Thoughts On Election Day, 2024

Going about this day, Tuesday, November 5, with equal parts hope and trepidation. Though it is one of many very uncomfortable days leading up to the election, I am savoring these hours when I can still believe that America remains the America I grew up in, where truth matters and there are consequences for misbehavior. If Kamala Harris wins, there will still be vast challenges. But if she loses, the election will represent a seismic shift for a country already shaken and paralyzed by artificial political polarization, disunited by deepening income disparities, and increasingly battered by climate change. 

If trump wins decisively, many of us will be eating irony paradoxide. That is to say, it would be ironic if, after so much concern about a violent revolution if Trump were to lose or the results were not definitive, it turns out to be the Democrats who must acknowledge clear defeat and cede power peacefully, respecting democracy while yielding to someone determined to undermine it. 

Evidence that Trump could in fact win by a substantial margin are opinion pieces like the NY Times' deputy opinion editor, Patrick Healy, who reported on the opinions voiced over three years by focus groups of voters. Inflation looms large for many. The Time's chief political analyst, Nate Cohn, points to evidence of a rightward shift that's been underway for some time. In this view, if Trump loses, it will reflect less an embrace of progressive values than the failure of conservatives to field a candidate with fewer liabilities. 

What is left unmentioned in these formidable opinions is the extraordinary power of propaganda being generated by Fox News and many other outlets that has made many in the country unresponsive to evidence. While Trump is free to think and say essentially anything and everything without apparent consequence, he has muzzled his followers and forced the Republican Part to strictly conform, to either parrot his words or face eviction. 

Along with the increasing isolation from and imperviousness to differing views, there is the cathartic power of "throw the bums out", in which voters are so busy directing their discontent at those in office that they forget to consider what sorts of bums they will be throwing in. Constantly fueling disgust towards his enemies, Trump's talent for harnessing this cathartic power is matched only by his capacity to stir disgust towards himself. If he wins in 2024, he will be thrown back in by some of the same cathartic energy that threw him out in 2020.

Also unmentioned in other analyses is how Republicans have a built-in advantage, not only due to the electoral system and the skewing of the Senate due to sparsely populated conservative states. The Republican Party lets voters off the hook, offering tax cuts while increasing government debt, and pretending climate change isn't real. Running from tough issues is a sign of weakness, and yet Republicans still claim to be strong protectors. This abdication of responsible governance has shut down productive debate and left the government paralyzed as these core threats grow ever larger. 

Even if Kamala Harris were to win, there will still be propaganda, a constant stirring of artificial political polarization through lies, and a political party that claims to protect the nation while ignoring looming threats.

What is heartening on this day of profound uncertainty is the Democratic Party's nominee. I was not expecting to like Kamala Harris after her campaign in 2020, but she has grown significantly in ways that fit this moment in history. She has the requisite experience, embodies compassion and caring, has found the joy, and there is widespread acknowledgement that she demolished Trump the one time he dared to debate her. She has the aura of a winner, while Trump stumbles to the end, showing his true colors, muddled, angry and extreme. Four years of unbearable and debilitating chaos await if he wins.

When Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt, my take on divine intervention was that God saved Trump so that he could be roundly defeated in the election. For him, that would be a fate worse than death. If he does lose, again, it will not deepen my belief in God, but will deepen my belief in the prospects for this beloved country. 

Understanding Donald Trump Through an Undiagnosed Learning Disability

A woman I know, 98 years old, sharp as a tack, excited about the upcoming election, offered a theory about why Trump is the way he is. She used to work with kids with learning disabilities, and based on her experience, she believes Trump has multiple learning disabilities, most prominently dyslexia. Undiagnosed when he was a child, and combined with a father who had no tolerance for failure, these caused him to become a compulsive liar to hide his inadequacy. Thus the bizarre inability to acknowledge he lost the 2020 election.

I had never heard this take on Trump before, and so I searched the internet for similar opinions. A similar view came from Harriet Feinberg, a former teacher, who wrote a piece entitled "Why Trump Can't Learn: An Educated Guess by a Veteran Teacher." She describes dyslexia as "a neurobiological condition that makes it difficult to learn to read and can also affect sentence formation and vocabulary." Trump has long had trouble speaking in full sentences, and on the campaign trail is said to use a 4th grade level vocabulary. According to what she calls her "informed speculation," a "mild to moderate" dyslexia is "foundational to his inability to learn and grow while in office," and also serves "as a way to link disparate troubling elements in his makeup."

Feinberg further elaborates her educated guess, 

"Because trying to read was frustrating, as time went on he read as little as possible. Because he experienced humiliation and shame in the early grades when he saw other children acquiring information with ease from books, I believe he came to resent those children who were academically successful, who loved school, and drew the teacher's praise. His own natural curiosity about the world waned."

The humiliation and shame Trump likely experienced in elementary school goes a long way in explaining the narcissistic and vengeful qualities so much on display in his public behavior.

