The Failure of Democrats to Defeat Trump’s Evil with Heroism

What are the chances that one of a country’s two political parties could be as odious as the Republican one without the other, the Democratic Party being just as execrable, albeit in different ways? Besides their positions on a handful of social issues, for some decades, at least, the main differences between those two parties have been their different flavour of badness. Both parties are rotten, because the American culture and Western liberal democracies in general are rotten, for reasons spelled out by the likes of Nietzsche, Thomas Frank, Matt Taibbi, and Yuval Harari. Consumerism, in particular, infantilizes the majority of citizens; moreover, those with the healthiest cognitive faculties, who are least susceptible to fake news, namely young people, don’t vote, whereas old people who suffer from cognitive decline and are thus the most manipulable are also the most reliable voters. Therefore, the political parties have to cater to their constituents’ delusions or ignore them and delegate decision-making to lobbyists and other elites who inevitably become corrupted by their insider knowledge and power over the lower, often most vulnerable classes. This form of decadence is comparable to that which undermines aristocratic societies, the primary difference being that in feudalism, for example, the hard-working peasants were infantilized by the Church, whereas the working poor of a capitalistic democracy are degraded ultimately by cynical corporations.

The kneejerk reaction to any criticism of the Democrats, given the monstrousness of the Republicans under Trump is that such a criticism would be a case of dangerous whataboutism or a centrist allegation of moral equivalence between the two parties. Indeed, if you define political badness as cartoonish evil, the Republicans but not the Democrats are bad. But there are other forms of the pertinent badness. As I explain elsewhere, there are roughly two kinds of political badness, those that arise from masculine and from feminine vices, respectively. The Republicans are obviously more masculine than the Democrats. Partly this is because there are significantly fewer women in the former party, but there also cultural differences at work. Republican culture is shaped by patriarchal Evangelical Christianity and by a social Darwinian cult of pseudo-capitalism, the latter being one of the American plutocracy’s main rationales.

By contrast, Democrats define themselves more as consumers and as professionals or technical elites. To be sure, there are Republican engineers, lawyers, and doctors, but they won’t likely be rationalists, meaning that they won’t be optimistic about the progressive potential of collective rationality. Instead, conservative professionals will subscribe to some philosophy of what’s been called the “intellectual dark web.” Democratic professionals, though, will be optimistic in that respect, and that confidence lends itself to effete snobbery, which is a feminine, passive-aggressive, bloodless attempt at social domination. (South Park satirizes the latter in their episode, “Smug Alert!”)    

In any case, the charge that the criticism of Democrats means to ascribe a (false) moral equivalence with Trump’s Republicans would presuppose a masculine notion of badness, according to which only psychopathic evil could be appalling. What I’m saying is there’s a feminine (Democratic) form of political badness that is just as outrageous as Trumpism. Moreover, to point that out isn’t to give the Republicans a pass. On the contrary, the implication is that radical change to the entire American political system is needed.

Myth-Making and the Cultural Judgment of Politics

Republican badness is obvious, largely because we’re familiar with evil from the monsters and villains depicted in our many forms of entertainment, including novels, movies, and television shows. Not only that, but we’re more interested in the villains than in the protagonists—just as hell often seems more interesting than heaven. These stories act as warnings about what not to do, because it’s easier to prohibit destructive acts than to know which constructive pursuits to recommend. (Most of the Ten Commandments are prohibitions, the main prescription in Christianity being the Golden Rule; Judaism and Islam have many more detailed prescriptions, and their arbitrariness tests the participant’s loyalty.) Still, for over two millennia, fictions and myths have presented us with stock villains and good guy characters. When we’re faced with real evil, therefore, we expect a hero to rise up and defeat the villain. What happens, then, when there’s no such actual hero who resembles the storybook kind in the way the real-world villain resembles its fictional counterpart? What happens when Republicans find deep inspiration for their evil from myths (from the sordid Evangelical reading of the Bible and from the social Darwinian, libertarian, quasi-anarchic ethos of egoism), whereas the Democrats have no such fervent commitment to lessons from fiction, because their elites take themselves to be hyperrational? What you’ll have in the latter case is the lower-class, non-elite Democrat, who is influenced more by Hollywood values, who longs for a liberal hero and who is perennially crestfallen by the evident absence of any such figure.

