Donald Trump’s authoritarianism and political jihad failed not because of any deeply entrenched democratic values of the American people but because it was confronted by a viral agent’s genetic precision that defeated Trump’s usual mimetic activation of the authoritarian masses.
In a literary context, the Trump-versus-coronavirus era was a tale of Adorno, Brunswik, Levison, & Sanford [“The Authoritarian Personality“], Hannah Arendt [“The Origins of Totalitarianism“], Gustav Lebon [“The Crowd“], and Eric Hoffa [“The True Believer“] meeting Richard Dawkins [“The Selfish Gene“]. The latter is an epic narration of the genetic and mimetic ownership of natural progressions, while the others dealt with authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and political command of the populous and mass movements in recent history.
There are thousands of other literary works on both subject matters. But based on my limited scholarship, these are a select few readings that might illuminate the nature of Donald Trump and his supporters and why both were doomed to fail when confronted by an efficient viral pandemic. To limit the scope of an already lengthy piece, I make only a few references here, but you will get the picture from this article’s totality. (You’ll have to wait for my upcoming book to read the full tie-in.)
Feckless President Confronts Fecund Virus
As the coronavirus pandemic raged across the homeland in 2020, rather than vigorously act in the interest of saving lives, President Donald Trump and his allies in politics and media politicized and weaponized the pandemic as a re-election strategy. Mr. Trump would run an election campaign against a Democratic opponent, but with China squarely on the ballot. The Trump machine then went into high gear, animating and activating his supporters’ (the base) dogmatic predispositions in much the same way he had done to great success in his previous three-plus years of strategic usurpation of undemocratic powers.
During his time in office, the president’s ability to animate and activate his true believers has beaten into fear and submission the entire Republican Party apparatus – elected officials and the money people who once publicly loathed him. He strategically delegitimized and negated Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s interference into the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf (“The Russian Hoax”). He had equally defeated his impeachment and negated the usual stigma associated – rendering it a “vindictive Democratic witch hunt.”
As America saw the overwhelming evidence of Trump’s High Crimes & Misdemeanors, only a single Republican Senator, Mitt Romney of the “safe” state of Utah, dared to vote to impeach (to confront Trump’s mob activation by Twitter) on one of two articles of impeachment.
With such success, this time, President Trump thought that if he could get the public to focus on blaming China and the Democrats who had made China a world power, then deaths in the heartland would become secondary. The public’s focus would be on Trump – the only one who could save America from China and retaliate effectively for unleashing the Trump-named “China virus” on America and the world.
So as the fecund virus replicated on the genetic (possibly even by mutating), the feckless president animated and activated the mimetic – America’s culturally transmitted predispositions to intolerance, to dogmatic and ideological opposition to way-of-life changes (wearing a mask or social distancing), and to behavioral control (offense taken at those wearing masks and socially distancing).
American Authoritarianism
American authoritarianism has traditionally manifested itself in the oppression of Natives and racial and religious minorities (mainly blacks) through a variety of legally-codified means, by stamping out differences (so-called “deviants”) in society, or by coercion into obedience and absolute submission to authorities – under law enforcement’s guise.
That early predisposition was the catalyst for teenager Kyle Rittenhouse this summer. In the aftermath of protests, in reaction to the police shooting of African-American Jacob Blake, Rittenhouse, yet to see his 18th birthday, crossed stateliness with high-powered weaponry to “defend and stand with the police.” He ended up killing two people.
On the other hand, where the “law and order” citizenry loses faith in the authorities, it virulently opposes the same – now deemed illegitimate. The long history of mobs in the South storming police stations to take custody of and lynch African Americans is a testament to this. Today, the citizen militia has evolved across the country and is heavily armed. For one reason or another, they have long been disillusioned with the government – deeming authorities at the federal, state, and local levels as illegitimate.
The Trump era’s most incredible turn was that the United States president – the country’s chief law enforcement officer – became the principal agent of delegitimization of the country’s authorities. We would see this even more after he lost the election (heavily armed militia members menacing state-level elected officials and poll workers). But during the campaign, President Donald Trump unleashed a fury of recklessness unseen in the history of an American elected official at any level. He attacked the credibility of the danger posed by the virus, those who sounded the alarms, and all reasonable public safety measures enacted to save lives.
Mr. Trump’s authoritarianism was in high gear and needed to activate his true believers to keep the Republican elected establishment in line – if they value their careers in politics. Power meant his way and abject intolerance heaped on dissident grumbles, regardless of the consequences. In countries like China, absent democratic regimes, the government took draconian measures to save lives, the economy, and the way of life. In America, the president opposed minimal efforts to save lives in order to “save the economy” and “preserve our way of life.”
Necessary Dissonance-Connivance
Americans tend to view it all through a somewhat dissonant lens – or with certain levels of connivance required for sanity. You often hear the television pundits speak of “the usual politics of division” or similar retrograde analyses. Hifalutin Democrats bemoan “moral declines” while trumping out historians or constitutional scholars to remind us that there was once a President Andrew Jackson, a President Woodrow Wilson, et.al.
