The American political right, its members assembled shoulder to shoulder, delights in presenting itself as a fused and coordinated phalanx of meaning and action. While overwhelmingly uniform in skin color, it is culturally, economically, and geographically, a far more motley proposition. Hawkish John Bolton and MAGAhawk Jacob Chansley–he of the defining “Capitol Hill Putsch” look with horns, fur, and painted face–do not order from the same menu. Power-purse wielding Kelly Loeffler and it’s-the-only-one-I’ve-got schlepping Melissa Carone–she of the seemingly inebriated, voter fraud testimony slurred at a Michigan state legislative committee–do not actually hang out. Not ever, ever, ever. There’s a lot of road between the trailer park, the tidy house on the cul-de-sac, and Mar-a-Lago. In spite of all the differences, the Republican party has made it work. 46.9 % of the popular vote in the latest presidential election is proof. Whiteness, among that percentage, is an undeniable ice-breaker. The other big one is that they are all afraid of being ruled.
Without their consent. To their terror and pain. The state of authoritarian affairs was grave enough already and it now grows graver still with a new, heavy handed, liberal lockdown lurching over the horizon. This sense of oppression–and sometimes of outright persecution–and the need to unite against the persecuting oppressor, is their article of faith, a not-so-secret handshake, the “of course” added to the end of every sentence, the default, go-to formulation. This lingua franca is spoken by those who maintain that COVID-19 vaccines scramble human DNA, by those who believe that trickle down economics is good for everyone and that strangulatory government regulations are spoiling a parade og unleashed, free market good works, and those who have concluded, like Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas, and any number of small town, doomsday, apocalyptic preachers, that Christianity is under assault and could be next on the dodo list.
Or, more fairly, that is what they all profess. That is the pledge, whether spoken aloud or hurriedly mouthed. Stoking paranoia is a good investment, after all, regardless of whether one personally believes in the whole program, or a little of it, or not in it at all. To get yourself past security and though the front door, though, you do have to at least know a few of the words to the song.
An equally disparate commentariat employs this mother tongue on all sorts of differently funded, differently scaled platforms. Couy Griffin, of Otero County, New Mexico, announces on his Facebook group “Cowboys for Trump” that even after the deaths and injuries of January 6, 2021, it may still be necessary for more “blood to run out of” the Capitol so to ward off dictatorship. Move the dial a touch toward the middle. Tucker Carlson intones: “Tens of millions of Americans have no chance. They’re about to be crushed by the ascendant left.” Move the dial one more touch toward the middle. In a recent column, Ross Douthat, a conservative opinion writer at the New York Times–and what could be more mainstream than having one’s own spot in the jungle of the Gray Lady’s many sober, somber, ruminative cubicles?–similarly wrote: “I’m one of those Americans who don’t want to be ruled by liberalism in its current incarnation.”
That word. Again. Ruled.
A class period’s worth of high school civics, then. As a citizen in a democracy, one consents to participate in a political contract with others. This contract involves representation, through local, state, and federal institutions. It is participation through proxy. That is the contract.
To alternatively frame the conversation so much more simply, according to rulers and ruled, not only fails to describe democracy: it is democracy’s antithesis. As such, it opens the door to that musty room where persecution fantasies bloom. Instead, when one abides by the contract, one accepts that at any given time, one’s political, cultural, or religious convictions may or may not be in popular ascendence. One accepts this with the understanding that whether waxing or waning, one can continue to make one’s case to the body politic and one can still vote for those who represent and who advance one’s case. Your opponent accepts your ascendency and you, in turn, accept your opponent’s. The many ascents and descents overlap, in multitudinous ways, at different registers of government. No permanent resolution to every difference–or imposition of one point of view, to put it differently–ever occurs. That singularity, that comprehensive unity, is not the point. Democracy is about making a workable political system that includes nonsingularity.
One is typically ruled without one’s consent in a democracy when when one chooses not to participate, or is not allowed to participate, in the contract. Sometimes, without thinking about it quite like this, one of your actions may be determined as violative of the contract. For those who abide by the contract, this act of yours may be so abhorrent and so contrary to the principles of contract itself, that you will be made to actively suffer certain consequences. You cashed granny’s social security checks for yourself, for example, and now here you are, walking around, bumming smokes in the prison yard. In this case, no matter how strenuous your convictions–as you drove to the bank, you may have been convinced that you, not granny, deserved that money because granny’s always been such a bitch–you will have lost the privacy, the freedom to associate, and the ability to pursue happiness as you saw fit. The things that the contract protected for you, once upon a time, in other words. In such a case, yes, you are most certainly being ruled.
But where is the evidence–not the belief, but the evidence–that anyone on the white, political right who has agreed to the contract is now being excluded from participating in it? Getting in a huff about Starbucks holiday decor doesn’t count. Nor does biting your tongue at the office party now and then. Getting pissed off because Harvard didn’t hire you doesn’t work either. Where is the you-can’t-talk, you go-to-jail, you’re-out-of the-game-and-you can’t-play-anymore exclusionary, real world, real time suffering? Or, even: where is the evidence that anyone has been even marginally inconvenienced, materially or culturally?
