The Jan 6 Hearings: Some Quick Thoughts

From Democracy to Demagoguery, with Apathy and Ire

Why is it so difficult to feel anything besides apathy and disinterest when it comes to the January 6 hearings? I admit this is my problem but I sense that many if not most people I know feel the same.

We share the sense that American Democracy has become a fraud and con game, a shallow spectacle. We don’t want to get taken in again. Our political situation feels strangely hopeless, overwhelming, and at the same time, bizarre and surreal. We need to shake ourselves out of this. But how?

In fact, a big lesson we could take from the Trump presidency is the opposite: That individuals, eccentrics, weirdos have more power to influence and change the collective political reality than we could have ever imagined — that our social system is up for grabs. Highly motivated outliers and deviants like Alex Jones, Gavin McGinnis, and Steve Bannon can have significant impact. Given opportunity, strange parasitic creatures climb out of the woodwork to have their day in the sun.

I actually don’t know if Trump’s absurd, flamboyant hyperbole is common to authoritarian strongmen, or if it is particular to him. I don’t get the sense that Victor Orban, Putin, or Duterte make the same outlandish claims. I find Trump’s performative narcissism acts on my Psyche as a buffer zone or a mental anesthetic. I have to overcome strong resistance to bring my conscious, intentional focus to a situation that seems ridiculous and stupid, more than terrifying or serious. I think this is actually a brilliant tactic on his part, whether done intentionally or instinctually.

To take an example: It appears that Trump expressed enthusiasm about the prospect that the angry seditious mob he had conjured up would actually hang Mike Pence, his Vice President, that day. Was this something that might have actually occurred? What would it have meant for all of us — for the world — if we had been confronted by the spectacle of Pence’s cadaver, swollen tongue lolling out of his mouth, hanging from outside of the Capital, as face-painted vigilantes resembling Burning Man rejects danced and cavorted around him? The ideas seems so preposterous; you almost can’t help shrugging it off. Yet it was on the table that day.

After Trump’s election, I studied the articles connecting him on a mythic, archetypal level to an Egyptian frog-headed deity of chaos named Kek, and to Loki, the trickster god, the “lord of misrule,” from Norse mythology. There was a sense that Trump’s election was a kind of circuit-breaker, revealing the degradation of America, its decline into self-delusions and vacant rage along with the still-virulent racism under the surface. In a sense, it felt like a comeuppance. Since then, one of the only two political parties we are stuck with — representing not-quite half the population — has turned away from any interest in Democracy to fully embrace demagoguery.

We see a similar trend toward authoritarianism and autocracy across a lot of the world right now. The reasons for this are not comical, but structural and deep. In the US, extreme wealth inequality — and the cascade of effects this has on society — is one of the main reasons. The Libertarian Koch brothers and their plutocrat cronies have been very effective in influencing public policy over the last decades. The decline in public education means that a huge swathe of the population is too ignorant to understand or even care about complex issues. All they know is they have a declining quality of life and diminishing prospects for the future.

According to political philosopher Nancy Fraser in The Old Is Dying and the New Cannot Be Born, the Democrats became the party of “progressive Neoliberalism,” building a coalition of Wall Street and the tech sector, practicing ritualized identity politics while pandering to the financial elite. This isn’t a strong position for fighting back against Republican neo-fascism.