The Confidence Man’s Sorrows
This week, we’re talking about hate, lies, and President Donald Trump with Tressie McMillan Cottom, Joseph O’Neill, Lewis Hyde, and Joshua Cohen. Hear it today at 2 pm, or anytime at our website.
Donald Trump has coronavirus, but that’s just the latest in this week’s three-act story of Trump in bad situations. First came the revelation that he’s hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and has been avoiding taxes; then came his behavior at the debate, where he provided a soft endorsement of a hate group, mused about a plan for staging a coup, and mocked Joe Biden for wearing a mask. Then we learned that Trump has COVID-19.
The novelist Joshua Cohen tells us (speaking earlier in the fateful week) that the president is “a small man with not much imagination and not much intelligence.” And now especially, you see how the strongman can never control circumstances as completely as wished. Trump has always been riding along a mysterious matrix of historical currents, currents that have shifted on him. And so the question remains: what are those currents?
After the debate, sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom and novelist Joseph O’Neill reviewed what we’d witnessed. Joe O’Neill remarked on Trump’s fascism, his racism. He wondered how a country like the U.S. could go down this path:
I’ve lived in countries with dictators, with military police, and, you know, these are countries which typically almost have a good reason to have a dictatorship, which is to say they’ve never been rich, the country has never flourished particularly well . . . You may obviously object to the authoritarian figure, but you kind of understand the popular sentiment, because the country’s just not running well.
Donald Trump and Republican fascism is against the backdrop of a country which is has had its struggles, obviously, and has enormous problems. But from the point of view of white Americans, white male Americans, it’s not as if their lives have been reduced to rubble and they’ve got no one else to turn to and everything else has been tried. American fascism, which is what we all saw in action tonight, has this gratuitous quality. And the only thing I can think of is the the threat to the social capital, represented by the diversification of the country and the rise of liberal ideas about the equality of persons and the equality of the races in particular in this country. . . The only thing I can think of is that we’re seeing a kind of racist fascism.
Tressie McMillan Cottom responded:
I love Joe’s comments about how gratuitous American fascism feels. I think there’s something to that, American fascism starts with the racism and then finds the fascism, and fascism in other contexts has started with the fascism and found racism to be the solution.
The American obsession with status in terms of race and class has set us up for this racist fascism. McMillan Cottom explains:
A lot of social scientists talk about deaths of despair among white Americans. And that’s what Joseph was really getting to, which is that it is not absolute loss that creates American fascism. It’s relative status loss that creates American fascism, and that’s what I mean by “you’re really starting with the racism,” because the racism is what tells you that your relative position, your well-being, is relative to the lack of well-being of someone else, of an other, that your absolute well-being means nothing. It’s not good enough for me to have good health and housing and a salary, I have to have good health that is better than someone else’s health. I have to have good housing that’s better than someone else’s. That’s the paradox of American exceptionalism and why a relatively minor loss of relative status would feel so cataclysmic to white male Americans. So we lead with the racism and sort of work our way back to a Trumpist fascism.
By now you’re aware of Trump’s lies: the racist lies on which he built his political career, lies about his wealth and business failures, and lies that have contributed to the COVID death toll. Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes this World, is an expert on the myths of frauds and tricksters, and to instruct us on the American susceptibility to those tricksters, he directed us to Herman Melville’s Confidence-Man. Melville’s novel is a brilliantly dizzying study of American gullibility, American evil, and American failings, and it speaks all too clearly to us today. Hyde explains how confidence men, from Melville’s character to our contemporary con men, present some facade of success, but there’s something else going on, beyond mischievous fun. Says Hyde:
There’s this weird, almost sinister sense of an emptiness behind the masquerade. You know, often in literature, in the movies, the confidence man is an amusing, playful character. The movie The Sting is fun to watch because these guys are very clever and they’re good-hearted and so forth and so on. Confidence men, in fact, are more like this guy in the Melville story. They’re a little creepy. And they’re a little sad. It’s as if they don’t quite know what they really want or who they really are. They perform a series of roles. But in fact, the more you look deeply, you find nothing.