But as the constellations churn forward, technology and human capabilities have since increased tenfold. Yet, cable TV invites scholars to tell America that things are not too bad because we once lived in the early 19th century and the early 20th.
On the other side, Trump’s allies (in politics, media, and religion) gave the president the cover he needed regardless of the wider society’s costs. They, like the submissive courtiers at the beck and call of history’s most maniacal princes, deployed the usual authoritarian euphemisms – “conservative values,” “law and order,” or other “MAGA throwaways” like “American First.”
But the truth is that in near-complete control of the levers of power, the people, and key institutions, President Donald Trump’s authoritarianism made him, first and foremost, America’s agent of intolerance – animating and activating its agency among diehards in a way that combined the leadership traits of both a cultist and a jihadist. The cultist commands the absolute submission of his adherents out of their inherent need to submit.
The jihadist commands the same of the faithful, except that common interests alone do not mobilize or harness jihad. Unlike the inward-looking cult, the jihad looks outward, and it needs visible targets of its intolerance (“enemies of Allah”). What they have in common is their predispositions, which beckon animation and activation with ease.
Among the daily chaos, corruption, and confusion, President Donald Trump is a natural jihadist-cult leader – commanding a type of cultish submission previously unseen in an American politician while feeding its authoritarian complex with visible targets for its manifestation. With each combative press conference, impromptu media chat, daily tweeting barrage, Trump revealed himself adept at that effortless animation and activation of his adherents.
It is extraordinary that we spend billions of dollars annually studying terrorist threats, recruitment, sleeper cells, their activations, and so forth when we could just have easily studied Donald Trump over the years. Objectives may be different (“enemies of Allah” v. “socialists” or “enemies of America”), but the predispositions and modes of animation and activations are the same.
The Mimetic Society
America is a mimetic (see below) society – a culture of imitating, where failure to do so can lead to serious ostracization. As the world’s dominant popular culture across the entire spectrum of entertainment – sports, music, film, television, and now the online black hole – the medium shapes our values more than it does those of any other culture on the planet. We didn’t just invent modern advertising (catalyst for mimetic replication); we perfect it each day.
Over the years, neurologists have explained the global demand for cocaine usage: it is the most potent activator of our reward center. Lab rats are said to chose cocaine over food. Along the spectrum of cocaine and sugar, advertising is an equally potent activator of our reward center. For this reason, it is one of the most potent forces in every society. Propaganda (strategic advertising) is the hallmark of cultural adhesion – and authoritarian activation.
In a previous life in marketing (pre-Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.), I had focus groups that could measure how effective we (at my company) were at using advertising to trigger dopamine-driven demand for our products. In other words, how well we were able to modify neural transmissions – to excite your brain’s reward center to our advantage. The range of effects the average person could suffer from either elevated or depressed dopamine levels spans the uncontrollable manic state to an inability to get out of bed, respectively.
So being mimetically cultured (by advertising) has tilled fertile ground – we are easy believers (a welcomed stance of religion). Overnight, access to the internet makes us believe that we are experts on any particular issue. But in reality, we are little more than the “dopa mined” – people who are mentally mined by legitimate merchants, by content hogs seeking to generate advertising dollars, and by nefarious internal or external actors with various aims.
Scandinavia, Germany, France, and others do not see outside interference levels in their elections as we do because their citizens are less malleable to online advertisement and propaganda. For many in America, though, we see it, and we believe it. For President Trump’s true believers, they believe it because the president tells them it is true.
The sequence of our nature is not entirely clear. Which was first? Was it our mimetic acculturation that led to advertising’s success or was it advertising’s success that acculturated our imitative nature? I will leave that one for the psychologists. One thing is for sure though: in 2016, America hired an advertiser – one Donald J. Trump. He was a marketer, a brand manager, a reality TV star – the perfect dopamine-inducing agent of our mimetic hell and our authoritarian predispositions.
Donald Trump, the real-estate magnate, hadn’t constructed a building in eons. Trump, the successful businessman, had filed for bankruptcy some six times. He never owned a cow, yet he sold stakes. He embargoed his college transcripts, yet he ran a “university.” He claimed he never had a drink, yet he sold us Vodka. Would you buy a bottle of Châteaux Margot from a Frenchman who doesn’t drink wine? If you would, you were of perfect predisposition to be mined by Trump.
The Meme Pool Replication
Cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution [p 89]. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so do memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. Memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasite my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the same way that a virus may parasite the genetic mechanism of a host cell [p 192].
Biologist Richard Dawkins [“The Selfish Gene,” 1976]
Effectively, when we speak of genetic evolution, we’re speaking of a phenomenon (molecular DNA adaptation) that creeps in over millions of years. But memes – culturally transmitted ideas, ideologies, fashion, lifestyles, politics, and even language – might explode overnight because they are transmitted (replicated) by imitation.
