In a couple of recent conversations, I’ve tried and largely failed to articulate an idea I have about Trumpism and stupidity. I should say I don’t mean stupidity as a personal quality, just a way of thinking. Quite smart people can fall into stupid ways of thinking. In that sense, there seems to me something willed and defiant about Trumpist stupidity. It seems to be chosen and to require a kind of double consciousness, belief somehow strengthened by the understanding that you’re being asked to believe a lie.
The answer I’ve heard twice is that, no, these are true believers, it’s a cult. They actually believe that the election was stolen and Trump is a hero and Joe Biden will lead us into a Stalinist hellscape.
Maybe my first thought is that beliefs are chosen. You are not just programmed by Fox News or Newsmax or OANN or Breitbart; you turn on the program. Easier to do that, of course, if everyone around you (or in your Facebook feed) is making the same choice. The tribal nature of Trumpism is one of its most obvious features.
Tribalism goes a long way towards explaining what I think I’m seeing. But that, too, takes us a step away from belief. This is belief as signal of membership. Belief is thus arbitrary, since any belief can serve equally well as signal. The signal is what’s important. The tribe itself is artifice. It’s held together not by beliefs and practices handed down through generations, but by justifications grabbed on the fly, wildly improvised.
I need to put in a word for meaning. However improvised and jury-rigged, beliefs fill our need for meaning. Aren’t these Trumpists simply trying to find meaning in a world in which much of what made their lives meaningful is under threat? Doesn’t the question of meaning bring us back to cult?
But cults are about reverence, and while you can find plenty of creepy apotheosizing of Trump in the movement, Trumpism itself is largely fueled by contempt. The invasion of the Capitol was about as literal a saturnalia as you could imagine. As in the ancient saturnalia, hierarchies were turned upside down. The sacred was defiled. Fools became kings. People shat on the Capitol floor.
The ancient saturnalia reinforced order by traducing it. Nowadays the saturnalia is the cult.
What’s most being shat on are the rules of intellectual engagement. When Representative Mo Brooks whips up the crowd that invaded the Capitol and then blames the riot on Antifa, the signal is not about belief. The signal is about how brazenly we can defy logic and evidence. The saturnalia is intellectual. The constraints of reason are being deposed.
Which is why the stupidity strikes me as willed and defiant. Chosen. And childish.
I know that there are good people who support Trump for what they believe are good reasons (though, to be honest, if your world view has brought you to that place, it might be due for some revision), but much of Trumpism exudes the narcissism of children. Children want to be cared for but not constrained. Medicare but not masks. Police but not background checks. The Cruzes and the Hawleys and the hedge fund libertarians may be more sophisticated than the folks that stormed the Capitol, but they express the same willful defiance of constraint, including the constraint of facts and reason.
This is where the frame of cult or tribe fails. Cults and tribes are about the group. Trumpism, like the man leading it, is about the rage of the insatiable self.
As Timothy Snyder says of Trump in today’s Times, “His vision never went further than a mirror.” The rage of his supporters at his defeat is a rage at not seeing their face in the glass.