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jsburbidge) wrote2020-11-05 09:20 pm
Leadership
There is a just-so-story about our pre-proto-Indo-European, pre-Yamnaya (pre-choose-whatever-nomadic-group-you-think-is-in-your-ancestral-tree) tribal ancestors: that there were two centres of power in the social patterns of our ancestors, the war-leader/hunter (strong, tough, aggressive, not-very-bright) and the shaman (clever, capable with language, might or might not be a good fighter).
(It's not a terribly great just-so-story as these things go: we have access to only traces of PIE culture, and no evidence of that sort of organization at that time, and there are lots of other patterns to choose from (priest-kings, for example, who combine the two roles).)
Regardless of its status it's certainly an old trope. Going by elements in his portrayal (that archaic shield) Telamonian Ajax, who pretty much embodies the stupid aggressive warrior type, may inhabit one of the earliest strata of the Greek epic tradition, and his fight with Odysseus over Achilles' armor stands at the head of our cultural tradition. (Shakespeare is still getting comedy from the opposition in Troilus and Cressida, over two thousand years later.) It may be worth pointing out that from our perspective Achilles, "best of the Achaeans", looks much like Ajax (and neither looks much like much-contriving Odysseus).
The trope reflects a reality: that a sizeable part of the population respond to "big, aggressive, and frankly stupid" as positive traits. This is the macho stereotype, of the hood as leader. (There's also the reality that a lot of people are also put off by it.)
Some of the splits in the US vote suggest that this has been a factor in Trump's relatively strong support; men (mainly men) from macho subcultures voting for him because they respond to him as a leader, especially if they are socially conservative and see as enemies the targets of his rhetoric.
This is also not just about now: the US has been here before. The American version of the standoff between Ajax and Odysseus was that between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Adams, like Odysseus, took the prize from the assigned judges, followed by great recrimination by the loser (though Jackson ended up winning in a rematch, four years later, with greater public support, and went on to ride roughshod over the fiscal well-being and constitutional norms of the republic, as well as putting a boot on the backs of inconvenient ethnic minorities). Biden is no Adams, but the Democratic demographic he stands for represents the Odyssean side over against Trump's cur Ajax.
Whether he wins or loses in the Electoral College, Biden has a sizeable majority of the popular vote; but the number of people who voted for Trump - against national self-interest, against economic self-interest, against any rational evaluation - is a reminder not only of the effect of the alternate reality presented by and inhabited by the modern conservative movement but of the continuing influence of the tough leader trope, millenia after Homer signalled a movement away from a simple macho leadership approach.
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I would say you didn't go far enough back.
Trump can't even play tough on TV; what Trump is selling is primate band status, that his followers can hit who they want and fuck who they want and those other monkeys can't.
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Also, primatological comparisons are a minefield, because the social patterns of our various relatives differ markedly from each other as well as ourselves.
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Well, fair.
I think we can point out from our own genetic history that the Y chromosone bottleneck came in way before we've got much evidence of cities; I think maybe one could say that the shaman is coming out a context -- that bottleneck context -- of warbands, and the Acheans are in the context of "women, cattle, and slaves" as a civilising principle allowing armies. (They didn't do armies very well, but they had the idea and most of the toolkit.)
Which to me has the analogy backwards; Biden's side is the city side, or, rather, Biden is the current champion of the city side. Trump's side is the tribal one, unwilling to welcome a stranger. (Or at least to not generalise the welcome of strangers.)
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But still, yes, very much the representative of the city state. There have been times when "conservative" and "progressive" didn't line up with "urban" and "rural" - when I was young conservative parties were most prominently the agents of Wall Street and Bay Street, as urban as they come - but they surely do now.
The rhetoric of red versus blue states actually hides the reality out there where most states are purple, with blue cities and red hinterlands (although to be fair Brooks' original article didn't make that error).
A civil war of some sort has now become slightly more probable with a narrative of a "stab in the back", but it is likely to take the form of a lot of localized violence in dribs and drabs rather than of regions seceding, what with the mixture of cultures, blue cities in red hinterlands.
All of which starts to get away from the consideration of Trump as "leader" and back to seeing him as a symptom rather than a cause, which is another, and in many ways more serious, issue
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Trump was an icon of success.
(A completely fake icon of success, but that hardly matters. "there are legends of heros, not many are true")
That aphorism about "no justice, no peace" isn't a moral prescription; it's a tautology. Nobody's getting any justice anywhere, irrespective of their cultural frame. (Mammonism cannot produce justice; it's pretty much civil solvent, and is in consequence antithetical to justice.) It's easy to construct a history of Anglosphere politics from 1980 as the increasing injustice necessary to prevent structural change from affecting the elite's preference for mammonist practices. The result is people resorting to magic to decrease their insecurity, because there's absolutely no material way for them to do so. (And instead of the market town subject to panicky feedback, we've got the internet as a global id-amplifier.)
That civil war is ongoing; it's not going to get better until cultural transmission of whiteness stops. There's a lot of possible approaches to that, but also time constraints as plausible pandemic resolution timelines start running into noticeable amounts of agricultural collapse.
I don't think we've got an active cultural model for something helpful; we'd have to go back a very long way to get something suitable for getting off extractive capitalism and getting everybody through a protracted crisis. (I continue to think there's something to Alfred's Wessex in this respect.) Which is in turn a problem of reducing those presently powerful to a state in which they cannot prevent their reduction, which is not something that can happen by increments.