The Way We Live Now, Part 1
Sources: Michael Valdon; Pixbay.com/photo; Alex Jones: Sean P. Anderson (Dallas, TX)
Author’s Note: this is the first installment in a four-part series, “The Way We Live Now,” on the current public climate of fear and intimidation that since the kick-off of the last presidential campaign in 2015 has dominated national life in the United States. In particular I look at how this toxic environment has poisoned our politics and even reached into our very relationships with friends, co-workers, neighbors, and family members. Next up is Part Two: “How the Public Climate of Fear and Intimidation Works: A Practical Guide.”
Harsh Climate
We think we know who they are: they cut you off on the highway, they taunt you to your face, mock you behind your back, smirk at you from the TV screen, standing always beyond reach. They are everywhere and anywhere, from the schoolyard to the boardroom, the office cubicle to your local bar. They come unbidden, visiting violence upon the unsuspecting and the fearful alike. They now lurk even in your pocket wherever you go, and you can feel the buzz as trolls spew 140-character poison to anyone and everyone. Even at home you can’t get away from the pervasive climate of intimidation and disrespect: you turn on your TV or laptop and there they are, injecting venom and fear through old and new media. Requiring little or no provocation, they are poised to strike at the first sign of weakness — or courage. For they tolerate no one, no one but their own kind — belligerent bullies ready to declare who is fit to speak, to listen, and to submit.
Few are called but even fewer are chosen to join the violent circle of sovereign subjects. That can be figured out only in the assault, the shout, the smear. As Donald Trump said to then Fox News host Megyn Kelly in a subsequent interview after publicly demeaning her following the first Republican primary debate, “But you gotta get over it. Fight back, do what you have to do.” From the workplace to Beltway politics the spectacle of intimidation never seems to stop, and nothing is ever guaranteed: from one day to the next, even those within may fall out (Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions), and those without, may work themselves within as circumstance and events warrant. And those who’ve been active in resisting the right-wing onslaught from Washington over the last eighteen months are showing signs of fatigue as well. There’s no escaping the constant barrage that greets us morning, noon, and night.
The Experience
The violence, the intimidation: you think you’re ready — perhaps you’ve experienced it before — but still when it happens, especially to you, your person, your body, the body politic, its sheer power, speed, and intensity bypass whatever defenses you have. From the edges of consciousness, the aggressors rush up, attacking and screaming in your face, “You’re nothing but” scum, a liberal, a feminist, a Muslim, a self-hating Jew, an immigrant, a Bernie Bro, a Putin stooge, a “nasty woman,” a faggot, a loser. Bewildered, we’re thrown off balance — we can’t believe it is happening. Be it again or for the first time, it seems to make no difference. The hormonal response wells up — “fight or flight” — but it’s already too late; something has slipped under our skin, and wormed its way to the core of our being and taken over. Disoriented and at a loss for words, we have the creeping realization that whatever our sense of self was before, we can never quite retrieve it again.
Thanks to bullying and intimidation we find ourselves forced into a life divided between what we are — or rather, what we have become — and a former sovereign sense of self that the aggressors have persuaded us we’ve lost.
Something or someone has intruded — and violently so — and changed us. Our self-representation has been wrested away, and we are, as it were, beyond our own reach. Something else is there, intimately there, a power — and a weakness — that we can’t control. Captive of our potential weakness and the aggressors’ potential violence, we have entered into the infinite, fearful regress and fact of future threat. If there wasn’t a relationship before, there is one now, unbreakable even as it breaks us. From now on we lead a compromised existence. We are prisoners of that new, injured, transformed self and of the agents of that transformation; they have declared with violence, “This is who you are, nothing more, nothing less.”
With successful intimidation the unthinkable has happened, and we feel betrayed by both the aggressors (“How did they dare?”) and ourselves (“How did I let it happen?”) — and there begins the endless search for answers. If our sense of humiliation is severe enough, we respond by reasserting ourselves through bullying others in turn, or in the case of the extreme distress of isolated young U.S. males consumed with self-loathing, taking a gun and shooting down teachers and students in classrooms and hallways before dispatching their abject selves to oblivion.
