Trump and the Democratization of Mythmaking
Abstract: I argue that Trumpean populism exhibits a certain—though dangerous—form of enchantment. I further argue that, on a world-historical scale, the benefits of the Trumpean era can be measured by its ability to democratize and equalize the power of mythmaking.
Diagnostics of “fake news” and denouncements of Trumpean politics are varied and well known. Little more can be added against this flood of criticism: from nation-wide marches to tweets and Facebook posts, the woes of contemporary American politics are well-discussed, well-documented and well-shared. Fake news has become old news.
But amidst this collective sigh, little has been said about what value these two phenomena offer 21st century American democracy. It seems that the payoff is twofold: on the one hand, what we are witnessing is a type of re-enchantment of the world in an age of secularism; and on the other, related hand, the democratization of myth-making in a time of equal access to information and the tools of information sharing.
A cornerstone aspect of the modern era is the theory of disenchantment. While in prior ages mankind saw the world largely in terms offered by religion, the growth of bureaucracy, science and secularism at the end of the 19th century signaled a shift to a more rationalized worldview. As the world became more explainable outside traditional systems of belief, faith in the theological began to wane, and the “progress” of the modern era brought with it a unique principle of expectation. Governments and societies were subsumed under new processes and procedures, stabilizing the daily lives of Westerners and mitigating, as much as possible, the potential of upheaval, revolution and unforeseen contingency. Despite the occasional natural disaster, life for many assumed a new rhythm and continuity unfelt in previous eras: the world was, in short, deprived of the “mysterious.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in 1873, captured the traditional notion of disenchantment best when, looking back to the early age of Greece, he wrote: “When every tree can suddenly speak as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens…—and this is what the honest Athenian believed—then, as in a dream, anything is possible at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a masquerade of the gods…”[1] It was exactly this feeling of infinite possibility, where the waking world was not too far removed from “dreaming,” that pre-modern systems of belief exalted and made possible. And it was exactly this dream-world that was conquered and extinguished by modern science and secularism. As the world became more understood, safer and prosperous, so too did it lose a fundamental aspect of its inherent mystery.
Tom Nichols, author of the recent The Death of Expertise, ends his book by railing against the contemporary undermining of expert knowledge. In particular, Nichols inveighs against the push to see all minds in our democracy as inherently equal: “…when democracy is understood as an unending demand for unearned respect for unfounded opinions, anything and everything becomes possible, including the end of democracy and republican government itself.”[2] While Nichols is clearly critical of this development, his observation illustrates an important aspect of American democracy: the mystery of the unknown—the anxious anticipation of “what will tomorrow bring?”, the sense that “anything and everything” is possible—has been transferred from the supernatural to the natural, from the idolism of wayward gods to the embodied populist voice of “the people.” Trumpean politics injects the world with an endless array of mirrors, an unending host of dark wonderments, a sense that, truly, no political contingency is off the table and anything is fundamentally possible. If it does not make the world exciting, then it certainly makes it confusing: it is not nature that “swarms around man,” offering neither promise nor understanding, but the daily politics of our democratic landscape.
This is in part the work of Trump himself, in part the work of that unnamed legion of fake-newsers—people behind computer screens captaining untruth across social media, blogs and online forums. Inadvertently, these unknown actors have ushered in a new era of unprecedented equality. No longer is the capacity to lie, on a mass-scale, reserved for politicians and corporate officers; it is rather the open business of anyone with an internet connection. The right to manufacture and spread “myths” has been totally democratized, and the acceptance of a “fact” has been divorced entirely from systems of acknowledged authority and has fallen into the mendacious hands of anyone whose prose is flashy enough to garner “likes” and “shares.” With the well-worded post, anything is made “true,” all that is solid melts, and the world is converted, once more, into a dreamscape of endless possibility.
In a world that has largely lost its sense of the unpredictable and mysterious, the advent of Trump and the spread of fake news pushes back. Part of the world’s secular enchantment is made possible by the social alchemy performed by the modern political totality, unmoored from Trump specifically but mined by Trump relentlessly. Somewhere, behind the scenes, so much of one’s own world is transformed and made and determined by others—many of whom one can never know. This depth of background, the feeling of the “meanwhile,” is one of the necessary results of pluralism itself: here are the vague rumblings that contribute to a sense of the “great elsewhere,” a source of mystery that is only magnified and made manifest as the enchantment of the vox populi. How this “elsewhere” is turned into a political tool, into a form of aesthetic power, is a matter of strategy, intuition and tact—to be determined ad hoc and as an open question.
Ultimately, however, the costs of this re-enchantment, whatever its form, are well-known and argued persuasively. My point here has not been to call into question the negative impact of Trump and his ilk: I agree wholeheartedly that these aspects ultimately contribute to the death of our republic and threaten many of our traditional American values. But I cannot help but stand and witness, in wonder and dismay, as they usher in a new chapter of our world: does this era not signal, in some deep Hegelian sense, the triumph of autonomy, when any moment might be made a spectacle by the individual? And what is a spectacle but the participation in a certain life of myth? Here we find the myth without mythology—a secular fertility goddess, devoid of life or legion. We enter the era of the naked myth: decadence, nihilism, fascism all threaten in wake.[3] It is as Procopius suggests with his analysis of the Nika riots: the disentangling of existential myth (meaning; the social) from political myth (purpose, the political) makes the political myth autonomous—the political comes to define, reduce and subordinate all relations in the construction of a supra-noumenal world of greens and blues. All becomes political; all is made political; all that is solid melts…[4]
[1] Nietzsche, Friedrich. “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” In Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Ed. and Trans. Daniel Breazeale. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1979.
[2] Nichols, Tom. The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. 238
[3] See for further reflection: Adorno/Horkheimer, Nietzsche, Arendt; E. Gentile. Agamben on the nude; Heidegger on unconcealment. Plato on necessity of the lie.
[4] Marx. We might further abstract and argue that enchantment—an enchanted world—is merely a certain type of contingency. Or: what is the difference between contingency that brings enchantment and the type of vox populi, guns-in-the-street-violence contingency of the Trumpean era? Is it fair to say this is a re-enchantment—or something closer to a Hobbesian return to a state of fear? What is the relation between fear, contingency, wonder/sublimity and enchantment? Is a world of total fear a world thoroughly penetrated by the enchanted? Pettit, Robbin, Burke, Frank.