The evidence, as yet, has not been produced. Certainly not in the magnitude sufficient to establish such a unifying, sometime-rhetorical-sometimes-not, circle-the-wagons call to arms,
To the contrary: the Trump friends and family plan includes a clause that makes sure that even if you do violate the contract, even if you have been convicted of committing a crime, you will not be subject to the ordinary rule of law. For anything. Ever. Even maybe for finally, actually shooting someone on Fifth Avenue some day. Who knows. We still have to see about that.
So where is the hardship? In what way are so many being so hurtfully tyrannized? How are tens of millions actually going to get crushed by the ascendent left?
Prior to the melee and actual death by crushing at the Capitol, Trump roared to his loyalists: “I know your pain, I know your hurt.”
What pain was he talking about?
He was talking about the pain, which is plainly quite real, acute, and even agonizing for some, of being imaginarily ruled.
At the center of this real world, fake world clusterfuck is the originative, rebellious cry of I shall not be ruled that is so fundamental to American cultural identity and that has turned us into a nation of Revolutionary war reenactors. The Tea Party didn’t get the name from the copy of Alice in Wonderland that everyone was reading at the time. Flags with thirteen stars fly at Trump rallies. Chris Zimmerman of the Nye County, Nevada, Republican Central Committee posts that “the next 12 days will be something to tell the grandchildren! It’s 1776 all over again!”
So says these alleged descendents of, and the allegedly rightful inheritors of the memory of, those outnumbered few who stood on the Lexington Green and fired at a well-drilled, machine-like regiment of British soldiers, dispatched, like red locusts from a vast, evil empire, the locus of which sat enthroned, far across the sea. That this ancestral lineage and that bequest is, in historical terms, largely a fantasy, one that freely glosses over countless interruptive facts, does not matter. The image of the original, righteous, rebel has been forged. This rebel is not an historical actor at a certain place at a certain time. This rebel is a character in a story.
In time this story, as stories will, becomes further and further removed from fact. American self-mythologizing began before the Revolution itself–pamphleteers made sure to describe a “massacre” in Boston–but this was much is certain: colonial Americans, as opposed to many of their psychological children, did not think that they were “inventing” democracy in any way. The notion have been astonishing, indeed delusional. The war began because the colonists were not allowed, as they saw it, to participate in an imperfect one that already existed. George III may have been a monarch, but he was no dictator. Even he had a Parliament to deal with. Whether it was porphyria, bipolar depression, or dementia that finally got the better of him, the Regency Act of 1811 shuffled him off the throne and then, discreetly, to Windsor Castle, where he could rave at will and harm no one. A parallel to the 25th Amendment? You can’t miss it.
All of which is beside the point. The righteous rebel story isn’t about, isn’t stuck in, wearisome quotidia. It is a fable that takes you straight into the dream time. You look in the mirror and see whomever you wish. The mirror is a projector and in it you can picture how law-abiding-but- pushed-to-the-limit white people, the sturdy farmers of New England, and the more elegant, aristocratic slave owning farmers of the South, indeed invented democracy.
And since we’re in the dream time, why stop there? Let it go, man. Bullshit freely. Your ancestors fought and died for your freedom to do so, after all. Let it go, mythologize and pump it up as you wish.
Just say it out loud and say it proud: I invented democracy.
That was me. And that is mine.
So the story becomes private property. Or intellectual property, at least. It is your story and only you get to tell it and you get to tell it any way you wish. In turn, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and Rosa Parks et alia committed a kind of propriety impropriety when they told the story as they saw it and when they added different heroes and endings. This was copyright infringement upon a dream. And it mattered not at all that the enfranchisement they and others sought was no zero-sum game, that this enfranchisement never really threatened your economic well being. It was something worse. It was the appropriation of your culture. Of your self. It was theft. For them to do so, as it was not theirs to tell, was in fact undemocratic according to the logic of hallucinations. It would be tyrannous. It would be oppressive. It would Big Brother Wolf come dressed in Kumbaya clothes.
The story of the righteous, outnumbered and outgunned rebel is full of narrative pleasures. Satisfying conflicts abound. One can find an embarrassment of reassuring resolutions. David defeats Goliath. The walls of Jericho are rendered useless by Joshua’s horns. Jim Bowie, of the knife, and Davy Crockett, of the signature hat, may have been martyred at the Alamo by the overwhelming number of wind-up toy soldier troops commanded by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna: but look who has Texas, and the Dallas Cowboys, and those cheerleaders, now.
It’s a good story. That’s why there are so many versions of it. It has value. No wonder you want to keep it for your own.
That this value is wholly symbolic and completely untethered from reality doesn’t make it any less precious. The opposite, in fact. The farther it departs from cogent, conventional, observable world, the more valuable it becomes: as demonstrated by the fact that only you, perhaps a few and other initiates, can see it. And it is especially pressing that you assert your ownership right now. Right now the world is overflowing, erupting, with stories. A million a minute. The mediasphere accelerates, expands in unprecedented ways, setting a new speed record every few seconds. In the viral clip, a convenience store torched by a lawless gang chanting that there will be no peace; in digitized pixels some of your favorite righteous rebels, carved in stone, are pulled down from their pedestals and erased in cancel code; chat rooms are alive with people who hate you just for being you. Everything is in flux. Up for grabs. Every man for himself. The image du jour will assuredly not be the image of tomorrow. And maybe yours will go missing altogether.