Language seem to ‘evolve’ by non-genetic means, and at a rate which is orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution [p 190]”, “Imitation is how memes replicate. For more than three thousand million years, DNA has been the only replicator worth talking about in the world. But… whenever conditions arise in which a new kind of replicator can make copies of itself, the new replicators will tend to take over, and start a new kind of evolution of their own [p 193].
Biologist Richard Dawkins [“The Selfish Gene,” 1976]
Without laying out a neural mapping of the brain, it is fair to say that culturally transmitted ideas may travel as fast as we are able to grow new neurons, make new neural connections, or expand existing ones (neuroplasticity). Fed up with political decadence in Washington and depressed by the idea of returning to another Clinton-era, Trump became the hottest idea in 2016.
His outrageous character earned him over a billion dollars in free advertising, as the networks were all over him. America then yielded to its mimetic nature – the advertising and branding, or to its advertising nature – the mimetic transmissions. Many then opened themselves up to the activation of otherwise unworthy predispositions that previous leaders knew well to leave alone.
Coronavirus — Why Did Things Turn Out So Bad?
As of date, no one is really able to explain why America, the richest and most powerful country in the world, turned out to be the worst at protecting its citizens from a raging global pandemic. No one can explain why a presidential candidate and sitting president would seek re-election by running a campaign to minimize the dangers of a deadly pandemic – even as it barreled across America, leveling hospital and morgue capacities, trampling fatigued and poorly protected healthcare workers, and stacking body bags on top of body bags in makeshift mobile morgues.
As president, sworn to defend the country against enemies — foreign and domestic, Donald Trump ignored the greatest domestic enemy America has confronted since the Civil War, even as the cemeteries were screaming bloody murder.
Covid-19 wreaked (and is wreaking) havoc countrywide at various stages — across states, cities, and towns in America. Yet President Trump’s go-to campaign strategy was to, at once, ignore and attack the virus – not as a reality to be embraced, against which to protect the country, but as a hoax to be ignored and delegitimized (“Democrat “hoax”). He attacked and undermined scientists and health professionals in the trenches on the frontline (including those in his administration).
He weaponized and delegitimized scientific institutions such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). He invested much capital attacking and “delegitimizing” his political opponents who dared to cringe at the majestic level of political manslaughter underway in the country (Trump’s refusal to implement a national strategy because it would help blue Democratic states like New York and California).
Where he felt his strategy waning, President Trump’s authoritarian predisposition then looked outward for visible targets – China (“China Virus,” “Kung Flu”) and the World Health Organization (pulling American funding and participation). As he did this, he animated his supporters to the warpath against everything but the enemy steering them down the throat – Covid-19. In the heat of the campaign, even as red states like Florida and Texas were on fire, Trump convinced his true believers that coronavirus precautions were as un-American as the “socialist” Democrats.
Comparative Perspective – France
In a democracy based on the rule of law, France put former Prime Minister Laurent Fabius on trial for manslaughter in 1999 for the Infected Blood Scandal Affair. Mr. Fabius faced charges after the publication of an article and a subsequent book by journalist Anne-Marie Casteret revealed that France’s National Blood Transfusion Center had transfused HIV-contaminated blood to hemophiliacs in 1984 and 1985 under his reign. He was eventually acquitted of the charges.
At present, that same country has its former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, on trial for attempting to bribe a judge with a plum retirement job in exchange for inside information on an inquiry into his campaign finances. This pales in comparison to Trump’s daily transgressions in office. Nicolas Sarkozy did not bribe co-conspirators with open presidential pardons. His actions did not lead to the death of a single French woman or man.
But in a fragile and modulated democracy, where authoritarian dispositions straddle the subtle contours of the executive and governing party’s near-absolute power, President Donald Trump can preside over hundreds of thousands of dead Americans with callous impunity. His Attorney General and Justice Department can enforce or “unenforce” laws according to his will. The president can use the pardon power of the presidency to reward and silence co-conspirators as he chooses.
His friend Roger Stone, his former National Security Advisor, General Michael Flynn, his former campaign manager Paul Manafort, others indicted and convicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and yet others to be named, kept quiet and will be free of criminal records on Trump’s departure from office on January 21st, 2021. But the unfortunate Michael Cohen (Trump’s former lawyer and “bagman”) did not. So after a stint in prison, his criminal record is enshrined for posterity.
Analysis – Donald Trump’s Authoritarianism in Action
In Europe, the view of what is happening in America is the usual simplistic knee-jerk reaction: “Americans are now as dumb as doornails.” Who am I to argue against simplistic generalizations? The truth, though, is much more complicated. It might lie in America’s mimetically-induced authoritarian complex – its predispositions to intolerance of differences (even though the world’s most diverse and vibrant multiracial society), its fear of change and perceived threats to ways of life around every corner, and its need for behavior control and mandates of conformity to normative social orders.
