Jonestown of the mind
by Tom Sullivan
The fierceness with which devotees of the acting president defend the indefensible in his name, and the reckless abandon with which they cast their avowed values to the wind is chilling. From his “trouble with a number of the Ten Commandments” to “palling around with” dictators to tearing apart desperate families to deporting the ill and disabled to denying refuge to hurricane refugees to threatening to get streets “cleaned up” of the homeless so they don’t “ruin our cities,” they stick by him. Even if they only infrequently vote. (Small blessings.)
If it was weirdly cultish before, it is even more so now. A sizable fraction of the population, it seems, has moved to Jonestown and it’s just a matter of time before their leader offers them a sugary kids’ drink to swallow to prove their loyalty.
America has both a fondness for and propensity for producing grifters. Ligaya Mishan joins commentators who consider grift “the ascendant ethos of our time.” The difference between grifters and common swindlers, she writes in the New York Times, is that grifters are small-time, not the kind of epic liars who leave the wreckage of lives and nations in their wake. They’re not even bad people, per se: They stand outside morality, defying the social binary of good and evil. They tend to pilfer just enough to disrupt but not devastate.” As Alexis de Tocqueville found prior to the Civil War, Americans pursue prosperity “ever tormented by the shadowy suspicion that they may not have chosen the shortest route to get it.”
By that definition, the head of the Trump Organization is a hybrid, a small-timer who stumbled into the biggest grift of his life, a kid left alone in a candy store or Santa’s workshop, eyes wide with possibility. More post-turtle even than George W. Bush, he finds himself atop a nation “deeply identified with the possibility of transcending humble origins and becoming someone powerful and new.” Not that he had humble origins, mind you. He was born into wealth and privilege. But as a “short-fingered vulgarian,” he cons fans less fortunate into thinking he is one of them and that they could be him. His wealth, his cunning, his stand outside morality is something to which they might aspire. They are one with him in spirit, glorying in owning the libs, the political short con.
Mishan writes:
OURS IS A CURIOUS time of both peak cynicism and peak gullibility. News is fake unless it comes from sources that espouse our worldview, in which case even the most preposterous conspiracy theory is seen as ironclad truth. Never have we been so suspicious or more ready to expose and accuse, and yet daily we accept fictions as the basis of reality, from the posturings of bots and provocateurs on Twitter to the radiantly lit, commercially sponsored posts of Instagram influencers for whom there is no distinction between the personal and the corporate, to the seemingly innocuous deceptions of friends who obsessively filter photos and curate their feeds to present a better version of themselves. We live in constant suspension of disbelief, what the American anthropologist Michael Taussig has called “this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up.” This makes us easy prey for — perhaps even complicit with — grifters who play off our communal, mimetic desires. As the linguist David Maurer wrote in his 1940 study “The Big Con,” the grifter is “really not a thief at all because he does no actual stealing. The trusting victim literally thrusts a fat bank roll into his hands.”
Or, in this case, executive authority in the most powerful nation on Earth.
Serendipitously, a friend Friday recommended a 2017 book by Kurt Andersen, writer and host of the public radio’s Studio 360, as an insightful explainer for this political and cultural era. Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History traces Americans’ unique susceptibility to being dupes. With Graydon Carter, Andersen founded Spy magazine, the source of the “short-fingered vulgarian” epithet for the acting president.
Not having read the book, I watched an interview.
Andersen considers much of the rejection of authority and facts a byproduct of the anti-establishment ethos of the 1960s. “Do your own thing” morphed into believe your own facts. Even so, from its earliest founding, the United States has been a place that promotes “fake news” and “alternative facts,” an early biography of George Washington providing the “cherry tree” zombie lie. It demonstrates, Andersen says, “Americans’ defining desire to believe, and insistence on believing, in the unprovable and untrue of every variety.”
From Randian fantasies of the capitalist Übermensch to New Age belief in unmeasurable “energies” to fascination with UFOs and medical quackery, etc., a historic pattern emerges. They are not one-offs. Where once conservative lights kept the movement’s conspiracist fringe at arm’s length, slowly the conspiracists have taken over the Republican party. And now the White House. Gullibility is a feature, not a bug.
A former member of the Jonestown cult observes, “Many people, individually and in religious, social, and political movements around the world, seem so desperate for charismatic leaders who have ‘the answers,’ that they happily surrender common sense and reason.” It is a fine American tradition with which we cannot afford to be fine. It was when Jim Jones felt the authorities closing in that it was time for everyone to drink up.
That may not happen inside these borders, at least not in that way. But every day of watching supporters of this administration spout obvious untruths and defend the indefensible leaves the unsettling feeling we now inhabit a Jonestown of the mind.