Directing shame outward
“One of the great ironies about 2016,” writes The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last, “is that Hillary Clinton was right,” if impolitic, in how she described a third of the GOP.
Over at The Atlantic, Peter Wehner writes about the attack of Trumpism we all witnessed last week by Republicans in the Tennessee House of Representatives. “[C]oming from a party whose sensibilities and racial attitudes are embodied by Donald Trump,” we should hardly have been surprised by their overreaction to Black activist members.
Memphis wasn’t exactly hospitable to Rev. Martin Luther King in March of 1968, either. The more things change, etc. MAGA Republicans want not only to roll back the 20th century, they want to roll back Reconstruction. Nullification is back, fof heaven’s sake.
Wehner suggests that the GOP knows it made a deal with “a demonic force” and is secretly ashamed:
The human mind’s capacity to rationalize such things is extraordinary, but not limitless. Some Republicans have the sense, even if it’s only in their quiet moments, that they have acted not only hypocritically but dishonorably. And it gnaws at them. They know they would eviscerate any Democrat who did a fraction of what Trump did. They therefore have to expend enormous psychological energy to keep from becoming sick with themselves for what they have become. Shame is a toxic emotion, and it often causes people to direct hostility outward rather than inward.
Tired from choosing to defend the indefensible, enraged at being called out, Trump’s supporters lash out. They desperately want to make critics of Trump the focus, forcing them to answer for their sins. Pointing to the misdeeds of their political foes allows Republicans to tell themselves, one another, and the rest of the world, See, we’re not so bad after all. They also catastrophize the threats posed by Democrats, because people will tolerate an awful lot of misconduct from their leaders if they’ve convinced themselves that the threat posed by the other side is existential.
That’s clear in the leaked audio of Tennessee GOP House members arguing with one another after the national and international recrimination they faced last week.
Wehner adds:
As we’ve seen in Tennessee, this frantic state of mind leads Republicans to preposterous places and to act in politically self-destructive ways. One of the two most important political parties in the world is dominated by people who are enraged, embittered, and anarchic.
Besides being reminded of their vulgar thirst for retaining power at all costs, what MAGA Republicans are enraged and embittered about is having their own deep insecurities resurface.
The spouse often stops for breakfast at the neighborhood McDonald’s. A local artist (who leans right, she says) recently brought in an old book to show another of the morning regulars. Wikipedia describes “God’s Man” as “a wordless novel by American artist Lynd Ward (1905–1985) published in 1929. In 139 captionless woodblock prints, it tells the Faustian story of an artist who signs away his soul for a magic paintbrush.”
Informed the next time that Lynd Ward was the son of the Reverend Harry F. Ward, the “first national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),” the artist waved away the news with words like, “I don’t cotton to that.”
What is it like to go through life as a member of a traditionally privileged class, in a culture built on the bodies of Black men and women, perpetually insecure in the guilt of it, and hostile to anyone who reminds you?