Over at The Atlantic, Elizabeth Bruenig has a theory about why Trump is so popular. A taste:
Consensus on the causes of Trump’s sweeping electoral victory has formed around the idea that voters were responding to Democratic performance on material matters, namely inflation and immigration. But the Trump movement has never been, to my mind, strictly concerned with tangible issues; part of the allure is immaterial by nature, addressed to elemental human urges. Trump offered something special on that count from the beginning—a politics consisting not mainly of a positive vision but rather of a series of opportunities to own the libs. In this project, rational policy details aren’t a priority and are sometimes absent altogether; the point is domination of one’s enemies, a libidinal desire.
Consider the recent post-election slogan “Your body, my choice,” also engineered to upset and humiliate liberals: It’s an overt statement of sex and dominion. And Trump draws that out in people. “Disinhibition,” the New York Times writer Ezra Klein wrote recently,“is the engine of Trump’s success. It is a strength.” Trump is in touch with the impulses and desires that run counter to social norms, and he invites his audience to put aside the usual internal barriers to acting on or voicing them. This moment is an opportune one for a revival of Freud, whose work, with its signature focus on subterranean inner worlds, helps make sense of these tendencies and their implications for politics.
Read the entire piece here.
E.B. is the Full Monty of those that are blind and accuse those they disagree with of doing actions and having motives that perfectly
describe what the side they agree with practices.
This writer exemplifies a–Constipated Mind and Diarrhea of the Hand and Keyboard.
I didn’t think much of this Bruenig piece, frankly, though I often appreciate her. I hope she’s not falling into the Freud trap, because that will be the end of her. Theoretically it’s all quite mystifying–Freud can be used to explain *anything*–but even worse, he’s useless. Woe-is-me-the-primordial-drives-erupted-and-caught-us-unawares-so-we-lost. All he does is give you a different vocabulary to describe what you’re looking at, in terms that are calculated to confirm your righteousness and their hopelessness.
You have to love her warning that those using Freud to invidiously psychoanalyze the folk who chose not to vote for them need to “recognize that they, too, are ruled by motivations they cannot easily recognize or define.” Oh, is that all? And what does that mean? What is one to do with it? How otherwise intelligent people get sucked into this stuff will never cease to amaze me.