An American Folk Tale

THE VOICE OF Emperor Hirohito of Japan was famously heard for the first time when he declared on the radio his country’s surrender in World War II. Essayist Richard Lloyd Parry writes that so unprecedented was the whole event for the Japanese that many listeners had difficulties understanding the emperor on account of his highly stylised speech. Throughout his long reign, from 1926 to 1989, the emperor had given only one interview in 1975 to an American journalist. His son, Emperor Akihito (who abdicated the throne in 2019 to make way for Emperor Naruhito, thus bringing to a close the Heisei Era of the Chrysanthemum Throne), did slightly better. He gave occasional but highly scripted press conferences where questions had to be submitted and vetted by the Imperial Household Agency. On a rare occasion however, this persona of royal discreteness slipped—the word ‘persona’ comes from the Latin word ‘prosopon’, a ‘mask’ used during a performance in order to become another—and Akihito broke away from the script and, uncharacteristically and movingly, spoke out against the pressures that had been put on his wife Empress Michiko by social expectations and the vicious gossip sheets. For a brief moment, Akihito the man set aside Akihito the Emperor and revealed his inner thoughts, only to recede back into the elaborate persona that had been patiently created over decades through acts of personal sincerity and the halo bestowed by royalty.

On the other end of this menagerie of political inner voices is Donald Trump who—like most politicians who steer their ship within the maelstrom of democratic waters—misses no opportunity to appear in front of cameras and speak ex tempore. Despite his usual grabbag of conspiratorial gossip, innuendo, paranoia, faux nostalgias and racist dogwhistles, unlike other great megalomaniacs in history there is no confusion about who is doing the talking. His speech is littered with first person singular. His administration’s achievements and victories are solely his (and their failures are solely because of others). It is often as if he were inviting us to see the squalid inner quarters of his steadily declining mind which once had the self-confidence of a veteran braggart to declare, “I have the best words.”

But for much of history, the inner worlds and soliloquies of political leaders, knaves and villains—including in literature—have often posed greater challenges to any efforts to discern who exactly is doing the talking. Is it the head of state, the potentate who dictates terms, the man behind the facade or the human cloistered behind the accoutrement of power? For centuries, ever since that great Shakespearean villain Richard III declared on stage ’Now is the winter of our discontent/ Made glorious summer by this son of York/ And all the clouds that lour’d upon our House/ In the deep bosom of the ocean buried’, authors and scholars have wondered who exactly the ‘our’ is in those lines. They ask this because a few lines later, Richard III resorts to a more familiar first person pronoun: ‘But I, that am no shap’d for sportive tricks… I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty… I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion…’. This ‘pronoun shifting’ in speech has often been a way for the exteriority of a person, especially in a performative context, to recede and allow for a more reflective inner voice to emerge and allow insecurities and anxieties to burble forth.

In the case of Trump, however, this first person singular is often merely not just an opportunity to catalogue and enumerate his self-declared greatness but also an opportunity to use the bully pulpit of the president’s office to speak as if there were no inner restraint. No prejudice was too shameful to utter in public and no paranoia unworthy of treating as fact. It is therefore unsurprising that many have resorted to thinking of Trump’s manner of speaking that is indistinguishable from a steady lurch towards chaos and cruelty as the id of American body politic.

In the Freudian vocabulary, the id is born from unconscious and the ego from the conscious. These mental constructs are drawn as being in directly in opposition—as if the mind’s role was often to participate in an election to choose between the two. The Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis tells us, ‘The id is primitive, the ego civilized; the id is unorganized, the ego organized; the id observes the pleasure principle, the ego the reality principle; the id is emotional, the ego rational.’ All of this naturally lends to useful, but arguably facile, juxtapositions when talking about Trump and Biden. This contrast between the two is played up by a third and singular presence in the American (and democratic) electoral politics: the mainstream media and its handmaiden, social media. To wit, they act like the superego—that hectoring, bullying, self-critical part of the ego that borrows freely from the unconscious, and therefore the id. The superego, writes British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, acts a permanent faultfinder. It echoes a line from Samuel Beckett’s novella called Worstward Ho: ‘Something there badly not wrong.’ The superego is like a self-aggrandising TV anchor or a hectoring father, whose usual rhetorical style is to accuse, to insinuate weakness, to bore you with their righteousness and ultimately pummel you daily with cruel assessments. If we resort to this tripartite division of the American or, more generally, the Western, political mind, the age of Trump has been one where the id and the superego have come together to browbeat the rational ideas of the American self, its ego, into trembling submission. It is perhaps therefore not surprising that Trump’s rallies continue to attract hundreds of thousands of attendees, who pooh-pooh away any risk from the coronavirus and who travel from far and wide to hear him rail against all his, and implicitly their, complaints about the world: ‘Hillary Clinton’, ‘China virus’, ‘immigrants’, ‘Mexicans’ and so on.

The fact that despite his catastrophic handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, he continues to poll within the margin of statistical error in many states against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden should give all a pause. Trump may very well lose by a landslide on November 3rd but Trumpism has sown its seeds in American political grounds. Much like the Reagan-Thatcher era birthed a generation-long belief in neoliberal institutions and market fundamentalisms, the Trump era has birthed a set of vocabularies that has mainstreamed old, primordial urges of the American body politic: isolationism, xenophobia, white nationalism—all in the name of the collective good. Emotions and prejudices which had somehow been tempered by custom, rules and inner restraints of common people have now found ways to appear reasonable and ineluctable thanks to Trump’s singular presence.

In this sense, Trump has been that little understood phenomena in present-day political vocabularies, but one that is all-too-familiar in folk tales—a Great Seducer who, through his own autobiographical soliloquies, has tapped the listener’s subconscious complaint that the world is unjust. Seduction, of course, is a dirty word especially in our times when men and women speak about ‘agency’ as if it were a sacramental truth of our inner psychologies. But seducers have appeared throughout history, in guises that are often hidden in plain sight. In folk tales, which are often morality plays—such as ‘Little Red Cap’ (made famous in the 17th century version by Charles Perrault called ‘Le Petit Chaperon Rouge’ or ‘The Little Red Riding Hood’)—they are explicitly visible. The wolf in that folk tale, as psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has written, is a ‘dangerous seducer’, who ‘represents all the social, animalistic tendencies within ourselves’.

Modernity has spawned many seducers, especially when old order crumbles and fosters cognitive crises—be it when the gods and magic surrendered to scientific explanation (Max Weber called this ‘the disenchantment of the world’), when rituals that marked the relationship between the sacred and the profane eroded (Marcel Mauss called it ‘desacralisation’) or when an individual was set afloat in a sea of meaninglessness thanks to breakdown of social relations (Emile Durkheim called this ‘anomie’). Trump, and his soliloquies which are all bile and much fury, appeared at a similar juncture: when economic order has over the past two decades changed all-too-dramatically for many. This is, in parts, the real reason to be pessimistic irrespective of the electoral results. The underlying faultlines of the American polity are only likely to widen as economic insecurity marries with demographic changes to birth strange new anxieties with no names. In a decade from now, we may come to think of Trump as a symptom of malaise and divisions that was intermittently successful in overpowering the rational part of the American political mind. Only by then however—faced with a powerful and belligerent China—there will be more calls for an efficient and radical version of all that Trumpism, in its malevolent genius, has set in motion. Winter, after a brief spell of spring, is coming.

DemocratesDonald TrumppoliticsRepublicanUS Elections 2020