The novelist Joshua Cohen is from Atlantic City, a place haunted by Trumpian sadness, a site of some of the president’s colossal business failures. He’s studied the social misery surrounding the Trump phenomenon, and he finds a story of sorrow leading toward annihilation.
I think that Trump has become the ultimate tool, the ultimate heuristic, if you will. You’re not voting for Trump. You have to vote for Trump to vote against the things you fear. . . . He is the person that you end up voting for if you are afraid of everything else. If you have a sense of fear regarding a country that is taking a different direction, or frankly, if you have a degree of depression and at this point self-hate and hatred for your country, where your death drive has largely taken over, and you want to see everyone go over the precipice with you.
Cohen says:
He is as amoral as a gun. You know, you can use a gun for many things. And people don’t necessarily ask themselves what is the soul of a gun when they want to use it. But he is the gun that people use against their fears of being written out of the last power they have. This is a country that has been immiserated and impoverished for decades. And the people who are Gen-X age into Boomer age and beyond have only grown up either trying to hold onto what wealth they’ve accumulated or trying to wait for their Boomer parents to die.
They have not seen their ability to rise into a middle class. And so the one thing that this white electorate that I’m talking about has been able to use to tell themselves that they are still powerful is their power over people of other races and ethnicities.
This is always the last thing you hold onto in the same way that racism within a black community or racism within a Hispanic community, when you get into the narcissism of “small differences,” is always about being able to say that you are better than your neighbor, you are better than the person who’s next to you and slightly different. And I think this was the last thing to hold onto when there was no other economic way to rise; when there’s no other way to rise from the situation into which you were born, you will fall back on the deepest blood hatreds. And Trump is the person that will allow them to hold on to that power, that delusion of power for, they believe, the remainder of their lives, after which I don’t think many people are thinking about the future of the country.
This is all bigger than Trump, in other words. As Hyde tells us about the broader American culpability for what’s happening: “it’s not just the con man who pulls this off, it’s the collaboration of the con man and the mark’s willingness to be taken in.”
Read: About the Death Drive
Perhaps you’ve seen that video of maskless leaders hugging each other at the Amy Coney Barrett event, now regarded as a public health disaster, a COVID super-spreader. These are senators, political strategists, powerful people: they know there’s a pandemic, and they know coronavirus spreads specifically through such contact, but there they are anyway, embracing each other in a danse macabre to celebrate their power’s entrenchment.
Freud would see no contradiction here. The human desire for the ultimate, our most innate craving, was to him, in part, a yearning for the end of life. Thus the most exaggerated ambitions, detached from other social or moral considerations, could rather plainly mean self-destruction.
For Freud, the death instinct is a relic of the inhuman from which the human springs, the inherent principle behind our compulsions to repeat, behind our urge to reiterate something that came before—to return to the ultimate “before,” which is inanimate existence. Here’s Freud on the subject:
It would be counter to the conservative nature of instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached. It must rather be an ancient starting point, which the living being left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the circuitous paths of development. If we may assume as an experience admitting of no exception that everything living dies from causes within itself, and returns to the inorganic, we can only say ‘The goal of all life is death’, and, casting back, ‘The inanimate was there before the animate.’
Listen: Khatia Buniatishvili’s Liszt
We’re entering Halloween and are already deep into a scary season. Here, then, is music for dancing with the devil.
Support Open Source on Patreon
There’s obviously a lot to talk about these days. Over on Patreon, you can find our ever-growing audio library of conversations, including conversations about whatever “these days” mean for us. This week, Adam Colman’s talking about wildfires in Australia and the U.S. with Chloe Hooper, author of The Arsonist. It’s a conversation about the social failures behind both climate change and individual destructive acts, on both sides of the Pacific. Find that conversation and more when you become an Open Source patron at patreon.com/radioopensource.
This week’s ephemeral library
David Remnick on COVID and the threat within the White House. This Overlooked Variable is the Key to the Pandemic. Michael Shapiro on a scrambled race to be president. This week’s very own Joseph O’Neill in the New Yorker with a new story. Molly Crabapple: Message From the Future (make sure you watch this one). Music in the Time of Trump.
Whew. What a week, folks. Hang in there!
The OS benevolent tricksters.