Trump’s mandates of conformity led otherwise serious Republican politicians to crumble like jello blobs of negligence and irresponsibility – with severe consequences for their people. This mimetically-induced authoritarian complex, accompanied by obedient submission to authority deemed legitimate (Donald Trump and Republicans) and virulent rejection of those deemed illegitimate (Barack Obama, Democrats, liberals, and immigrants (Latinos, Muslims, others from “shithole” countries), punitive needs to crush “deviants” across ethnic, religious, political, sexual/gender orientation (LBGTQ), give rise to racism, xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and the all-inclusive manifestations of white nationalism and supremacy.
It adds up to an Us versus Them siege disposition, best summed up by French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who said, “Hell, is ‘The Others'” (“L’enfer, c’est le autres”). At once, President Trump made responsible leadership out to be both hell and the others.
For much of red-state America, hell in 2020 was not a viral pandemic that was killing their loved ones. It was the Democrats and their hatred of President Trump. It was the “cooked up” Mueller Report on Russian interference in the 2016 election. It was the “Democrat-led impeachment” of their beloved president. For the true believers, 2020’s real hell was not the killer coronavirus.
It was the Democrats’ ultimate hoax – their pretext to use the “common cold” to shut down the economy and damage President Trump’s chances at re-election. Sprinkled along this scattered-brain dialectic are, of course, the anti-vaxxers, the fringe QAnonners, and a wide range of conspiracy theorists who provide online fuel to retard and destroy the naturally occurring neuroplasticity mentioned above.
Consequences
So, in 2020, two pandemics confronted America – one, the genetic and deadly virus and the other, the mimetic and equally destructive cultural predispositions to dismiss the virus as a hoax. Much of the country yielded to the latter while mostly dancing around the former. The result? The death spiral continues. While New York and the Northeast painted the map red in the spring, the entire United States is now awash in viral brush fires.
Among the known high-level victims of President Trump’s strategy are former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani. Christie spent a week in a New Jersey hospital for intensive coronavirus treatment after huddling with Trump for debate preparations in the Oval Office. Giuliani was hospitalized for a few days in Washington, D.C., from a combination of arrogant defiance of reality and a deft submission to the Trumpian Order.
As of this December 25th update (original article posted December 13th), the coronavirus has infected almost 20 million Americans. Daily new cases hover between 160,00 and above 200,000. Hospital capacity is maxing out with over 100,000 hospitalized, and we’re steering down a run rate of nearly 3,000 daily deaths.
But it doesn’t stop there. Going seven weeks after President Trump resoundingly lost the 2020 General Election, the flaming authoritarianism that attempted to delegitimize the genetic pandemic has now turned into a mimetic rejection of the election results. Like all memes, this has become a parasite infecting Trump supporters. The president has put his full effort into delegitimizing the democratic process, democracy itself, and Joseph Biden’s incoming Democratic administration.
He continues to live in a fantasy land where he “won” the election while orchestrating the ultimate con game on those he has so successfully dominated – raising hundreds of millions of dollars from his submissive adherents for his fictitious fight to overturn the election results. But this, too, is a logical consequence of Trump’s own movement. He is backed in a corner by his own monster. As writer Hannah Arendt reminds us:
It is the nature of the movement [totalitarian] that once the Leader has assumed his office, the whole organization is so absolutely identified with him that any admission of a mistake or removal from office would break the spell and spell of infallibility which surrounds the office of the leader and spell doom to all those connected with the movement
Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” p387
Trump’s Authoritarian Animation
It is not my intent here to write about President Donald J. Trump – the evident authoritarian, or to dissect his personality type, where he falls on the spectrum of “5 Personality Patterns” but instead to explore his instinctual activation of America’s mimetic nature and its authoritarian predisposition. His attempt to usurp extraordinary powers has so far resulted in disaster for the country and, by extent, for the global economic community.
That as president, Donald Trump would reveal himself as the half-baked authoritarian of a bygone era of the old world, or a despot of the developing new world with totalitarian instincts is quite unremarkable. Indeed, he was a known thin-skinned near-psychotic self-promoting narcissist long before entering office. But what is remarkable is his approach to re-election and how he set out to usurp and hold on to power — by weaponizing the coronavirus against the country, in particular, against his own supporters.
The president knew of the danger early on (as revealed by writer Bob Woodward). Yet lied to the public and instead focused on animating the authoritarian instincts of Republican partisans by delivering objective targets to delegitimize and obliterate: the intolerable Democrats, their supporters, and their hoax — collectively, them. Once he declared Covid-19 a Democratic hoax, his friends over at “American Pravda,” a.k.a. Fox News, amplified the claim.
A mimetic opposition movement, not to the virus but to those who embraced its realities, was born. They juxtaposed the economy and livelihood against death. Those who believed in the pandemic’s threat were “un-American,” Democrats, “libertards,” and “socialists” to be delegitimized and conquered. All were now even more un-American than before. They had found a weapon from China to change and ruin our way of life, control us — to bring in a Democratic administration and Democratic policies with China’s help, the World Health Organization (WHO), and other global entities.
