Member Newsletter
I’ve been reading through your emails about your favorite Editors’ Blog posts, and among the maybe dozen that are most often mentioned, there are three themes I wanted to highlight, because they each relate to a central dimension of our politics today.
The first is the post on “bitch-slap politics” which I wrote in 2004; I later began referring to the concept I described in it as “dominance politics”.
The second is the post I wrote the day after the 2016 presidential election about optimism as an ethic, a posture toward life rather than a set of predictions about the future. It was actually a post with a series of bullet-pointed observations. But that one bullet point — about optimism — resonated with people. A lot of you wrote in about it. And in recent years it’s probably the thing I hear about from people most.
I’ll return to those two topics in a moment.
The third theme is not really any individual post but a stream of posts and tweets over several years about “dignity loss” and “dignity wraiths” and like things, a whole bespoke vocabulary or a running gag about this pattern we’re all aware of in which Trump demands of people an ever escalating series of humiliations, dignity losses and more. Trump requires it — that part alone isn’t hard to understand. It’s that people give it … lavishly and fulsomely. Soon you’ve got some guy you may not have agreed with but seemed like a reasonably self-possessed adult, and they’re saying “thank you, sir, may I have another” each time Trump comes up with a new insult name for them, praising his far-reaching intellect and encyclopedic knowledge of history, clapping obediently on his approach. Trump somehow casts a spell over these people and soon they’re like a desiccated dignity husk. It’s like he’s a dignity black hole that no one can re-emerge from.
We were reminded of this in Trump’s visit to Capitol Hill last week. The maniacal clapping, the near-teary-eyed testimonials. TPM Reader BF wrote in noting the historical analogs to the great dictatorships of the mid-20th century or perhaps the grisly theatrics of Saddam Hussein’s strongman rule in Iraq or North Korea. But those people all face prison or worse if they get caught not clapping hard enough. These folks at worst risk loss of political office and exile not to a gulag but K Street or perhaps heading a foundation back in their state or district.
So what is the driver here?
In the early Trump years it may have seemed like a kind of funny pattern tied to the weirdness and poor character of the campaign flotsam that found their way to Trump during his rise to power. But we’re nine years in. It’s far more than a few analogous cases. It’s a consistent pattern that has not only continued but expanded to other parts of the GOP which were originally unaffected. It requires a general explanation and a serious one.
I’ve thought about this a lot and come up with much less satisfying answers than I’ve wanted. But over time I decided that the cluster of issues I mentioned at the top — dominance politics, individual dignity, resilience and optimism — all fit together here like the pieces of a small puzzle, albeit in ways that I don’t yet fully understand. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role of resilience, dignity and self-respect in the way we approach the political or civic realm, how we pace ourselves, how we respond to adversity. This has a practical import: you want to act in the political world in a way that is sustainable over time, able to react and even thrive in the face of adversity and setbacks. But it’s also about how we choose to live in the world in a way unrelated to tangible results. Optimism isn’t just a prediction about the future or getting pumped. It’s a moral way to live in the world. It is a way to live in the world that affirms our own dignity.
A whole gaggle of public intellectuals, psychoanalysts and social theorists in the mid-20th century created a construct they called the “authoritarian personality type,” and the general verdict of history, I think, is that they collectively got out a bit over their skis. I try to be mindful of that. So I’m not proposing a personality type. But there are some patterns in our political world in which left and right are often less meaningful than the divisions between populist authoritarians and civic democrats.
Our word “dignity” derives from a Latin word that is mostly about inequality: the power, prestige or respect associated with greatness — familial, charismatic, wealth or a kind of masculine physical beauty. But as we’ve used it above, the English word “dignity” is really about equality — a way of bearing yourself that commands both self-respect and the respect of others, a refusal to be trod under foot by anyone else, a refusal to make oneself absurd for another’s benefit. Ideally this is reciprocal, at least in aspiration: A desire neither to fawn or be fawned over. The point I’m making is maybe more recognizable when we note that most definitions of equality assert a common worth and dignity to all people, even if wealth, station or power differ greatly. Maintaining our dignity, optimism, self-respect are also the building blocks of resilience.
When I look at our political world today, it is impossible for me not to come to the conclusion that political strongmanism, which is what Trumpism is, is simply antithetical to this whole world view. This extreme version of dominance politics, with its mutual feasts of fawning and being fawned over, the hyper-clapping for Trump as he strides into the room, is intrinsically undignified. Dignity as we’ve defined it here is inherently egalitarian, and strongmanism is stacking people atop one another in relations of extreme inequalities of power. Dignity loss is simply inherent in the system. You wouldn’t think that these theoretical concepts, ideas about power and authority and subordination would make seemingly normal people act in these inexplicable ways. But clearly they do. (Like, I would never argue that this would happen. It’s just totally out of my experience with how ideas dictate behavior, certainly not behavior so closely tied to identity and what seems so close to very basic and even intimate definitions of self-respect. But it clearly does. Or it has.) So we’re just recognizing what’s happening around us and needing to explain it.
All I can think is that this is just hard-coded into strongman/authoritarian — stop me before I use this word! — aesthetic. Once you get on board with Trump and his extreme, pro-wrestling-esque version of very theatrical dominance politics, this kind of hyper-clapping, aggressive dignity loss and slavering obsequious just comes naturally and inevitably. They can’t help it. It comes with the package. Their whole idea of what it means to be a self-respecting person doesn’t so much go out the window as get replaced by well … this!
I don’t have this fully worked out clearly. I’m just pointing to some connections. But it’s clear to me that this isn’t random, accidental or tied to the particular poor character of Trump’s current batch of flunkies. It’s a worldview that comes inevitably with the populist authoritarian package. It’s antithetical to everything that goes into the civic democratic mindset. That’s why it looks so strange.