The Trump administration is introducing us all to a new reality show. Like other reality shows, the inhabitants are in desperate, uncomfortable, dog-eat-dog situations. The outcome is uncertain. It's hard to know who are your friends and who are your enemies, and friends can shift to enemies in a nanosecond.
The President’s earlier TV career prepared him well to be the star of the new show. His role in this one is going to be terrific. Not only is Trump comfortable with the new show, so are millions of American reality TV fans.
The outrageous tweets and the relentless stream of patently untrue statements emanating from the new show continue to throw the mainstream media and traditional politicians into a frenzy. From that blurry vantage point, they squeal desperate messages of confusion, anxiety, fear, and alarm in a never-ending stream of op-eds.
The media, apparently never having watched earlier reality shows, is confused and distressed. As Joel Whitebook, director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at Columbia University, puts it, the media’s reaction resembles the disorientation of a therapist confronted with a psychotic patient. They “can’t make sense of what is going on. The patient’s statements and behavior simply don’t add up, and the flurry of disassociated statements and actions can quickly begin to produce [in the therapist] something like a disorienting fog.”
How baffled should we really be?
Even before reality show TV, alternate realities were part of everyday life for both the clinically psychotic as well as everyone else. Each of us lives in our own unique reality every day. Homo sapiens has never had a firm grip on reality.
Human are fundamentally story-telling animals. Our stories are what we live by. We have our individual stories--which we constantly refabricate to make ourselves look better to ourselves and others—“What’s his story?”, we often ask about someone else.
We also have another kind of story that groups of people share. These shared stories often harness an astounding capacity to suspend disbelief, an amazing gullibility. When we unquestioningly share belief in widely shared stories, astoundingly bad things can happen. The history of Christianity and Islam, of Nazism, communism or other popular stories is replete with horrendous destruction and the extermination of millions.
Shared stories are key elements of religions and ideologies, the “Isims”. Communism. Socialism. Anarchism. Feminism. Monarchism. Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Capitalism. Religions and ideologies are both stories that attempt to explain everything and promise an alternate happier reality. Religions require the existence of God and promise paradise in the afterlife. Ideologies promise a more perfect life after the revolution, or after we get rid of governments and regulations. Ideologies have an added benefit in modern life in that they don’t demand the difficult intellectual stretch of belief in an invisible, unverifiable God, hovering above in the clouds. Religions and ideologies both have the power to organize large groups of people and inspire amazing commitment as well as violent action against, even death to, those who do not share belief in the same story.
Actual reality, if its exists, is quite another matter. It is much more complex, variable, confusing, stressful, inaccessible and uninspiring to humans. In actual reality, there may be no paradise in heaven or on earth. Actual reality can only be accessed piecemeal through long, hard, scientific study biased on evidence and theories.
We are always open to persuasion through stories, fantasies, lies, novels, magic, movies, and other stories, but facts and science? Not so much. Global warming is ugly and inconvenient, and probably does not have a Hollywood ending. It could be a hoax, like gravity or evolution. T.S. Elliot famously said, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” The simpler stories we were taught as children, or accept (or invent) as adults, no matter how fantastical (e.g. Scientology), are alternate realities that we can more easily buy into, especially since they promise a happy ending, if we obey a few simple rules and wear the right clothes.
So why all the uproar over Trump’s alternate reality? Because he lives in grotesque, tasteless, places and plays fast and loose with facts? Maybe. A Trump strategist did upset the picky truthaholics when she said on Public Radio that “there are no such things, unfortunately, as facts.”
Yet the President’s false pronouncements are only different in magnitude from the lies and exaggerations politicians have always used. The real uproar is because Trump’s story departs dramatically from the widely shared stories believed by the bicoastal cosmopolitan educated elites. His is a dystopian story of lost jobs, urban crime, a terrible health care system, bad brown people swarming over our borders, America’s economy on the ropes, swamped by dumb trade deals cut by losers in our government who were duped by smarter foreign powers. The Chinese cheated us and Europeans still don’t pay their fair share for their own defense. “ So sad”.
The liberal elites are still dwelling in their own bubble, blindfolded by stories about the economic benefits of trade, globalization, uncontrolled immigration, competition in government enforced health care, and multicultural diversity in a “post-racial” paradise. Liberals enforce belief in these stories through the ham handed terrorism of political correctness, name calling (“racist”, “xenophobe”, etc.), and the more desperate efforts to shout down anyone espousing a different story.
The reality show favored by the liberal elites are not selling everywhere. Hillary Clinton could sell almost no part of the story to unemployed coal miners and other “deplorables”. She offered no promises of a better life. Nothing inspirational, other than the tepid thrill of electing the first female President. Ironically, to huge blocks of voters, she was saying “You’re fired!”.
Bernie Sanders never fails to lecture the anti-Trump forces that they need a better narrative than one in which poor and middle class Americans need to suck up the status quo and be happy happy with NAFTA, Wall Street oligarchs, record-setting wealth inequality, and Obamacare for insurance companies. He is well aware that Trump’s alternate reality has a wide appeal to huge blocks of disenchanted and disempowered people.
I am not suggesting, of course, that anyone seeking office should dedicate themselves to fact checking Trump and his allies. This is politics, not science or philosophy. (Remember T.S. Elliot.). People still need an inspiring story, one in which they escape from deadly perils and win in the end. This will require a good story teller. But “be careful” argues Russian expert, Masha Gessen. Fighting lies with opposing lies is a dangerous game, one which is ruinous of political discourse and can completely discredit the entire political system.
The challenge for Trump’s opponents is to tell the truth (or something close to it) woven into a good story that can match the thrills of Trump’s astonishing fantasies. And to provide a happy ending. Good stories can actually synchronize the minds of the story teller and the audience. One writer who has been doing just that (without the happy ending) since Trump first emerged is Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.
The opening lines for the story could go something like this:
“Once upon a time, not so long ago, on a dark and stormy night, a very angry, delusional, and unstable man decided to take over a country. He succeeded because he was rich, he promised everything and anything, and the people trying to defeat him were habitual losers who could not figure out how to tell fairy tales that people longed to hear. Sadly, he did not know much about running a country, and right off the bat, he started to make a big ugly mess of things.” You can fill in the rest as the story unfolds
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