Donald Trump’s Mimetic Activation
As one side embraced the realities of the risks to public health, traditionalists mimetically weaponized the virus on the other side. They quickly abandoned their once treasured positions (or at least reformulated them) in the happy medium of promulgating “conservative values” and “freedom.” There were discussions by conservative politicians and media personalities (supposed “pro-life” Christians) suggesting that grandma and grandpa might have to “take one for the team.” This was Texas’ Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick on Fox News (with host Tucker Carlson) earlier this year:
No one reached out to me and said, ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?” If that is the exchange, I’m all in. That doesn’t make me noble or brave or anything like that. I just think there are lots of grandparents out there in this country, like me, I have six grandchildren, that what we all care about and what we love more than anything are those children. And I want to live smart and see through this, but I don’t want the whole country to be sacrificed… I’ve talked to hundreds of people, Tucker, and just in the last week, making calls all the time, and everyone says pretty much the same thing. That we can’t lose our whole country, we’re having an economic collapse.
Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick
Imagine La Noblesse – sacrificing the elderly to save the economy! Brit Hume, the once-respected ABC News personality now at Fox News, chimed in to support Patrick, telling the same host:
The utter collapse of the country’s economy, which many think will happen if this goes on much longer, is an intolerable result. [Patrick] is saying, for his own part, that he would be willing to take a risk of getting the disease if that’s what it took to allow the economy to move forward. He said that because he is late in life, that he would be perhaps more willing than he might have been at a younger age, which seems to me to be an entirely reasonable viewpoint.
Fox News anchor Brit Hume
Were these the only available options or just the available options of the depraved zero-sum mind? The idiocy, irony-hypocrisy was palpable. The staunchly “pro-life” were now undermining the right to life of the elderly. Additionally, these are the same people who, in an effort to discredit and derail President Barack Obama’s attempt to avail health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans a decade ago, marketed the idea that “death panels” would take out grandma and grandpa if the “Affordable Care Act” (ACA) were to become the law of the land.
But so powerful were President Trump’s cultist transmissions that even the weirdest ideas were now on the table in their efforts to distract America from the coronavirus. Failing to accept that the country was in a viral driven economic collapse, the president believed that only a stock market plunge could damage his re-election chances – even as small businesses were closing their doors en masse. So his millionaire supporters in the media submitted and drove home his message.
National Tragedies & Deaths — Comparative Perspective
The Japanese’ December 7th, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, which officially brought the United States into World War II, killed 2,403 Americans. The 9/11 attacks killed 2,977 – deaths to which we solemnly pay annual homage. Yet almost two decades later, we’ve topped 2,977 deaths daily for many weeks and will likely continue throughout the winter months.
The global economic carnage wreaked by Covid-19 dwarfs that of 9/11 by many multiples. Death should be death, regardless of the source. Indeed, it’s the magnitude of death (as during a war) that aggravates our collective sorrow. But this is naïve thinking that ignores authoritarian needs for visible and tangible opponents – them.
There would likely have been a different level of awareness and mobilization against the virus had it been the issue of terrorist activities or a foreign agency. This would provide such a visible target against which to manifest authoritarian predispositions for intolerance and war. But an organic viral agent lacks an objective target. So instead, many remain dissonantly indifferent to the virus while channeling their opposition to state-level authorities – now the “them,” who dare to embrace the pandemic’s dangerous realities by attempting to enforce behavioral changes to our way of life.
And this is where President Trump has excelled. He provided the vehicle of defiance to the “freedom-fighters” in the form of virus-infused mass spreading campaign rallies and other events accompanied by a prolific disdain for masks, social distancing, and other safety precautions. The August 2020 death of 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain, who had proudly tweeted his joy in anticipation of attending Trump’s mask-free July “celebration of freedom” in Oklahoma, was a prescient forewarning of what was to come.
Within weeks Cain was dead of the coronavirus, yet neither President Trump nor his true believers took heed to change their behavior. It was reported that masks were prohibited in Trump’s presence in the White House – until he became infected and likely went on to infect others, possibly including his wife and young son.
Making the Connection
The connections in behavioral manifestations during this pandemic hardly figure into the discussion in an America inundated by Trump-infused daily chaos and confusion. Democrats, progressives, and others on the Left remain largely snobbish and aloof to the motivation of the fervent Trump adherent. Deploying its own intellectual authoritarianism and prescription for a “Woke-Cancel” world order, the Left is often too quick to disdainfully discard the hardcore “Trumpists” as racists, xenophobes, zealots, bigots, “basket of deplorables,” “covidiots,” and so on.
Indeed, while some are, this, too, is a simplistic perspective of what we now know to be upwards of 73 million Americans – those who voted for President Trump, despite his disastrous handling of the coronavirus and his visible indifference to the loss, pain, and hardship facing ordinary Americans.