Like my 98 year old acquaintance, Feinberg links an undiagnosed and untreated learning disability to compulsive lying:

"How does Trump's difficulty in reading relate to his penchant for uttering falsehoods? I think he began faking when he was six or seven and couldn't keep up with the other children his age who had learned their letters and were starting to read sentences and little stories. He wanted to be "great" so he made things up. Faking got baked into his personality. He couldn't stop now, not for anything."

Imagine someone growing up in such a vice, trapped between an undiagnosed learning disability and his father's high expectations, with no one to turn to for solace or help.

Another view in a similar vein comes from Divergents Magazine, whose mission is to shift us away from the language of disability and towards neurodiversity. In an article entitled "Trump's Likely Struggle, Our Nation's Consequences," the unnamed author, who has "worked with adults with learning disabilities for 30 years," describes Trump's shame and dissembling when asked to read a legal document. The author's diagnosis: "'a hyperactive dyslexic'--a term coined by Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s, in his autobiography."

Describing this rare combination of hyperactivity and dyslexia, the author says that "either challenge by itself presents high hurdles in education. Taken together, they can be devastating to a child’s ability to attain literacy."

The author went to New York Military Academy a few years after Trump, in an era he describes as 

"the Dark Ages then when it came to learning disabilities. I can well remember how struggling students were humiliated by teachers in public and the exodus of some students to schools with greater behavioral rigor and lower academic demands. Only in 1977 did a federal law begin regulating education for individuals with learning disabilities.

Having grown up in the 60s and 70s, I remember how humiliation was sometimes used in schools, most memorably by a high school symphony band director who presumably modeled his approach on that of university band directors William Revelle and George Cavender. Though ultimately earning respect and even reverence from his musicians, Revelle acknowledged "I'm intolerable when it comes to perfection. Sometimes I'm even downright mean about it." Of Cavender's admirable pursuit of excellence by less than admirable means, it is said that he "accomplished a lot through intimidation and humiliation." For those who could weather the tactics, these directors offered an inspiring commitment to excellence, but imagine someone with an undiagnosed learning disability trying to survive in such a milieu. 

Trump was sent off to the Military Academy, a private boarding school, at age 13. The author's description:

In those earlier years, students with learning problems had few options for compensation. One common one was to become the class clown. Another was to become the class bully. Trump seems to have chosen the latter.

Being exiled from home and from one’s circle of friends is hard for any child. It seems possible that for Trump it caused a narcissistic wound that has driven much of his behavior as an adult: the need to surpass his father, his mistrust of most others, his terrible pride and anger, his drive to be the best in all ways.

That’s all speculation, of course.

A third source suggesting Trump has an undiagnosed learning disability is Trump's niece, Mary Trump, in her 2020 book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

There will never be a professional diagnosis. To fill that void, a mix of informed speculation, educated guesses and insider family exposes are all we will ever have as each of us seeks to make sense of Trump's behavior. 

What is particularly striking is how our political reality has come to mimic the conditions Feinberg believes to have been at play in Trump's childhood. The Republican Party's refusals to acknowledge human-caused climate change and taxcut-caused deficits play out as a learning disability. The doubling down on falsehood, the reflexive export of blame--these strategies work with the electorate much as they may have worked with an unforgiving father. And when Feinberg speculates that Trump "came to resent those children who were academically successful," it's hard not to think of the Republican Party's cultivation of resentment and its dismissiveness towards academia. 

These traits--denial of reality, anti-intellectualism, bold fabrication, a need to stoke resentment of the "Other"--were already deeply embedded in the Republican Party long before Trump came along. The groundwork was laid for him to take existing traits further, and brand the Party in his image.

On this blog, I have viewed Trump through varied lenses, as a suicide candidate, a narcissist, a hypnotist. Now an insightful 98 year old has offered a fourth lens, perhaps even more powerful and foundational than the others. Reminiscent of the apparently fictional story of the Spanish king whose lisp became embedded in the national language, the Republican Party now speaks Trump's language, dutifully parroting his fictions. As the 2024 presidential election approaches, there is currently a 50/50 chance that the nation, too, will succumb. If he gains control of the nation as he did of the Party, for the duration of his reign we will find ourselves living within the harsh, polarizing realities of a most unfortunate childhood.

Denialism Lets Voters Off the Hook for the Federal Debt and Global Warming

In "America Is Living on Borrowed Money," the NY Times editorial board sounded a warning about the federal debt, which continues to increase at a spectacular pace. 

The editorial covers a lot of bases, but it misses a central point. Americans are being let off the hook. One political party acknowledges the need to increase revenue to pay the government's bills, the other party does not. Similarly, one political party acknowledges the reality and danger of global warming, the other does not. This denialism has kept the Republican Party electable by letting voters off the hook. A vote for the Republican Party in its current state is a vote for shirking collective responsibility for our future. The reward for the voter is being relieved of having to pay the government's bills and making any substantive changes in our lifestyles to save a livable planet. 

As long as one party maintains an electorally advantageous posture of denial, all substantive debate is shut down. That posture of denial has worked well for the Republican Party since the Reagan era, allowing the party to compete for power despite many unpopular policies. The result is the quiet rise of increasingly troubling numbers, be they the size of the federal debt or the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Both of these rising numbers pose a threat to the America we know and love, and contribute to the diminishment of the nation's stature in the world--first through a steady weakening in the government's fiscal condition, and second by cheating the nation of its charmed place in the world's climate. 