The Emotional Cost
The toxins are so powerful that in simply witnessing the attacks by-standers come away tainted, their psychic immune systems breached. The aggressors destabilize and intimidate their victims and everyone else by making violently clear to one and all that they are supremely indifferent to any type of social, psychological or ethical boundary: they don’t hesitate to belittle a critic’s gender and a judge’s ethnicity, mock a reporter’s disability, question a rival’s mental fitness, and deride the patriotism of athletes protesting police brutality. They issue casual threats to the physical safety of protestors and political opponents. Once in office they strike business deals in open violation of the Constitution and unleash banks to speculate with customers’ deposits. Cruel to a fault, they tear immigrant children from the arms of undocumented parents and cage them in holding pens, and abandon whole generations to the mercy of global warming’s destructive power. Even public humiliation of friends and allies of the White House can’t be ruled out. Trump’s achievement has been to combine Republicans’ longstanding aggressive tactics with a highly personalized brand of political intimidation, bullying, and fear-mongering, lending them a truly psychological and affective dimension that perhaps they didn’t quite have before.
The preemptive violence is all-enveloping and forces everyone to react, and if you don’t, the news media — conservative and liberal — eager to drive up ratings, make sure you do. And thanks to social media that now dictate the news cycle, it’s 24/7, all the time with little reprieve crowding out coverage of virtually all other political issues that readers and viewers may care about. Our reactions become so many emotional facts on the ground that remain with us even as the next cycle begins. Unplug your TV, suspend the newspaper, close your laptop, ignore your smartphone, it’s all to no avail: breathless colleagues, friends, or neighbors eager to tell you the latest, accost you with details of the day’s outrage. Finally, matters aren’t helped by liberal and progressive politicians and organizations to which you’ve made one or more donations: in reply to your latest contribution they come right back with the urgent demand that you convert it to a monthly donation or that you need to give again right away. And again. Regardless of events and indifferent to contributors’ privacy, the emergency requests land in your inbox every single day as if your donation made no difference emptying it of any value or meaning. This deluge, too, is 24/7, non-stop. It’s as if they owned you and your pocketbook. Mental safety or peace of mind are now hard to come by, even with friends and political allies whom we thought we could depend upon to keep the harsh climate and its intrusive violence at bay.
As the world as we know it threatens to unravel before our very eyes, the cumulated emotion exhausts and isolates. We are thrust into a life of raw reactivity that causes us to flee not only the media but also each other. It can even induce an emergent political agoraphobia — and perhaps that’s the point, to keep us at home, bottled up with the toxic brew, away from the street and the poll booth. Such intimidation raises the price of citizens’ and residents’ participating in public life and can be viewed as a form of voter suppression. So today things have reached such a pass that we approach any social interaction or source of potential stimulation with caution. To detox, we want to stop reading, watching, and even talking pure and simple.
However, many of us can’t help ourselves, we are bound up to the ritual of daily abuse. The violence exerts an undeniable power of fascination, for it has also transformed us and made us who we are today. It has become an intimate part of our way of being, of the day’s routine, and even a perverse, aggressive way to connect with others. Absent the jolt of our daily dose of sensationalized bad news and public bullying, we don’t achieve that higher level of anxiety — and intense plane of existence. We don’t feel alive, we don’t know who we are. The disorienting trauma must be experienced again and again, and the feelings of helplessness must be shared with others. I remember an old friend who was in New York visiting her son hospitalized by a motorcycle accident just before the World Trade Center attacks, who stayed glued to CNN week after week following 9/11 as it endlessly replayed the clips of the collapsing towers for fear if she took her eyes away something else even more terrible would happen. Reliving psychic trauma becomes at once a way to come to terms of our new selves transformed by the violence (“How did I let it happen?”) and something of a prophylatic against the violence of future threats.
Political Consequences
Borne alone, the toxic load seems intolerable. In this harsh world, no holds are barred and nothing is sacred. For both actual and potential individual or collective victims public bullying and political intimidation’s literally boundless character exceeds all possible imaginings and logic. In this way do these actions conjure up a dreaded fate and ungraspable future. As such, they operate as a direct challenge to citizens and residents, especially those seeking to engage in activism and party politics now and in the years to come.