On one level, we might look deeper into the human condition for predispositions that animate us to racism, xenophobia, zealotry, white supremacy, and more. Before being a racist, xenophobe, or supremacist, there are predispositions – the genetic and mimetically-cultured (“nature and nurture”) that program us to manifest as such when activated. We manifest behaviors for things as well as against things.
For example, social philosopher Eric Hoffer reminds us of a critical means of activating the “abjectly poor”:
The abjectly poor are without faith in the future. The future seems to them a booby trap buried on the road. One must step gingerly. To change things is to ask for trouble
Eric Hoffer “The True Believer” p10
Additionally, though, submission is a vital ingredient for authoritarian activation because of people’s longing to “belong.” MAGA-America was a vehicle of “belonging.” Writer Gustav Lebon expanded on this by explaining “the crowd.” Hoffa’s “The True Believer” was an epic journey into the symbiotic domination-submission relationship between the Leader and the commanded multitude. Hannah Arendt, who focused on totalitarian movements, said, “Totalitarian movements have proved time and again that they can command the same loyalty in life and death which had been the prerogative of secret and conspiratory societies [“The Origins of Totalitarianism,” p381].
She went on to note the extremes of “self-confessed ‘criminals'” of the Bolshevik era, where “men condemned to death (the Chekists) would receive their sentences with calm.” MAGA-America served up all the relevant ingredients to Trump supporters. In the end, Trump’s post-election demands – that which is permissible in a democracy, a few hundred million in fundraising, is a relative drop in the bucket to ask of his supporters.
MAGA – Trump’s Authoritarian Catalyst
President Trump understood this. Starting from day one, his “MAGA” tagline – “Make America Great Again,” unabashedly spoke to many, particularly the non-college-educated white masses that form the core of his most fervent supporters. They feared change, and he promised a return to an America in which they could be comfortable – AGAIN! MAGA communicated his intent to restore an America to be “for” (Ronald Reagan’s or even Andrew Jackson’s America) as well as his intent to crush the America to be patently “against” (Obama’s and the Democrats’ America).
Lord knows, on taking office, the president had enough hot-button social issues and changes abound with which to activate the usual predispositions to intolerance. There were the athletes taking a knee, the resurgent Black Life Matter youths confronting police abuse, visible signs of LGBTQ advancement in the military and general society, mobilization of Latino political power (in numbers), and an American heartland that reflected disparate immigrant populations – the browning of America (hence his dire need to build a wall on the Mexican-American border).
As the fear of the devil is known to be a more potent instrument of religiosity than the actual love of God itself, “building the wall” became a galvanizing force for a president who had opened his campaign by denigrating Mexican-Americans as “criminals and rapists.” He became obsessed with it. It was a tangible means of mobilizing supporters whom he otherwise could not care less about.
But above all, President Trump made his predecessor, President Barack Obama front and center of his effort to activate and rule by intolerance. Once President Obama was sufficiently demonized (a process that started with the Tea Party), Trump’s ability to animate and mobilize the authoritarian dispositions he needed to usurp traditional Republican politics and American democracy itself became a cakewalk.
Instead of governing and leading while in office, the president campaigned perpetually against that which MAGA America should be against, that which it should retroactively reject and delegitimize – the “un-American” “socialist” Barack Obama (the once “Muslim” subject of Trump’s many years of racist astroturfing). President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, environmental regulations, and “Affordable Care Act” were then targeted for extinction.
By extension, the “Godless” Democrats and progressives who had brought us President Obama were to be subdued in like fashion. Colin Kaepernick and his merry supporters in professional sports were also targeted, as were Climate Change believers (Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord). Latinos (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was two for one), the LGBTQ community, Muslims (first the Muslim Ban, then Ilhan Omar as a gift), and all that they collectively represented, were to be equally vanquished into submission – to be met with intolerance and disdain, viewed as a clear and present threat to the American way of life. Trump presented America-in-opposition to his supporters as a threat to their desired “MAGA America.”
It was more than just four years of racism, xenophobia, and white supremacy as progressives will claim. President Trump and his media and religious magisterium reached beyond the surface to animate and activate the genetic and mimetic predispositions to desired behaviors and manifestations the way the leader of a cult animates his followers into submission – the way the jihadist leader activates his faithful into homicidal-suicidal destructions. So once an enemy that yielded not to the authoritarian instincts of women and men confronted his supporters, their strategy ended up pulverizing the country – and themselves.
Think about it for a moment! Large swaths of the American society for whom politics and the ideology of intolerance (Us versus Them) form the basis of life, confronted (and continue to) a dangerous evolutionary pathogen (informed solely by the basics of biology) as if it were a political opponent to be subdued. In doing so, they provided it with source hosts for rapid replication – the very fuel it needs for mass propagation.
Candidate Obama (2008) had long suggested a reason (for which he was roundly and hypocritically condemned). He had told a Pennsylvania audience that “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It was the truth then, and the truth today.
