs (the difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles) predicts about a four to five percentage point decrease in Trump's vote share. In other words, more educated counties don't vote Trump. (They tend to vote Rubio, polls show.)
- The fraction of people in the county who are working. After controlling for other factors, the percentage of people with jobs was a significant predictor of the Trump vote share. If an additional 12 percent of adults had jobs (which is roughly the gap between the 75th and 25th percentiles), Trump would have lost about two percentage points of the vote in the primaries.
- The decline in manufacturing. In the early 2000s, increased trade with China delivered another whammy to American manufacturers. The data show that the places that lost a lot of manufacturing jobs since 1999 were also more likely to vote for Trump on Super Tuesday.
The data deliver a clear message: Economic distress in many parts of the country is driving voters toward Donald Trump. But there remains this mystery about white death rates.
One factor that stood out as not being predictive of the Trump vote is the rate at which Hispanic and nonwhite people die. There only seems to be a relationship between Trump support and the middle-aged white death rate. And economic factors don't fully explain it.
We still don't know what exactly is causing middle-aged white death rates to rise, but it seems that Donald Trump has adeptly channeled this white suffering into political support.
Understanding why this part of America is so unhappy — why some white people are literally dying faster — may help explain how Trump became such a powerful force in this election.
(Note: If you want to see the regression table, I put it on Twitter. I included fixed effects for each state and urbanicity. Data came from the 2010-2014 five-year American Community Survey, the 2000 Census, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Associated Press.)
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Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
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Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
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Eternity is in love with the creations of time.
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