No one is immune.
Sara Robinson (Orcinus, AlterNet, HuffPost) summarizes this David Roth essay now a couple of weeks old: “The Performativity Is The Point.” To wit, “For too many on the right (and on the left as well), acting out grievance has become the only viable way of life.” Her comment appeared on Facebook. The irony of that will be clear in a moment.
Roth provides a thumbnail history of recent American “kooks” using National League Cy Young Award-winner Steve Carlton as an example. Over the course of his career, Carlton entered The Big Silence. He stopped talking to the press. Good thing. Carlton off the mound was what might be called quirky, a nice way of saying that when he did talk he could say some mighty conspiratorial, racist, and anti-Semitic stuff.
Carlton eventually retired to Durango, Colorado in 1989 where Philadelphia Magazine reported in 1994 he was “doing yoga and hoarding guns and preparing for The Revolution in whatever Red Dawn–ish guise it might arrive.” But at least he was quiet about it.
He was, Roth says, an early adopter of what might be called Facebook Brain. A feature of this is not the careful picking and choosing of what conspiratorial dreck to believe. True believers accept it all. A couple of decades later Facebook arrived to provide the all. Plus, a means for the faithful to perform their beliefs in public.
Roth writes:
In a society that signals, in a million brutally overt ways, that your life does not really count for very much, it is easy in the abstract to see the appeal of being able to opt into something a little more significant—to be a leader, a rescuer, a hero or a star or just a soldier on the winning side.
Enter Donald Trump:
Here is the synchronicity that binds old-fashioned American kookery’s longstanding suspicions and signature fantasies to the person Donald Trump, and which sent them charging into the Capitol last month ready to commit murder in his service, and which has them still standing back and standing by to advance a fantastical and self-invented agenda of retribution and exterminative violence. Trump’s inexcusable celebrity and singularly rancid self are the irritant around which this weird pearl has formed, but the process was perfectly natural.
Without social media, Trump himself is a spent force, just another podgy golf asshole griping in a country club. But also he is airborne, now.
He is alive in all the Americans who are not just blinkered and baffled and vain enough to consider wearing a mask into a supermarket somehow the same thing as dying in the Holocaust, but who also believe that their confrontations with the tyranny of The Door Guy At Trader Joe’s must be streamed someplace where people can throw it some hearts, or likes, or fuming devil faces, or money. Social media is bad for people like this in the ways that it’s bad for everyone, but there is no more intoxicating or deranging a gift for a person who is already like this than something that looks and feels so much like a megaphone.
This reminds me of the tag-team, street corner preachers I saw in Greenville, SC in the 1970s. White males, of course. Any derision they received from annoyed passersby they viewed as another jewel in the heavenly crowns Jesus himself would place on their regulation crew-cutted heads in heaven.
The politics these people profess is not about helping anyone, lord knows, or really about any kind of ideological program at all. It is about an obsessive and even loving taxonomy of and fixation upon enemies and problems, and the way it works is through relentlessness, and through a refusal to ever stop performing weird arias of anger and umbrage. The terrified and fuming derangement that conservative media sought to embed in its consumers, mostly to keep them pliable and on the hook through the commercial breaks, has blossomed into this: a rising army of impossibly unhappy people, their ambitions both vague and vast, who have come to understand that the dizzy righteousness of that derangement is the point.
Post by post and provocation by provocation, it is absolutely as stupid and ridiculous as it looks. But whether it’s out of some curdled honor or sincere belief, the more important point is that they would absolutely kill to keep it all going, because they cannot imagine any way of being outside of it. For all the wild talk of vengeance and violence and humiliation, the fantasy catharsis of firing squads and military tribunals and the rope, there’s nothing they truly want on the other side of those lurid resolutions. They need to feel like this all the time, because they can’t imagine another way to feel. This is the last and most meaningful tenet of this vain and annihilating and wildly metastatic politics: It just can’t stop.
Because grievance is an addiction. They’ve been taught to see themselves as victims and to act out that grievance, sometimes violently, but regularly. As toxic as that is, performing grievance is what one does these days.
Robinson notes briefly that the left is not immune. We are just likely to perform our grievance in different ways. The ritual Democrats-are-weak narrative after the impeachment vote is by now as reflexive as performative. And self-destructive. It reinforces the right’s narrative about the left as unfit to lead.
Purveyors of “they caved” grouse that Democrats in Congress were unwilling to go Conan on Republicans. That is, to put exacting retribution before accomplishing the mission Americans needing help sent Democrats there for: to help them. But performing “crush your enemies,” etc., would also reinforce for many voters that “both sides” are more interested in fighting each other than fighting for voters. For a significant portion of the electorate, that is how we ended up with Donald Trump in the first place.
It is easy to understand the impulse. Grievance is in the air. On the air in the broadcast sense, and everywhere on social media. Performing it earns likes and hits and guest appearances on cable news.
Still, that Nietzsche guy’s admonition is worth keeping in mind: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”