Shortly before he passed away my grandfather made a remark about Donald Trump. “He’s trying to be a dictator but is slowly realizing that it’s not possible to govern this country that way.” True, I think we can agree on this idea about the president. He wants to be a dictator, but the United States government, it’s structure and mores, keep him from becoming one. A good example of this is the travel ban. It went through months of legal challenges before the Supreme Court upheld it. If he were a dictator, he would have signed the executive order and there would have been no legal challenge to it at all.
Which brings me to my main point, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, as well as Trump’s election are episodes in a larger narrative, that narrative is the cultural decline of America and the Western World. Even though we’re not living in one now, if we keep to this path, a dictatorship is quite possible.
The cultural decline of the West is an idea that has been around for some time. As far as I can tell it begins with Oswald Spengler’s book Decline of the West. The title pretty much gives away what it’s about. According to Spengler cultures are like organisms, with stages of development. In the case of culture it’s a thousand years of flourishing and a thousand years of decline.
Writing in 1918 he had the opinion that the West was in decline. I would have to agree with him, but as an American I would have to put this into the context of America itself, America as a culture, as an expression of the West.
I once read in an essay by the psychologist Carl Jung, a hero of mine, that America is the most “western” of Western countries. I would say so. If we define Western Culture as the culture of the individual then I would have to say that is America. We idealize the individual, and it’s origins go all the way back to the founding of America. A phrase that best summarizes this idea is President Hoover’s phrase, “rugged individualism”.
And here we are with the most individualistic time in our history, the twenty-first century, almost a hundred years after Hoover.
Continuing with the notion of cultural decline, there’s a scholar I’ve recently discovered and have come to admire these past few months, Camille Paglia. In her book Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence: From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, she presents the idea of cultural decadence that is when cultures are in a moral vacuum, some key factors are present. Here are just two of those factors, phenomena I see as applicable to our current situation; a sense of alienation in the individual, and a rising bourgeoisie with increased sexual promiscuity and libertinism. Once in a moral vacuum, cultures seek to fill it with whatever is on hand; usually perpetuating the very decline they are trying to escape.
Paglia has since the book’s publication gone on to elaborate on these ideas. In an interview that can be found online she warns that we are culturally heading towards a phase that is similar to late Rome. In a lecture she compares our current time to that of late Hellenism, a time of great uncertainty much like today, where authoritarian men ruled and nobody was sure what the consequences of such a rule would be. Sounds a lot like Trump, Putin, and Kim Jong Un. These are both eras of history that most scholars would see as the end of a particular culture. With that we come once more to Spengler and his idea of cultural decline.
But what does this have to do with Trump or Kavanaugh? First of all I want to make some things clear. I didn’t vote for Trump and never in a million years would I do so. He is the most dangerous man to occupy the White House since Nixon. He’s utterly unqualified to hold the presidency and yet he’s there. He’s president because of American decline and decadence.
He represents the dark side of “rugged individualism”. Here’s a man who professes his status as self made billionaire, which has now been called into question by the New York Times in a recently published article. In addition to his status as a wealthy man, Trump says whatever he wants to say, never questions himself, and is completely unapologetic, he is American Exceptionalism at its worst. Thus, he is the perfect beacon for all the resentments, dreams, and fantasies, of a morally depraved and declining America.
Now allow me to be clear on what I mean by morality. I am no social conservative. I champion liberal social causes. More than that I’m proudly sex positive and reject old-fashioned views on sex and monogamy.
By morality I mean a cultural narrative or ideology that all citizens in a society can believe in. That kind of morality, that kind of national direction is gone.
Evangelical conservatives, who I find to be utterly distasteful would argue that the fault lies with the secular humanists and that America, can only be saved by a return to old-fashioned, God-fearing morality. What they don’t realize is that they’re part of the problem, and actually might be the problem. Science has debunked their literal interpretation of the Bible. The box has been opened and there’s no going back. More to the point, their agenda creates a culture of hypocrisy in which men and women, although primarily men, engage in morally dubious behavior, while imposing their moral narrative on others, as if it will somehow cleanse them of their moral faults, or that the faults belong to the other and not to them, a phenomenon Freud would call projection. It’s from this that we now have a man that has been accused of sexual assault, regardless of the evidence, regardless of the victim’s testimony, appointed to the Supreme Court. And more than that, he claims to be a man who upholds conservative, family values. It’s a morality that turns a blind eye where it counts.
Which leads me to mention another book, How Democracies Die by Steven Livitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. They argue that American democracy is in danger. The basis of their argument is that the recent polarization of the American electorate makes it more difficult than ever before to find compromise. In a situation such as this, the chances of an authoritarian like Donald Trump coming to power are increased.
I have to agree with them, but I would also point out that the moral vacuum has been replaced by politics and that it is from there that the polarization has its origin.
But then we need to ask ourselves, what is America? What has America stood for? We say we stand for equal rights and freedom, but we have not always practiced that. In fact I would say that we never really have. We were founded on the blood of a people that were here before us. And much of our economy and industry was built on the backs of slavery.
This is what I call America’s Hypocrisy. It’s a fundamental part of our identity and has haunted us since our Declaration of Independence was signed on that hot summer day in 1776. The hypocrisy is from the dichotomy of what we preach and what we actually do. We preach equal rights for everyone and yet we only give them to a privileged few. We say we’re for freedom, and yet we’re an empire. But and this is not to be ignored, we have the potential to be the things we preach. That is our greatness, it’s that we could be those things. We could have liberty. We could have freedom. And we could have equality for everyone. But when we no longer believe these things, when we let out voices become silent, then those ideals and those hopes die, and the American hypocrisy lives on.
Sources:
Barstow, David, Craig, Susanne, Buettner, Russ. “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father.” The New York Times 2 Oct. 2018: NY Times. Web. 16 Oct 2018
Gay, Peter. Freud Reader. Vintage, 1995.
Jung, Carl Gustav, et al. The Collected Works of C. G. Jung. Routledge & Paul, 1993.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae. Yale University Press, 2014.
Spengler, Oswald, et al. The Decline of the West. Windham Press, 2013.