The Donald Trump Archives — Prophetic Musing #1 [12/22/15]
The question on the minds of everybody who follows politics right now is: Why would Donald Trump stoop so low as to insult Hillary Clinton for her bathroom breaks during a recent Democratic Presidential debate? Isn’t that so far beyond the pale that it’s just….un-Presidential in the extreme? And, apart from a few yahoos, why would anybody — anybody— whatever their politics, think this was acceptable, much less something worth roaring one’s approval at?
I think it’s time for all of us, and especially my good friends on the Left, to understand that Trump is playing a different sort of game here, and not one that can be made sense of using the standard political vocabulary. I’m not even sure that the vocabulary of what might be called “the rise of fascism” quite does the job. What is needed, in fact, is the theory embraced by a somewhat earlier iteration of the Left: Rabelais and His World, by Mikhail Bakhtin.
Trump is, for better or worse, opening up the deadened language of conventional American politics with a blast from down below. He calls it a refusal to bow to “political correctness.” But he’s got a woman problem — or, more correctly, a menses-and-shit problem. Any American man who can, in successive seasons, deeply insult both the ice queen of the Fox-American Right (Megyn Kelly) and the feminist icon of the MSNBC Left (Hillary Clinton) by demanding that we see them as reduced to their most fundamentally gendered/human bodily functions is working a very weird and unusual sort of cultural magik.
I don’t like it. But I want to understand it. To call him “misogynist” isn’t sufficient. It’s woefully inadequate — inadequate in the same way that calling a lunar eclipse “bad lighting” is inadequate. It doesn’t begin to do justice to the phenomenon.
This is where Bakhtin comes in. Donald Trump is winning, right now, because he is, for the first time in many decades, supplanting the ritual language of American politics with the language of carnival. “Carnival familiarity,” writes Bakhtin, “was reflected in speech patterns. For example: abusive language. But we are especially interested in the language which mocks and insults the deity and which was part of the ancient comic cults”
If you listen to the laughter which follows on Trump’s insults, it is precisely the laughter sketched by Bakhtin: “the language which mocks and insults the deity.” One day the deity is Jeb Bush, the deity of the so-called Establishment Republicans. “Poor Jeb,” he mocks: “He’s got no energy. No energy!” The next day it’s Hillary: the deity of the feminized (as he would have it) Liberal/Left Establishment. “I know where she was. It’s disgusting. Disgusting!”
Trump is a clown. He is a master transgressor. That is his (yes) fearsome power. He is seeking in his own twisted, instinctive way to revivify America’s degraded, ineffective, over-ritualized political discourse. Blame him for being crass. Or thank him for being crass. Just don’t hate me for telling you the truth.
You want to shout, “He embarrasses me! He’s not Presidential!” Or you want to shout, “Finally a politician is being honest with me and actually saying what he thinks.” Guess what? You’re both right. The Left and the Right are both right about Trump. He’s got no class and he’s doing something vitally important. In a brilliant, maddening, intuitive way, he’s bringing the vulgar language of grotesque realism to the American Presidential campaign.
Here is how Bakhtin sees Trump-as-clown:
“One of the main attributes of the medieval clown was precisely the transfer of every high ceremonial gesture or ritual to the material sphere; such was the clown’s role during tournaments, the knight’s initiation, and so forth….To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth. Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one…. Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving.”
Trump is destroying and/or regenerating American politics.
No matter what your political persuasion, you agree, I suspect, with at least half of the preceding sentence.
Or else, foolishly, my unregenerate and overconfident Left/Liberal friends, you imagine that you know exactly what he is. If that’s the case, then why, for the last six months, have you so consistently misjudged where he would be, poll-wise, in late December of 2015? That’s on you, not on him.
Get hip, quick. Trump is a master transgressor, a carnival barker and CEO of the revels. Figure out what that means and come up with a deeply grounded, multipronged response. If you don’t, he’s President.