Two classic examples of this dynamic are the cases of Obama and Robert Mueller. Both were hailed as messianic saviours and both failed to deliver. After the fiasco of Bush Jr.’s Iraq War, Obama was expected to enact radical progressive changes; instead, he was a hyperrational, overly-cautious centrist who was outplayed by Republicans in his handling of Supreme Court nominations, and who protected the banker villains more than the working class dupes in the market crash of 2008. Similarly, Mueller was expected to dig up a treasure drove of dirt on Trump, because Trump is obviously evil and crazy. Mueller disappointed not only by presenting a politically-useless, legalistic report that missed entirely the evil spirit of Trump’s regime, but by personally seeming clueless and ineffectual in his testimony after the many months of silence that had built up his mystique. You could see this latter disappointment in Saturday Night Live’s handling of Mueller. While Mueller was silent, presumably building his case against Trump, Robert DeNiro played Mueller as an all-knowing tough guy whom Trump feared. After the fiasco of the Mueller Report, SNL became more cynical; in an Sept. 28, 2019 sketch, some liberal pundits sit around a table saying that the Ukraine debacle will be enough to bring down Trump, while one hold-out induces that since Trump hasn’t yet been punished for any of his myriad misdeeds, he’ll escape justice in the Ukraine case too and he’ll even beat the Democrats again, in 2020. 

Presently, the Democrat’s hero-in-chief is Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House. Taking fiction as the source of the case studies that shape mass judgments about right and wrong, Pelosi makes for an untenable choice of hero simply because she’s an old woman. I know of few old women who act in fiction as heroic protagonists. One that comes to mind is Aughra from The Dark Crystal. Her heroism is based on her spiritual connection to the will of the planet that’s endangered by the rampant consumption and amorality of the Skeksis. Pelosi isn’t celebrated for her intuition, though, but for her alleged prowess in Machiavellian strategizing, which means Democrats should be preparing for disappointment. Although hyperrationality—the scientistic, technocratic, slave-morality-style overextension of reason to solve nonrational problems, including political ones—is prized more by Democrats than Republicans, and the former are culturally feminine in comparison to the latter, men still excel in cold-blooded analysis, compared to women, because the human form of “cold-bloodedness” evolved as a hunter’s instinct. Men killed animals whereas women gathered nuts and berries and other non-hostile items, which meant that women came to excel in holistic judgments (appreciating what’s present in the environment as a whole) and in relational ones (categorizing the different materials for recipes and so forth). Men needed to overcome their conscience and fear to physically hunt and kill ferocious animals in the wild. They therefore learned to focus on their target, ignoring the context and employing, in effect, the algorithm or step-by-step logic needed for the team to trap and kill its prey without getting killed and eaten in the process. That’s largely why men are more inclined than women to pursue extensive training in math and sciences.

Thus, the conceit that Pelosi is an ingenious strategist or tactician is laughable on its face. But let’s lay aside that sexist presumption and consider Pelosi’s actual strategy against Trump, since exceptions are possible. Pelosi has been cautious in following the polls that have not been overwhelmingly in support of impeaching Trump, and she’s relied on the legal process to build a reasonable case against the president, to convince the public based on the facts thereby gathered that Trump has committed impeachable acts. That so-called logic or strategy of Pelosi’s is utterly feminine in the pejorative sense, which is to say that, under the circumstances (the rise of evil in the “Republican Party”) she ought to appall you as much as Trump. Granted, Trump is evil and psychopathic whereas Pelosi isn’t. But Pelosi is a clueless coward and bean-counter who idolizes the letter of the law in myopic, hyperrational fashion like Mueller.

