Editor’s note: David Moats, an author and journalist who lives in Salisbury, is a regular columnist for VTDigger. He is editorial page editor emeritus of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.
[I]t is a frequently repeated truism that Donald Trump is a narcissist, but if that is true, how did someone with such a repellant trait gain the highest office in the land, and what does it even mean to say someone is a narcissist?
Another commonly heard remark, while, not precisely narcissistic, is an indicator of how we got to our present predicament. It is not unusual to hear someone say, “I might have voted for Hillary, but I just didn’t like her.”
My response: “You didn’t like her? So what? The election is not about you. It is about the country. Whether we like a candidate is not important. Would you like to have a beer with Hillary? Not important. Citizens of a democracy are supposed to ask themselves what would be better for the country.”
Thinking about the country requires an awareness of civics — how the government works — and of history — how we got where we are. It requires people to reach considered conclusions about what would be good beyond their own narrow horizon. The better candidate might institute policies hurting one’s self-interest, but improving the nation — for example, raising taxes to pay for education or infrastructure improvements. Whether we like a candidate is less important than whether the person would do a better job for the country as a whole. Certainly, the list of presidential candidates whom I have liked over the years is a short one, but that doesn’t mean I have not had the obligation to choose which one was better for the country. In a fit of pique, I cast my first presidential ballot for comedian Dick Gregory rather than for Richard Nixon or Hubert Humphrey. It was a juvenile gesture that was more about me than about the good of the country. Humphrey did not lose because of my vote, but it would be a different world if he had won.
For voters to be locked in their own heads, rating candidates on a personal likability scale, may not count as narcissism, but the narcissism of the president has been widely remarked on, even by psychologists, who have wondered if they had a professional obligation to render a clinical judgment. So is there a larger social pathology at work that has allowed someone displaying dangerously narcissistic traits to rise to the top?
The topic of narcissism brings to mind a book that made a splash a generation ago, “The Culture of Narcissism” by Christopher Lasch. It was published in 1979 at a time when the nation was experiencing a crisis of confidence with remarkable parallels to the crisis of today.
The book came out a few years after America’s defeat in the Vietnam War, at a time of economic stagnation and rapid inflation, and an environmental crisis growing out of dependence on foreign oil. The U.S. president had been forced to resign just a few years before because of his demonstrated criminality, and a lack of confidence in the institutions of government and business was extreme. Fascist and communist groups were gaining ground around the world, and violence at home was rampant.
In Lasch’s view the narcissism of the time grew out of “the logic of individualism,” whereby the pursuit of happiness becomes a “narcissistic preoccupation with the self.” He saw it in the self-improvement movements that grew up at the time and the “therapeutic sensibility” that places a premium on the individual’s health and mental well-being.
“The popularization of psychiatric modes of thought, the spread of the ‘new consciousness,’ the dream of fame, and the anguished sense of failure, which all give added urgency to the quest for spiritual panaceas, share a quality of intense preoccupation with the self,” Lasch wrote. “This self-absorption defines the moral climate of contemporary society.”
In Lasch’s view, therapists had taken the place of priests, and, with their focus on the self, “it hardly occurs to them … to encourage the subject to subordinate his needs and interests to those of others, to someone or some cause or tradition outside himself.”
One consequence, according to Lasch, was a narrow view of history. “To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity.”
One example of the moral failure Lasch is describing is the denial of climate change — an assault on posterity for the sake of present profit.
Lasch also had a good fix on what defined the individual narcissist. “Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience.” To the narcissist, success must necessarily be ratified by “publicity.”
Donald Trump was but a shady New York real estate operator when Lasch wrote that passage.
These descriptions of narcissism as a deeply rooted social affliction are generalizations that don’t take into account the surge of civic-minded activity taking place in reaction to the ascendancy of Trump. Nor do they describe movements that have achieved progress in human rights throughout our history. This year Democratic victories can be seen as a repudiation of the way politics has been sucked into the black hole of Trump’s narcissistic need. The rhetoric of honor, service and sacrifice that dominated the funeral remembrances of President George H.W. Bush was a reminder that many people yearn for an ethos that goes beyond selfishness as a governing creed.
A more recent book touches on themes similar to those of Lasch but without dwelling on the idea of narcissism. It is “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire” by Kurt Andersen. He suggests that America had a “nervous breakdown” in the 1960s, a period when “ultra-individualism” morphed into “magical thinking” and “anything-goes relativism.” By magical thinking he is referring to the wide array of conspiracy theories and crackpot notions touching on everything from UFOs to JFK, 9/11 and the fear of vaccines.
The dignity and liberties of each individual are fundamental to our democratic system, and to the flowering of genius, creativity and discovery. But it has all gone overboard, according to Andersen, “letting the subjective entirely override the objective; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts.”
Intellectually, reason has been discounted as oppressive. A professor of biology at a leading university told me that students frequently defend erroneous answers on their exams because they feel their answers are right. In fact, falsehoods do not become truths because we feel they are true.
“Mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that ferment for a few centuries; then run it through the anything-goes ’60s and the internet age,” Andersen wrote. “The result is the America we inhabit today, with reality and fantasy weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled.”
A famous quote of an adviser to President George W. Bush, attributed to Karl Rove, though he denies it, chillingly foreshadowed the way that politics untethered from a belief in objective reality can be hijacked by authoritarian leaders. The advisor disparaged journalists who remained part of the “reality-based community.” Ours is a time when those in power can create the facts, according to the adviser. That the facts created by the Bush administration — the Iraq war, the Great Recession — constituted disasters of a historic dimension is a new fact that the American people are still grappling with.
If the 1970s were a period of darkness, yielding Lasch’s gloomy diagnosis of American narcissism, it is also true that we eventually evolved beyond the 1970s. It is has been a haphazard evolution, and humanity is still learning how to conduct its affairs in the digital age, when information — facts and lies alike — travels everywhere at the speed of light. But Andersen’s journey into what he calls Fantasyland concluded with a hopeful note.
“Even as we’ve entered this long winter of foolishness and darkness, when too many Americans are losing their grip on reason and reality, it has been an epoch of astonishing hope and light as well,” he wrote.
The resistance to Trumpism and the growing awareness of climate change — with talk of what is being called a “Green New Deal” — are all signs that more and more people understand that reason, joined with political power, can serve to counter what may be the high tide of fantasy and unreason that now surrounds us.
