Perusing the Rec List Diaries — sorry, the Trending Stories — and thinking through what it is, exactly, that explains Trump’s apparent resonance with a large portion of the American public, I think of the mechanism that I’ve heard psychologists refer to as a permission structure, a context in which people can be made to feel comfortable adopting an idea (or buying a product) contrary to the kinds of ideas or products they would embrace. In this connection, no one has been more effective in giving Americans permission to indulge their selfishness and hatred than Donald Trump.
Trump lies incessantly, he lies blatantly — you might say transparently. A person in the possession of half a brain cell can usually see his lies coming from a mile away. But weirdly, his supporters see him as “honest”; they say that he “tells it like it really is” — all of which would seem to fly in the face of his obvious lies, lies so obvious that his supporters smirk knowingly when they are recited back to their faces.
What Trump is “honest” about, as far as the MAGA-hatted set is concerned, is more a matter of style and mood than content or substance. Trump is the first politician probably since the advent of broadcast media in the early-to-middle 20th century to almost completely eschew any of the usual rhetorical pieties and nostrums that more mainstream politicians feel obligated to recite. (Maybe George Wallace is analogous in this way, now that I think of it.) What Trump spews back to his audience is pure, uncut self-interest, completely untouched by rhetorical gestures towards democratic process or shared values or unity or idealism of any kind. I really can’t think of anyone in recent American political history for whom this is so true: celebrities-turned-politicians like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or perhaps Jesse Ventura, are permitted to speak with a bit more frankness than regular politicians, but even their rhetoric is not as given over to the total, selfish, narcissistic self-regard of Trump, who believes everyone in the world looks at things the same way.
And so Trump comes to their small towns, or their exurbs, and just sort of directly appeals to the Trumpist’s lizard-brain amygdala. And the reaction is, “no one ever told me before that I had the right to think like this! Yeah, screw those immigrants!” Trump opened up a conceptual space of selfishness and vicarious cruelty that had been implicitly walled off, even for those who have spent the last twenty years quietly embittered about the slow change of things in the culture that they don’t understand.
The whole thing reminds me of the Spike Lee movie Bamboozled. (It’s a pretty difficult watch, for reasons that will become clear below.) In the film, a Black producer tries to get his boss to sever his contract by pitching a show that would engage in an incendiary revival of blackface minstrelsy, the disturbing racist entertainment practice from the 19th-century, in which white performers would “black themselves up” by applying burnt cork to their faces and engaging in ugly racist stereotypes. In complete contrast to his expectations, the producer found that his white studio boss actually loved the idea, and fast-tracked the program for development.
What is especially unnerving about the movie — and I think entirely correct — is the speed with which a culture that has long tacitly been invested in white supremacy, but which has kind of halfway kept its worst aspects under wraps, suddenly feel like they have permission to do it out in the open. So the Black comics associated with the show have the disturbing experience of running into white people in the street who have unselfconsciously “blacked themselves up,” mirroring the show’s ugly racism right back to them — this time not as irony but as total fandom.
Another example I could point to is the post-9/11 discourse about torture: what had for many decades been completely beyond the pale as even an acceptable conceptual point of discussion in polite company (no matter what the CIA or covert ops groups got up to behind the scenes) had suddenly become the stuff of CNN punditry panels, with people giving full-throated permission for us all to entertain “enhanced interrogation techniques” as an acceptable idea.
The exploding forth of a more visible, if just as present, manifestation of white supremacy has been the product of a President who has given his followers permission to indulge his own toxic brand of nihilism. And once that “permission structure” has been activated, it’s hard to put it all back in the box.