Pelosi would say, with Obama, that she’s optimistic about “the American people” and therefore trusts their judgment. If most Americans don’t want Trump impeached, that’s a judgment that should be respected and so Pelosi seeks to change the public will by laying out a rational case for Americans to inspect at their convenience. Notice that, if interviewed on the subject, Obama would claim to have retained his optimism or his “audacity of hope” even after Hillary Clinton’s defeat to Trump and after the rise of Trumpian white nationalism in reaction to Obama’s two terms in office. Notice, then, that Obama’s optimism could only ever have consisted either of a tissue of cynical platitudes to charm voters or of a weakness of his feminized character. (Obama would have been feminized first by his hyperrational, liberal ideals and then by his strong-willed wife.) The rational choice when faced with the full force of evil rising up against you is to drastically change your ways, if your negligence and double-dealing nourished that evil in the first place.

In any case, Pelosi’s strategy is to follow rather than to lead the polls. She trusts in the rationality of Americans, whereas half of the politically-active part of the country is committed to Trump’s cult of personality. She expects the majority of Americans to be impressed with an ironclad legal case against Trump even though, first, Trump controls much of the legal system, including perhaps the Supreme Court; second, the American legal system is geared to defeating poor people, not rich ones who can afford to delay matters indefinitely until they go away, as shown in Matt Taibbi’s book The Divide and by Trump’s extensive personal history in the court systems; third, the conservatives’ support for Trump is patently irrational, since it’s meant either to troll or embarrass Democrats, to take vengeance against Bill Clinton’s and Obama’s neoliberal support for globalization, or else to be a stubborn, tribal defense in the faith that God himself is using Trump for “Christian” purposes.

When faced with these facts, there would seem to be two rational strategies for Democrats, one aggressive, the other passive. The aggressive strategy would be a masculine option of attempting to fulfill the expectations for heroism, generated by the archetypes of world fiction. On the one hand, you have the evil monster of Trump; on the other, you have pencil-pushing, dilly-dallying old women and effeminate beta males, otherwise known as the Democrats. The latter are not nearly good enough, not when the American masses look up to heroes played by Clint Eastwood, Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis, among others. So instead of following the polls like a sissy, you might try being heroic in the face of real evil. What might that involve? Merely consult your memory of classic films, novels, and religious myths for the answer.

To begin with, the hero would identify his foe as the evil villain, and make clear that elementary, mythic distinction between good and evil. Have the Democrats done anything like that? Have they framed their opposition to Trump in mythic terms, befitting the actual scale of their conflict? To be sure, they’ve spoken out against Trump and his actions, even going as far as to call him a traitor or unfit for office. But their language is reserved and lawyerly, because they don’t believe in real heroism or even in a black-and-white morality of good and evil. They believe in rationality versus ignorance, and thus in bloodless technocracy. But Democrats don’t have to be moral absolutists to learn how to play the hero, when the American masses are crying out for some such figure to restore their faith in America and to show that their nation is worth preserving. When no such hero shows up, when the world appears as lost as the cynical Trumpian figure entails, why not let their pet monster burn down the entire system, hoping a phoenix will rise from the ashes?

My theoretical advice to Democrats who are interested in changing the polls with rhetoric rather than to follow the polls with impotent displays of hyperrationality, like lemmings—and note that this advice is only theoretical because two years have passed in hyperfeminine weakness, so the cultural situation is already lost for Democrats: whenever speaking publicly about Trump, be sure to speak of him plainly, literally as an evil, psychotic monster, and when contrasting Democrats with Republicans, be sure to speak of the Democrats as courageous heroes battling an actual, mother-fucking monster. If you haven’t the courage to tell such obvious truths or to stand up for yourself in mythic terms when real monstrosity rears its ugly head, you’ve already lost face with the public and don’t deserve to defeat a Trump.

