I want to offer a theory for why 73 million Americans voted for Trump despite his evident deficiencies as a president and, truly, as a human being. To my mind, it’s a pretty basic manifestation of nationalist myth making, albeit accelerated by modern social media. 🧵
All nationalisms are rooted in myth; artificially constructed narratives about the roots of “our” unity, and apartness from “the others”. That’s why we have flags and anthems: they are memetic forms of identity construction.
Now, most nationalist myths are still partially rooted in material reality or lived practice: territory, language, cultural norms, religion etc. But the trick is in weaving a coherent narrative that includes some and not other peoples and practices in a given region.
Trump’s great innovation is that he has advanced an almost entirely rhetorical project. Yes, his political project is deeply steeped in the legacies of white supremacy and xenophobia in America. But the accompanying cult of personality, incl the Q mysticism is a potent variation.
Trump offered not policy, substance, or results; he offered narrative. A narrative in which he and his followers were locked in a divine struggle against demonic forces. Insane? Of course. But if you create a parallel media environment in which this new identity can be forged...
...you can get a lot people to buy into it, especially in a country as deeply religious & conservative as the U.S. That’s just propaganda 101; it’s the Stab in the Back Legend w/ hashtags. It’s Milosevic’s “Heavenly Serbia”. The substance is familiar, the medium has been updated.
And the reason why it’s so effective is bc a lot of folks would rather be paladins in the forces of heaven — even if it means participating in atrocities against their neighbors — than middling, suburban “nobodies”. And, again, when there’s an entire alternative media...
...environment created to egg them on, to feed their delusions, to whip up the mob frenzy then, yeah, you’ll get 73 million votes for a semi-literate vulgarian w/ a messiah complex. Because it’s all narrative, it’s all myth; nothing is real except his word and his promise.
And to assert otherwise is actually to “prove” his point. Trump convinced his followers that suggesting he had erred was a sin, itself evidence of corruption and idiocy. The more the MSM media and civil society tried to engage in a reality and fact based discourse, the more...
...his base became convinced of his myth and prophecy. And it’s why you’re seeing these deranged post-elxn antics. Forced to choose btw myth - “Trump won in a landslide” - & reality - he lost in a landslide - they choose the frmr, despite all facts to the contrary, bc they...
...prefer the other narrative & Trump keeps feeding them just that. Narrative, rhetoric, and myth. That’s the narcotic; the myth is the point. And that’s why it will survive virtually any material defeat (cf. the continuing potency of nationalism in Serbia post-Milosevic).
The only way out is systemic, mass de-programming (e.g. denazification) and/or generational evolution. And even the former is highly dependent on the latter; cf. Germany’s ‘68 generation. But, unfortunately, that’s a ways off yet — and a relapse is possible, maybe even likely. /x
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