The something
that we can, perhaps, loosely call the “ugly American fringe” is
something that pundits have been trying to get at since the Trump
ascendancy began. This world of angry, white people who feel betrayed
is certainly nothing new, but as a phenomenon, it was ignored by the
media for decades. In the '90s, it was ignored while the economy was
good, and the moronically smiling faces of Gingrich's brigade took
over Congress. In the '00s, it seemed like there was enough chaos and
horror, war and economic collapse to preclude any discussion of slow
decay in our own backyards. The last time that class divide was
strongly in the public consciousness was in the '80s, when the term
“Rust Belt” entered public currency, when Bruce Springsteen sold
millions of albums, when countless slobs versus snobs comedies could
still accurately contrast a slovenly if virtuous working class
against a coat-and-tails wearing, beef wellington-eating haute
bourgeoisie. But in the decades in between, little was heard from the
marginalized industrial class, even as so many of them slowly
transformed into Trumpists, avant la lettre.
Granted,
there were exceptions. There were the often remarkably ill-informed
documentaries of Michael Moore, there were the sharply-written if
frantically polemical essays of Thomas Frank. Or a line like this
from Jonathan Franzen, in The
Corrections:
“Well,
there was still the citizenry of America’s heartland: St. Judean
minivan drivers thirty and forty pounds overweight and sporting
pastel sweats, pro-life bumper stickers, Prussian hair.”
Now
to write about this gap, about the decay in Middle America, I could
use any number of approaches. I could rely on the old “silent
majority” handle, a phrase that has been useless ever since it was
used to represent Archie Bunker and the protagonists of The
Deer Hunter.
I could talk in vaguely elegiac terms about “the ordinary folks,”
their “humble” lives. I could attempt some sort of (if we're
being optimistic) sociological analysis, something already done
countless times by more capable and intellectually rigorous minds. Or
I could do some awful, recoiling-in-horror “look at those flyover
country people” analysis of the sort that feeds both Atlantic
think pieces and the worst sort of clickbait. I could draw
countless comparisons to previous currents both domestic and foreign,
whether the 1968 George Wallace presidential run, the Poujadiste
revolt against Gaullism in 1950s France, the desperation and
disenfranchisement that led to the Brexit vote. I could go into depth
about the anxiety of the Wall Street and national security elite of
having such an unsubtle candidate for their party, or the
evangelicals who, despite the fact that I disagree with them on
virtually everything, have an odd sort of integrity. Or, hell, I
could do a series of postmodernist backflips a la Slavoj Zizek.
But
what fascinates me more than anything else, is the grotesquerie.
Consider
how Trump was viewed as a comedy figure until he became an
existential threat. Consider the barbs about his small hands and
concordant assumptions about the implications for his cock. Note his
habit of pairing Brioni suits with dime-store baseball caps. Or his
speech at the RNC, his jowly red face looking like a pustule about to
burst with fury.
It's
also telling that when Tim and Eric of Awesome Show fame appeared in
character, they vocally supported a Trump presidency. Which character
they appeared in is irrelevant – they all form part of the same
continuum. What their comedy gets at, more than anything else, is the
peculiar flavor of the Middle American grotesque, a social status
that is a few notches above the gashed-open white-trash porn of
Harmony Korine films. It is the world of exurban tract houses,
Applebee's memorabilia, ill-fitting suits, and a mediated environment
in which a hot tub and a tropical drink form the pinnacle of luxury.
And it is exactly this populist appearance of wealth (q.v. buildings
with YOUR name on them, the aforementioned Brioni + baseball cap
combo) that lies at the heart of this particular stereotype, a formica-coated
version of the American dream.
This
is the mutation of the American-dream concept. When I was 15 or 16, I
adopted Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg,
Ohio
as a totemic text. These stories of small-town adolescence, of a
whole world in which dreams had been warped, spoke so strongly then:
“The
old man had listed hundreds of the truths in his book. I will not try
to tell you of all of them. There was the truth of virginity and the
truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and
of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon. Hundreds and hundreds
were the truths and they were all beautiful.
“And then the
people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths
and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.
It was the truths
that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate
theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one
of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth,
and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth
he embraced became a falsehood.”
But as powerful as this imagery is, it
is not electoral politics. It is tribalism.
What
bothers me immensely, is that, without the media seeming to know it,
this notion of the grotesquerie has displaced real political
discourse. When MSNBC shows Trump supporters, it shows fat, slovenly
rednecks with Confederate flag tattoos. When Fox News shows them, it
shows small-town swells and immaculate blonde publicists. Both feed
the same purpose, of splitting people into identity-based camps.
I
shouldn't be surprised. The aesthetic mode displaces the ideological
with terrifying frequency, and the current iteration of American
cultural war is nothing more than an accelerated, 4G-era version of
the same disconnect between metropolitan oversimplification and rural
oversimplification that is far older than the republic. In focusing
on this distinction, those of us on the left fully play into Trump's
us-versus-them message. We don't look at the common evisceration of
the middle class, we don't look at the way the paranoia regarding
abstract terror is being spun into a surveillance state by both
parties, we don't look at the processes by which the image-machine
turns our hopes and fears into capital.
The
only shot we have at overcoming this chronic shortsightedness is to
first address it as such. It is only when we realize how much we
conflate external image with politics, when we realize how much we
rely on the crutch of market-tested identity, that anyone can
actually find a political language that transcends these divisions.