Democrats will reply that they couldn’t do any such thing without alienating conservative voters and unfairly associating those who are mentally ill but harmless with Trump. To take the first bit of nonsense first, the only way Trump-supporters could be further alienated from Democrats is by their waging an all-out civil war with them. American conservatives hate Democrats, believing them to be smug, effete, amoral socialists whose policies benefit the upper class of professionals at the expense of the working poor (as Thomas Frank explains in Listen Liberal). Here we touch on the greater monstrosity of Trumpism, which is that millions of Americans idolize him. That means defeating Trump, the individual, is pointless unless his minions too are disgraced. How do you defeat Trump’s supporters? Again, you begin by demonizing them, not because this would be a useful rhetorical stretch, but because their cultish support for Trump is perfectly demonic! You frame the political issues in terms of good versus evil, reminding Evangelicals, for example, about Jesus’s discourses on ethics, and you do so because the world has already framed events along those lines. American society coughed up Trumpism, meaning that the country as a whole is responsible for its being captured by a cult of flagrant evil, and with no counterweight, Trumpism will persist even when Trump is gone. If Trump’s supporters refuse to acknowledge their complicity with evil, even when the conflict is spelled out in those terms with heroic displays of rhetorical artistry, and if those supporters revolt against the state, then let there be another civil war (a resumption of the last one).

Of course, Democrats shouldn’t merely insult Republicans. The moralizing should be coupled with radical truth-telling in the form of a fearless explanation of how Trumpism (trolling, white nationalism, Evangelical hypocrisy, neo-authoritarian populism, and Trump’s con) emerged. This explanation would have to demonstrate that Democrats understand the gravity of their situation, as a leading democracy, given the evident disenchantment with liberal values around the world. Democrats would have to concede the failures of Obama and of the Clintons. Moreover, although the progressives are happy to talk about how large corporations have captured the government and rigged the American economy to enrich billionaires at the expense of the country’s majority who haven’t gotten an effective raise in four decades, adjusting for inflation and worker productivity, Democrats also need to speak to the structural failures of capitalism and democracy. Those failures help to account for the cynicism, apathy, and resentment that prevent half of the United States from voting and that fuelled Trump’s demagoguery.

Second, avoiding the issue of Trump’s mental disorders for reasons of political correctness is foolish because the distinction between Trump’s dangerous disorders and the benign ones is well-established not just in psychiatry but in popular culture. Trump’s not just a psychopath, but the worst, most monstrous kind, the malignant narcissist, that is, the one who has both deranged love only for himself and contempt for everyone else. That’s the kind of personality shared by dictators and evil, power-mad kings and emperors throughout the centuries. Trump’s disordered mentality has become egregious because the equally-deranged American culture has allowed Trump to prosper for decades. The psychological reality of such a monstrous personality disorder shouldn’t be denied just to protect harmless mentally ill people from the wildly-illogical imputation of guilt to them by their tenuous association with Trump.

I said there were two rational strategies open to Democrats, under the circumstances, aggressive and passive ones. The passive strategy is to do nothing, to let President Trump do whatever he wants, including winning reelection, expecting Trump to thereby destroy the country and humiliate himself, the Republicans, and America at large to such an extent that even Trump’s most loyal followers will lose heart and be incapable of rationalizing their association with such cartoonish evil. Then Democrats could step in with their “I told you so,” and the public would welcome the change. In effect, this is Pelosi’s strategy, because relying on the courts and ducking the mythic status of their conflict with Trump’s Republicans means that Democrats are only delaying their country’s reckoning. Democrats allowed Trump’s evil to metastasize, by not preparing Americans with an adequate rhetorical framing of Trump’s disorder. The risk of this passive strategy, though, is that there’s no guarantee the Democratic Party, which failed to shoulder the hero’s burdens would be welcomed as the antidote to Trumpism. Americans might search the ashes for some third way, which would be eminently rational.