So when a viral pandemic came knocking, many were too preoccupied “clinging” – this time to Donald Trump’s coded activation, and they were left ill-equipped. When confronted with a phenomenon of science, many of the mimetically activated masses of conservatives, Republicans, and true believers submitted not to the dictates of science but to Trump’s activation, which invited their own deaths and the deaths or impairments of loved ones.
The Activated Authoritarian
On Tuesday, November 1st, deputy sheriffs closed Staten Island’s Mac Public House pub. They arrested general manager Daniel Presti for repeated breach of coronavirus restrictions by him and pub owner Keith McAlarney. Having lost their bar license for repeated defiance of official efforts to stem the rising infection rates on Staten Island, the dynamic duo insisted on their “right to a livelihood.” By Friday, November 4th, Presti told local NY1 news that:
We are not getting the support that we need, the funding, anything from our local, state governments, all governments, for what we need, and we need our livelihoods back, and if they’re not going to give it to us, we’re going to take it back at this point because we have no confidence in them to do what needs to be done.”
Staten Island bar manager Daniel Presti
Strike 1 for citizen defiance of the “illegitimate authority.” Where Kyle Rittenhouse deemed the authorities legitimate in Wisconsin, Presti and McAlarney deemed them illegitimate on Staten Island – a manifestation of the same predisposition but with different conclusions.
A few days later, Mr. Presti was at it again. This time, he used his car to run over a sheriff, who had come to arrest him for the second time in under a week. The sheriff received treatment at a local hospital for multiple fractures, and authorities arrested Presti on a wider array of charges. But as his “mimetic stance” is part of a more extensive political activation, Presti was booked and promptly released to go home – in George Floyd’s and Jacob Blake’s America.
We have seen the defiance of activated, now derisively-called, “Covidiots” (those who are in full rebellion against an act of nature) in full force. They defy public health measures (that are relatively mild compared to Europe and elsewhere). Virus-era restrictions have become battle cries for these “defenders of freedom.” It’s the activation of the conspiracy-infused true believers cynically deployed by a political machine like a bulldozer to pulverize its already atomized masses in order to galvanize the fulcrum of opposition to President Trump’s benefit.
From heavily-armed militias in Michigan’s state capital and elsewhere to post-election death threats for swing-states officials who certified Donald Trump’s loss in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, the disposition is the same. The need to delegitimize and stamp out the “illegitimate” (that which is neither Trump nor MAGA-America) becomes an existential one.
It is the reason why Staten Island’s Daniel Presti felt empowered to overrun an agent of the state with his car. He saw Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Democratic regimes as illegitimate and state and local law enforcement officials who enforce their orders as existential threats.
As the virus rages across the land, the true believers’ attention and focus have now turned to opposing the will of the American people. They believe that President Trump won the election — because he told them so. And they are on the warpath. Presidential election security czar Christopher Krebs spoke to the facts (the election was the most secure in American history).
That made him one of them for attesting to facts, so Trump promptly fired him in order to concretize the opposition to the election results. In the aftermath, there have been calls for Mr. Krebs’ execution – to be medievally “quartered.” Those calls came from prominent Donald Trump acolyte and an officer of the court, Washington DC lawyer Joseph DiGenova. For his part, puppet master President Trump still isn’t wearing a mask in his closing act of fundraising and delegitimizing democracy. He’s still fighting against a ghost — believing it to be a Democrat.
Societal Psychosis
The coronavirus pandemic illuminated a rich set of psychosis in American society, namely the rise of a new generation of political alchemists – charlatan politicians with accumulation and maintenance of power as their sole objective. In addition to dissonance and connivance, a mimetic fatalism has taken hold of large swaths of society in much the way it had taken hold in many parts of Europe in the early-to-mid 20th century.
The indifference shown by putting forward options of the “valued economy” versus the “non-valued life” reflect the level of inequality in the society and the lack of social safety nets in an economy that generates for the rich and leaves minimum state-level reserves for a rainy day. States like Florida and others could hardly make it under the European-style multiple-month lockdowns without going bankrupt.
So, a political leader in Texas uttered the unutterable yet thinkable – that it’s better to open up the economy, put people back in offices, factories, warehouses, and on public transportation even if it means continued viral transmissions that might kill the elderly among us.
The instant gratification of “our livelihood” that now takes precedence over civic duties to protect our communities and us shows an alienation from one another and ourselves. Exploding infection rates, dwindling hospital-ICU capacities, and spiraling death rates spiral mean little or nothing to individual needs to assert absolute dystopian freedoms (a refusal to wear masks, respect social distancing, and adhere to local restrictions) unknown to civil societies.
Hardly anyone would get into a car and head out without a seat belt (a safety measure for us and those in the other vehicles). Yet with a viral pandemic abound, many of us clutch to our freedom purses, viewing responsible authorities as pickpockets around the corner. It’s a cherished “freedom,” as some see it, but in reality, it’s a claimed freedom to infect others and be infected by others – the right to kill or be killed (suicide notwithstanding). Defining and clutching to surreal “freedoms” is only a symptom of the irreconcilable issues facing America.