In this mad rush, caught up in the wired current, you start to panic and assume that you don’t have the time, the luxury, to discern which narratives flowing in the current is true and which one is false. Therefore you have to hang onto your own story as if it is a life preserver. It is a life preserver. Because one’s own story must, in order to survive, hold its own against all of the other stories in this flood of fake and photoshop. Your story must be likewise impervious to all analysis or fact. When it is invoked, all argument must stop. It must. It is, after all, in the lexicon of superheroes, your magic power.
No Way Out: a Hollywood film from 1950, starring Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier in his first screen role. Poitier plays Dr. Luther Banks, a physician who returns to the predominantly black neighborhood where he grew up. He establishes a medical practice there. The neighborhood, Banks learns, has, in his absence, come to be controlled and terrorized by a white hoodlum and small time con man named Roy Biddle, played by Richard Widmark. In typical Hollywood fashion, the movie ends in gun play. Biddle is shot.
Biddle slumps over. In pain, he cries out, mixing hateful racial invective and jealousy. Pitying himself, he rages that he has been insufficiently pitied for the whole of his life–so unlike, as he sees it, the pity that is supposedly so liberally distributed to Blacks. He suffered too, but no one noticed. He’s lonely too, but no one cared.
Who loved me? Who loved me? Biddle howls
James Baldwin, reflecting on this pervasive “what about me?” narrative trope so pithily expressed by Biddle–whom Banks, the doctor, saves–wrote that among Americans there is:
…a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on public conduct, and on white-black relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would not be so dependent on what they call “the Negro problem.” This problem, which they invented in order to safeguard their purity, has made of them criminals and monsters, and it is destroying them. And this, not from anything black may or may not be doing, but because of the role of a guilty and constricted white imagination as assigned to blacks.
From a recent article in the New York Times:
Kevin Haag, 67, a retired landscaper from North Carolina who ascended the Capitol steps as the crowd surged forward, said he did not go inside and disapproved of those who did. Even so, he said he would never forget the sense of empowerment as he looked down over thousands of protesters. It felt so good, he said, to show people: “We are here. See us! Notice us! Pay attention!”
He is seen. He is recognized.
Dependent upon “the Negro problem”. Indeed. In the mad economy of taking back something that was not a possession in the first place, in the the cartoon warfare of fighting back against imaginary appropriation and theft, the impoverished, unsteady, white, right imagination goes about doing so by, remarkably, in the identity fun house, by imitating the black left. “Black lives matter” becomes “all lives matter.” Trump justifies his maskless political rallies by calling them “peaceful protests.” The point being: if they have the right to tell the story, I surely have the right to do so too. Especially since the story was mine in the first place.
And so, standing amid transgressive chaos, permissible injury, and even sacral murder, Haag stood on the Capitol steps and felt empowered. He had rejoined himself to part of himself that had been lost. His consciousness, riven by the distinction of public and private, precisely as described by Baldwin, was healed. His divided self made whole again. It didn’t matter that the act was primarily symbolic. Reporters asked his opinions. He was on television. His picture was being taken. He was, for once, really and truly “live streaming.”
This is more than a fragile self. Or, perhaps, this is even less than a fragile self. This is an empty self and the emptiness self-inflicted. Or perhaps it is even less than an emptiness. Perhaps it is a vacuum.
The irony becomes all the pointed when one considers that Haag, of course, was perfectly real all along. He only dreamed that he was not. He was not Ralph Ellison’s “invisible man,” whose disfigured representation, made by others, might be lynched if the representation didn’t behave just so and as instructed. Haag was not subject to the demands of maintaining this sort of “double consciousness” as described by W.E.B. DuBois, that strange, unwelcome armor that may nevertheless be necessary for one’s survival. Haag’s vote was counted in North Carolina, a state notorious for its disenfranchisement of Black voters. Haag had a job. Haag retired. Haag was invited to Washington D.C. by a demagogue. Haag went and no one stopped him from attending a rally that became, or perhaps was always intended to be, a violent putsch. In spite of all of his utter realness, Mr. Haag believed that his capacity to participate in the story of democracy, and so in turn the story of his very self, had been stolen from him as Congress was moments short of certifying an election that, like the story, had been supposedly stolen.
Perhaps it filled, for a purely theatrical moment, some imaginary hole in his chest. Or his head. Maybe it soothed the irritated vacuum. Where was his Martin Luther King, his Malcolm X, his Rosa Parks? Who loves me? Who loves me? While standing on the steps that day, he may have become, finally, briefly, his own hero, one worthy of love and even, perhaps, our gratitude. He certainly was no longer being ruled. As the evidence of havoc all around him made so abundantly clear.
Hell yeah!!