Conceivably, if Democrats had the courage and the creativity from the start of Trump’s presidency to meet Trump’s mythic evil with mythic heroism, if only by evoking an air of heroism with truth-telling absolutist rhetoric rather than, say, by slaying Trump with a sword, Democrats might have cowed Trump into submission, by rallying the American public who evidently respect shows of strength more than promises to enact complicated policies. Democrats might also have forced the Senate to convict and oust Trump, and have shamed Republicans into curtailing their evil plans. But Democrats are piss-poor salespeople, the reason for which is clear: to sell well, you have to be an effective liar, because when the facts are on your side, the item can sell itself; deception in politics—rather than in petty social relations—is a masculine rather than a feminine skill. Women may excel at lying and manipulating their male partner in their local dominance hierarchy, but myth-making seems to be a male enterprise. Men dominate not just in the most rational fields such as the sciences, but in the arts. The best film directors are almost all men, for example, and that’s not just because Hollywood is patriarchal. On the contrary, the system is rigged to benefit men, because male stories are far more popular than female ones, on average.

This might be because women are less interested than men in highly-speculative or imaginative scenarios. Women enjoy dramas, romances and mystery tales, which are grounded in reality, whereas men are drawn to flights of fancy, to science fiction, horror, and even to theological tales. That’s largely why men came to dominate Jewish Synagogues, the Catholic Church, and Mosques; again, the patriarchies followed the inequality in demand. Women could become nuns in Christianity, but almost all Christian theology, for example, is a product of male imagination. Likewise, political myth-making is a man’s or at least a masculine game. Again, an evolutionary reason for this mismatch is that the feminine, holistic thinking of the gatherer of resources and of the nurse of infants is grounded in real-world contexts, whereas the hunter had to imagine counterfactual scenarios to be relished or avoided in his life-or-death strategizing.  

At any rate, what the Democrats do, instead, is neglect their duties as potential leaders, which is just as dangerous as Trump’s open hostility to the law and to norms of American government. By being weak-willed and feminine, the Democrats feed the impression that evil (Trump’s hypermasculinity) deserves to win, that all hope is lost because metanarratives really are preposterous in the late-modern age, and that the forces of amorality have arrived in the US to reign in some unthinkable dystopia. The Democrats running for president in 2020 are hardly more encouraging than Pelosi. The current front-runners are an old, soft-spoken, evasive schoolmarm and a doddering, blustering old man (Warren and Biden). A decade or more ago, Biden might have worked as a mythic hero figure, but even if he wanted to be a radical truth-teller—and his centrist rhetoric proves he doesn’t—he no longer has the mental agility to put on a compelling performance, as the 2019 Democratic debates showed. Bernie Sanders is radical but he comes across as a cranky old man, clinging to his mantras.

The other candidates all have flaws that indicate they wouldn’t rise to the challenge. (They might beat Trump in the election, but that’s not the same as destroying Trumpism at the mythic level of winning over hearts and minds.) Some have the intellectual weapons and radical perspective to be potential heroes, such as Buttigieg, Harris, Klobuchar, and Steyer, but none of them would be a flawless nemesis of Trump. Buttigieg could pass for fourteen years old; Harris and Klobuchar are women, which means they would have to seem compassionate and above-the-fray in a debate with Trump, to “heal” and “unite” the country, rather than perform the mythic role that’s archetypally reserved for men, namely that of the heroic hunter and slayer of monsters; and Steyer is a billionaire who can’t therefore seem a genuine radical and reformer of American systems of government. No one ever became a billionaire without violating ethical norms.