The signs of the resulting personal and collective emotional shock and fatigue as a potential political problem are everywhere. Changed by the harsh climate of fear and intimidation, we’ve succumbed to looking for silver bullets even though the facts suggest otherwise. Often, it involves delegating to others or impersonal processes the patient work of resistance and the political transformation of moribund political organizations. To start there is the embrace by many people of a consoling fiction, in the way that victims of bullies often do, namely, that Trump is an insecure narcissist (thanks to his father), a phony (failed businessman, in debt, etc.), ignorant (of the art of government and foreign policy), a liar (delusional), and self-destructive (reckless and unethical dealmaker) and therefore bound to meet his end soon. The hope is that his personal flaws will do the heavy political lifting for us.
Then there are the more active-minded among us who set their hopes on national law enforcement and security agencies (historically no friends of democracy and progressive movements) to stall the right-wing juggernaut and on impeachment proceedings that will not only get rid of a sitting president but put an end to the larger culture of bullying and intimidation he embodies. Another silver bullet is entrusting substantial political change to finding a charismatic or telegenic candidate or savior billionaire to sustain a political movement over time and renew a political party in the absence of a transformed political infrastructure. Finally, there is indulging in nostalgia for the theater of moral shaming that presumably existed in the days of a relatively unified broadcast media sphere (as in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings that put an end to Senator Joe McCarthy’s campaign of red-baiting political opponents); or, related to this, a reliance on media frenzies devoted to political scandals to carry the political day.
But the media old and new in a harsh political environment follow a different rhythm from that of meaningful political activism, focused as they are on the bottom line and profiting from political turmoil stemming from the latest tweet and sensational news. They helped create the climate of fear and intimidation and put the current regime in office and will be more than happy to see Trump impeached, but most of the media have little investment in publicizing and educating citizens and residents in the substance of issues that many care about (a living wage, affordable healthcare, a secure retirement, tuition-free higher education, accessible public services) and will continue to care about after the current regime is gone.
Renewing Public Life
Restoring dignity to public life and taking back our stolen future are now the order of the day, and in many ways it has already begun: from the very public spectacles of the 2017 Women’s March, airport protests against the Muslim bans, the #TakeAKnee movement by professional black football players, the flooding of Republican congressional town hall meetings, and the actions of Black Lives Matter to the #MeToo campaign against sexual aggressors and the March for Our Lives movement of K-12 students against gun violence. These have been matched by the less visible nuts and bolts political activism of Indivisible.org and its 6,000 chapters nationwide, Swing Left, Sister District Project, and other new groups whose innovative actions contributed to the electoral upsets in Virginia and Pennsylvania in November 2017. They all recognize that what’s needed is a transformation of our coarsened public life and sclerotic political process. And nothing enrages the powers that be in Washington more than public claims of personal and collective dignity that risk drying up the toxic flows of fear and intimidation that for years have carried them and their ilk along right into the halls of power.
If and when Trump’s sham populism fails, in the absence of a viable alternative political vision, many disappointed voters, exhausted like the rest of us by the harsh political climate, will be tempted to lapse back into an attitude of protective cynicism that blames all political factions equally and disengages from local and national politics altogether. Or worse, they will follow the right’s lead in blaming entire communities of Muslims, African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, etc. for the government that the current political regime has broken and for the White House’s failure to deliver on campaign promises.
Much hinges on the fall 2018 congressional and local races, but the task is also deeper than winning the next election. It involves the work of finding each other in collective activities big and small that re-energize each one of us and create new, safer venues of mutual encounter and collaboration that are so many laboratories of public power and renewed national life — and perhaps also of dignity and trust. This also entails pacing ourselves so that we have the energy it takes for the tasks ahead including the fall elections and their aftermath. In the end, it is a question of taking aggressive, concrete steps that lie within our grasp and lay the groundwork for lasting change, not counting on magical silver bullets to be done by others.
Roddey Reid is Professor Emeritus, UC San Diego (rreid@ucsd.edu) and author of Confronting Political intimidation and Public Bullying: A Citizen’s Handbook for the Trump Era and Beyond (2017). He is a member of Indivisible San Francisco.
