It has taken me nearly forever to notice a stupid and obvious fact about Donald Trump. He rose to fame as a reality TV star, and the one thing everyone understands about reality TV — people who love it and people who hate it — is that reality TV is not reality. It’s something else: the undermining of reality, the pirated version of reality, the perverted simulation of reality. If reality is Hawkins, Indiana, then reality TV is the Upside Down.
So I’m not sure how many of the people who voted for Trump actually thought they were getting a real president of a real country in the real world. (I feel badly for those people, though not as badly as they should feel about themselves.) That whole "real world" thing has sort of worn out its appeal. They wanted a devious goblin-troll from another dimension who would make the libtards howl and pee their panties, and so far they have had no reason to be disappointed.
Zero legislative accomplishments, an utterly incoherent foreign policy, a wink-and-nod acquaintanceship with neo-Nazis and white supremacists and an ever-lengthening list of broken promises and blatant falsehoods? Whatever, Poindexter: Fake news! Anyway, it’s all worth it to watch people in suits with Ivy League educations turn red on TV and start talking about history and the Constitution and all that other crap.
A year ago last August, in what felt like a noxious political environment but now looks like a different nation, a different historical era and perhaps a different reality, I wrote a mid-campaign Zeitgeist report that contained a strong premonition of what was coming. It wasn’t the only premonition I had while covering the 2016 presidential campaign. But I’m honestly not congratulating myself here, because like many other people who write about politics, I covered up my moments of dark insight with heaping doses of smug and wrong. (...)
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the real innovators and disruptors in this dynamic were not the Bannon-Hannity Trump enablers in the media but the Trump demographic itself, which was more substantial and more complicated than we understood at the time. Trump’s supporters are mostly either studied with anthropological condescension or mocked as a pack of delusional racists hopped up on OxyContin and Wendy’s drive-through, who have halfway convinced themselves that their stagnant family incomes and sense of spiritual aimlessness are somehow the fault of black people and Muslims and people with PhDs. But in some ways they were ahead of the rest of us.
Don’t get me wrong: A lot of them are delusional racists who believe all sorts of untrue and unsavory things. But MAGAmericans have also imbibed a situational or ontological relativism that would impress the philosophy faculty at those coastal universities their grandkids will not be attending. They have grasped something important about the nature of reality in the 21st century — which is that reality isn’t important anymore. (...)
When Trump exults on Twitter over the perceived defeat of his enemies, Republican or Democrat or whomever, it often appears ludicrous and self-destructive to those of us out here in the realm of reality. But he’s making the same point over and over, and I think his followers get it: I’m down here in the labyrinth gnawing on the bones, and you haven’t even figured out how to fight me! To get back to the “Stranger Things” references, there must be a rule in Dungeons & Dragons that covers this scenario: There’s no point in attacking an imaginary creature with a real sword. (...)
Repeatedly hitting people over the head with a rolled-up newspaper, as if they were disobedient doggies, while telling them that Donald Trump is a liar and a fraud is pretty much the apex state of liberal self-parody. They know that. That’s why they like him.
Trump is a prominent symbol of the degradation or destruction of reality, but he didn’t cause it. He would not conceivably be president today — an eventuality that will keep on seeming fictional, as long as it lasts — if all of us, not just Republicans or the proverbial white working class, hadn’t traveled pretty far down the road into the realm of the not-real. Reality just wasn’t working out that well. God is dead, or at least he moved really far away with no phone and no internet, and a lot of reassuring old-time notions of reality loaded in his van. The alternative for many Americans is dead-end service jobs, prescription painkillers and blatantly false promises that someday soon technology and entrepreneurship will make everything better.
So I’m not sure how many of the people who voted for Trump actually thought they were getting a real president of a real country in the real world. (I feel badly for those people, though not as badly as they should feel about themselves.) That whole "real world" thing has sort of worn out its appeal. They wanted a devious goblin-troll from another dimension who would make the libtards howl and pee their panties, and so far they have had no reason to be disappointed.
Zero legislative accomplishments, an utterly incoherent foreign policy, a wink-and-nod acquaintanceship with neo-Nazis and white supremacists and an ever-lengthening list of broken promises and blatant falsehoods? Whatever, Poindexter: Fake news! Anyway, it’s all worth it to watch people in suits with Ivy League educations turn red on TV and start talking about history and the Constitution and all that other crap.A year ago last August, in what felt like a noxious political environment but now looks like a different nation, a different historical era and perhaps a different reality, I wrote a mid-campaign Zeitgeist report that contained a strong premonition of what was coming. It wasn’t the only premonition I had while covering the 2016 presidential campaign. But I’m honestly not congratulating myself here, because like many other people who write about politics, I covered up my moments of dark insight with heaping doses of smug and wrong. (...)
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the real innovators and disruptors in this dynamic were not the Bannon-Hannity Trump enablers in the media but the Trump demographic itself, which was more substantial and more complicated than we understood at the time. Trump’s supporters are mostly either studied with anthropological condescension or mocked as a pack of delusional racists hopped up on OxyContin and Wendy’s drive-through, who have halfway convinced themselves that their stagnant family incomes and sense of spiritual aimlessness are somehow the fault of black people and Muslims and people with PhDs. But in some ways they were ahead of the rest of us.
Don’t get me wrong: A lot of them are delusional racists who believe all sorts of untrue and unsavory things. But MAGAmericans have also imbibed a situational or ontological relativism that would impress the philosophy faculty at those coastal universities their grandkids will not be attending. They have grasped something important about the nature of reality in the 21st century — which is that reality isn’t important anymore. (...)
When Trump exults on Twitter over the perceived defeat of his enemies, Republican or Democrat or whomever, it often appears ludicrous and self-destructive to those of us out here in the realm of reality. But he’s making the same point over and over, and I think his followers get it: I’m down here in the labyrinth gnawing on the bones, and you haven’t even figured out how to fight me! To get back to the “Stranger Things” references, there must be a rule in Dungeons & Dragons that covers this scenario: There’s no point in attacking an imaginary creature with a real sword. (...)
Repeatedly hitting people over the head with a rolled-up newspaper, as if they were disobedient doggies, while telling them that Donald Trump is a liar and a fraud is pretty much the apex state of liberal self-parody. They know that. That’s why they like him.
Trump is a prominent symbol of the degradation or destruction of reality, but he didn’t cause it. He would not conceivably be president today — an eventuality that will keep on seeming fictional, as long as it lasts — if all of us, not just Republicans or the proverbial white working class, hadn’t traveled pretty far down the road into the realm of the not-real. Reality just wasn’t working out that well. God is dead, or at least he moved really far away with no phone and no internet, and a lot of reassuring old-time notions of reality loaded in his van. The alternative for many Americans is dead-end service jobs, prescription painkillers and blatantly false promises that someday soon technology and entrepreneurship will make everything better.
by Andrew O'Hehir, Salon | Read more:
Image: AP/Getty/Shutterstock/Salon