Evil and American Political Entertainment

The above raises two further questions. The first is whether I’m contradicting myself by calling Trump both evil and crazy. Can you be both or are crazy persons exempt from moral evaluation? The answer is that it depends on the type of crazy. There are mentally ill people who don’t know the difference between right and wrong, and they are indeed exempt from moral condemnation. Trump isn’t psychotic in the sense that he hallucinates or takes himself to perceive an alternate reality and literally can’t tell the difference between truth and fiction. Based on Harry Frankfurt’s explanation of bullshitting (in On Bullshit), Trump likely knows what he’s doing is bad but doesn’t care. Trump can’t care about anyone else because he’s a psychopath, and the paradigm for our concept of evil is likely the real-world, neurological wonder of psychopathy. The reality behind fictional portrayals of demons is the serial killer or the cult leader or the raving pharaoh. What that means is that evil has always been entwined with that specific personality disorder. What we call “psychopathic,” folks in the medieval world called “evil” or “sinful” or “antichristian.” Psychiatry is scientistic so the demonic phenomenon had to be stripped of its moral and mythic resonance, but the phenomenon itself, the human brain’s psychopathic configuration, is the reality-based reference point of all talk of both evil and of the egregious mental disorder. I should note that the social Darwinian or libertarian wing of the Republican Party carries over the apology for psychopathic tendencies, since the corporation in the “free market” is just a case of collective psychopathy, that is, of extreme selfishness and narrow-mindedness, given an economic (quasi-theological) rationale for commercial purposes. Indeed, Trump honed his psychopathic vices by engaging fervently in the dog-eat-dog business world under Reagan.

But is psychopathy a form of craziness? Yes it is, because that lack of compassion isn’t a rational choice but a neurological necessity. What’s eminently crazy, for example, is to be as President Trump has been, to deny unpleasant reality not because he can’t understand the difference between right and wrong or because he can’t perceive reality, but because he can’t possibly care about offending others and cares only about maximizing his personal advantage. He wants only to “win” in a zero-sum game against everyone else, and that means shamelessly bullshitting or gaslighting to distract his enemies, sending them on wild goose chases in the media so he can escape being punished for his misdeeds and profit financially from his capture of the presidency. The narrow-mindedness especially of the malignant narcissist is crazy in the sense that it’s an abnormal, dangerous, congenital mindset. 

The second issue is whether I have any standing as a Canadian to poke my nose into American affairs. Why presume I have the right to condemn American culture? My response is twofold. To be begin with, Trumpism could conceivably spill over into Canadian politics, as it has in the case or Rob Ford and Andrew Scheer. (Of course, Canada being the world-famous boring place it is, these stand-ins for Trump aren’t nearly as compelling or entertaining villains as that true symbol of the malignancy.) More importantly, my condemnation of American culture is aesthetic not political. I don’t have the expertise to know how to fix America’s social problems or how the US government should be run on a daily basis. I’m speaking here, rather, about the weakness of Democratic heroism in the face of Republican evil, as these roles are portrayed in the American spectacle, and I’m speaking as a fan of good stories. I’m saying that the story begun by Trump’s epic villainy is liable to have an anticlimax because of misplaced Democratic femininity, and I’m saying that would disappoint me as a consumer of American entertainment.

Let’s not pretend Hollywood is the only entertainment powerhouse in the United States. Once the mass media became a business with an obligation to maximize shareholder returns, the media outlets lost their interest in informing the public to help American citizens make wise choices. News stories became infotainments, at best, facts wrapped up in sensational packaging. Under Trump’s presidency, this business accelerated, thanks again to Trump’s mythic stature as the ultimate American villain. That infotainment found its way to me and it both amuses and disappoints me. I’d rather just be amused by the tales of the American culture war between “liberals” and “conservatives,” so I’m advising Democrats how to defeat Trump, for the sake of upholding the preeminence of American fictions and myths. To remain a good story, Trump needs to have his comeuppance. Otherwise, the American narrative becomes dystopian, which makes for as dull a tale as a depiction of life in Christian heaven.

Failing that, however, since as I said the rhetorical situation is already lost in the war against Trumpism, I’m not seeking to change anything in the United States, but am merely explaining the dire political situation to interested persons who sense with the likes of Bill Maher that the failure of Democrats is much greater than you might have gathered from the corporate media’s storylines.