In Search of Savior & Messiahs
Americans of all stripes are predisposed to search for saviors and messiahs, only then to project that predisposition onto their political leaders. The truth is that President Donald Trump is to his diehards what President Barack Obama is to about 90% of black America. It is our mimetic culture, originating in the church, that drives this need for saviors.
It is our mimetic acculturation that made it so easy for a Reality Television star and multi-failed businessman to tell his faithful at the 2016 Republican National Convention that, “I alone can fix it.” He then proceeded to govern by chaos, lies, confusion, unprecedented corruption, childish tantrums, shady associations, petty vindictiveness, effete Twitter wars (even with a 15-year-old girl in the dead of night), and as the laughing stock of the civilized world.
In the end, the “Messiah” turned out to be a knockoff combined variant of Britain’s mad King George III, match king and con-man extraordinaire Ivar Kreuger, Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko, and a litany of Africa, Asian, and Latin American despots who refused to leave when their “sell-by-date” has expired. Imagine what might have happened if Winston Churchill or General Charles de Gaulle had said no.
Along America’s political spectrum, the dire quest for messiahs has resulted in the cultivation of abject charlatans and aspiring authoritarians. They seek power to rule, not to serve or govern.
Mimetic Dissonance
A salient reality that evades the opinion columns is that dissonance and connivance (in leadership and the media class) have worked well for Americans for a long time. It is just that it is now taking its toll. We have become experts at rebuilding ‘better and stronger’ after successive hurricanes, earthquakes, and wildfires ravaged our coastal towns and laid bare our inland forest and residential neighborhoods, respectively. At the same time, we deny climate change and continue to indulge our growing appetites for fossil fuels and disastrous means of extraction such as fracking.
As we have grown more successful, not only have we grown more and more alienated from ourselves and our communities, but to a certain extent, we have become alienated from reality as well. So we submit with ease to parasitic mimetic activations (culturally transmitted beliefs, political ideologies, and online conspiracy theories) that now enslave us (mentally).
We do not need to read a Richard Dawkins book to understand Biology 101 of the coronavirus because we have all come of age with the common cold and the flu, and we know that we get sick by being around other sick people. The difference here is that we see, even as many continue to ignore, the massive death rates and economic devastation that accompany the coronavirus.
Therefore, the rapid propagation of a viral pandemic was inevitable because, as the virus respects biology’s basics, we disrespect them. We are no longer informed by science (reality) and no longer programmed to adapt to science for survival. Instead, parasitical political, ideological, and conspiratorial dogmas drive many of us. They activate our authoritarian predispositions for the benefit of political and civic leaders and dispose us to oppositional intolerance rather than living and life. It is a form of authoritarian eugenics.
We are now a receding society under siege, a global receptor of and repository for conspiracy theories, driven by fears and paranoia of everything – our neighbors, our institutions, a changing world, the global community, and so on. In the vicious freewheeling media circle/cycle of the online era, our corporate media is mostly advertising businesses competing with propaganda outlets to sell a product like any other.
They chase audience and advertising dollars by “content spooling” rather than informing or disseminating relevant information. Opinions (propaganda) dominate on both sides – telling the audience what it wants to hear, what it needs to reinforce and confirm existing beliefs and prejudices, and what it needs to activate its predispositions and mimetic authoritarian stances.
In the end, President Trump’s authoritarianism and his instinctive activation of authoritarian predispositions at the heart of America have taken us to a disastrous coronavirus precipice. It mandated intolerance to all that is antithetical to Donald Trump — reason, prudence, and decency. He told his supporters that the virus was a phenomenon in poorly run Democratic states when the virus sought hosts – Republican or Democrat in anywhere-America.
The president delineated differences as threats to America because he saw them as threats to his reign of corruption by chaos. He encouraged defiance of authority he believed to be “illegitimate” and cheered on the supine codification of destructive public policies by state-level politicians from Florida and Texas to North Dakota in seeking an air of “legitimacy” in the eyes of his true believers.
The virulent politicization of the coronavirus has been to the detriment of society. Today, as it pushes through, the perfected mimetic authoritarian replicators are melting like ice in the face of an even more fecund genetic replicator that conducts thousands to hospitals and morgues each day as it constantly mutates.
In all fairness, while authoritarian dispositions are equally prevalent on the Left, it is more of an intellectual manifestation that seeks to obliterate and “erase/cancel” you for “inartful” deployment of language, for straddling politically/ideologically incorrect spectrums. It may cost you your job and livelihood, but not your life in an instant. Collectively, though, both extremes are now turning the country inside out.
In retrospect, the real question is: How could we have expected otherwise?
When 2016’s Donald Trump told us, “I alone can fix it,” many of us readily believed the man with a long history of breaking things and walking away would actually have fixed it this time around.
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