That's the way to undermine a nation. Shut down substantive debate through denial, then let the problems grow and grow. 

Thoughts On a Consistent Ethic of Life

I was introduced to the concept of "a consistent ethic of life" by an opinion piece entitled "You Can't Protect Some Life and Not Others." The writer, Tish Harrison Warren, is a priest in the Anglican Church, but quotes Catholic leaders heavily, calling for a "whole life" ethic that "entails a commitment to life 'from womb to tomb'." She sees this consistency as a means of breaking the rigid categories of political affiliation. "We need to rebundle disparate political issues, re-sort political alliances and shake up the categories," she says. "A whole life ethic is often antiwar, anti-abortion, anti-death penalty, anti-euthanasia and pro-gun control. It sees a thread connecting issues that the major party platforms often silo."

It can be refreshing when people adopt points of view that draw from different political camps. Warren points to a time, in 1973, when conservative evangelical leaders declared that "we, as a nation, must 'attack the materialism of our culture' and call for a just redistribution of the 'nation’s wealth and services.'" And yet attempts to achieve moral consistency come at a price. A whole life ethic appears to call on women to risk their lives to have unwanted children, and calls on society to put vast resources into sustaining indefinitely lives made unbearable by pain or dementia. The ethics of life get murky at the beginning and the end. Does the quality of life enter into these ethical considerations, or just quantity?

A consistent ethic of life becomes even more elusive when considering our relationship to nature. I spend my days seeking to heal nature, and yet all of us depend for our comfort, sustenance, and mobility on machines that are chemically altering the earth's atmosphere, to the detriment of nature. Each of us can do a great deal to reduce our own individual dependency, but as long as our shared ecomony and culture runs on fossil fuels, there is little hope of consistency. What we intend and what we unintentionally do will remain very much at odds. 

To break down rigid political polarization, I'd suggest we invest our consistency in a pursuit of truth, in building opinion on accumulating evidence, and not just the cherry-picked facts that will prop up an emotionally comfortable opinion. And, in building an opinion, be ready to be wrong. It's a readiness to be wrong that motivates the study needed to be right. 

Related post:

Skepticism and Self: Science's Role in Sustaining Democracy

The Movie Gaslight, and a Nation in a Narcissistic Grip

Written before the 2022 national election:

For many people, narcissism has a limited meaning: someone who is self-absorbed and caught up in their own image. But start reading about it, and you discover that narcissism expresses itself through a whole suite of symptoms. Some people with narcissistic qualities can have significant and sometimes beneficial roles in the community, but they can also exhibit traits that vary from annoying to deeply disturbing, many of which you may encounter in the workplace or at home, or most tragically in the political world. Narcissism has roots in childhood trauma, is nearly impossible to cure, and ultimately proves emotionally impoverishing for all involved. A familiarity with narcissism's many dimensions can shed considerable light on persistent problems in the public and private realms.

After hearing that Angela Lansbury had died, I watched a Fresh Air podcast about her, in which I learned that she first appeared as a movie actress in Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. Gaslight was first a play, then a 1940 British movie, then the classic 1944 version out of Hollywood. We ended up watching the 1940 version because it's free on youtube. The movie is so grim at the beginning that we at first bailed. But I was curious, read about the plot online, and knowing what would happen actually made me more interested in watching the movie. It turned out to be a perfect, if over the top, example of how narcissism can wreak havoc on a marriage.

The male character, Paul in the 1940 version, is the ultimate narcissist. He dazzles a woman in a whirlwind romance, marries her, then steadily works to undermine her confidence. Gaslighting, a term that grew out of this movie, is a classic tactic of a narcissist. He hides things, then blames her for losing them. When the gas lights in the apartment periodically go dim, he tells her it's her imagination. He is harshly critical and controlling. He seeks to isolate her from her friends and family. As he victimizes her, he claims that he is the victim. All of these are classic symptoms of narcissism. Despite his mistreatment, she loves him still, committed to the marriage and not understanding why they can't get back to the happiness they had shared early on.

In some ways, I see our country as being similarly under siege. In politics, narcissistic traits like projecting one's own negative traits onto others can prove highly adaptive, whether it be for an individual or a whole political party. The more pathology a narcissistic politician has stewing within, the more ammunition he has to hurl at his opponent. There's the doubling down on lies (a form of gaslighting), the quickness to blame others rather than reflect on one's own actions, a lack of empathy, false claims to victimhood, and the iron control to maintain party unity. 

Even as the husband Paul isolates his hapless wife Bella from her friends and relatives, in order to expand his control over her, she remains loyal to him. Can we not see the same dynamic occurring in our country, as people remain loyal to a political party bent on dismissing truth and dismantling democracy in order to tighten its grip on power? A nation's cherished ideals are sacrificed to sustain one man and the big lie.

Movies condition us to believe in happy endings. I won't say whether the author of Gaslight, playwright Patrick Hamilton, gave us one. My main concern, as an election nears, is whether a gaslighted nation can escape a narcissistic grip.