The Covid-19 situation in the United States, which has become the epicenter of new infections because of its flawed and chaotic response to the pandemic, is seen by some around the world as an emergency case of its own, requiring some sort of defensive response by countries that could become similarly infected. The Week‘s Ryan Cooper notes that “The world is putting America in quarantine.” (The piece was written before the new case rates began hitting over 40,000 on a daily basis, as they have this past week.)
Cooper largely credits Donald Trump for that. He writes:
A nation that could elect Donald Trump is deeply, deeply sick. […] When a country is as gangrenous as the United States, the rot tends to spread through its entire system sooner or later.
But the disease that, for Cooper, is represented by Trump is not so easy to quarantine or excise. It is not just that of poor leadership coupled with an underfunded public health care system that has become deeply mismatched with state and local needs and capacities. It is a disease with multiple layers that can be found in variations all around the world, from Brazil to Russia to Turkey to the Philippines.
To successfully diagnose and treat a disease, one must understand its symptomatology and its etiology (causes). With that goal in mind, I want to consider some of the factors involved in what we might tentatively call “Trump-like derangement syndrome,” or “TLDS” (which bears no necessary relation to “Trump derangement syndrome,” though a few of its causes might). I use this term as a placeholder to indicate that the problems of the United States appear (for many) to be linked to its president, but that there may be other conditions similar to it in other countries around the world, and that its causes are still to be worked out.
I don’t intend for this list to be exhaustive, but I do want to propose what I consider to be some key causal factors.
1) Patriarchal bluster: There is no doubt that Trump’s attitude is a key factor in the recent decline of respect for the U.S. He is pompous, arrogant, and egotistical at the same time as he rejects or is simply unwilling to listen to the advice of all but a few trusted advisors (Stephen Miller, Jared Kushner, and a few others). In particular, he is defiant toward those who are “supposed” to know better, which includes scientists, health experts, and other professionals. He is more concerned with what people think of him and appears guided by the need to be recognized as smarter and more powerful than anyone else, both by his fans and by those he recognizes as the “strongmen” on the block. He is an example of the type of man most women and many men recognize very quickly — the haughty, aggrieved bully who is intent on getting his way at the expense of those who are clearly in a weaker position than he is, with women, non-whites, and foreigners being particularly frequent targets of his ire.
In all of this, Trump combines the arrogance of patriarchy with the intemperance of someone stuck in adolescence. (Let’s leave toddlers out of the picture.) Even many of his supporters recognize these traits, but are either willing to conveniently set that aside for other perceived gains, or enjoy the vicarious thrill of a kind of personal vindication through him. Unfortunately these traits also make it harder to deal with the complexities of the coronavirus pandemic. But they all connect with the second factor.
2) The conservative grievance complex: Most countries have their variation of the clash between liberals and conservatives, with one side supporting “modernization” of one kind or another (individual rights and freedoms, upward and global mobility, “political correctness,” and so on) and the other representing what they see as “traditional values.” In the U.S. and in some other countries where Trump-like leaders have gained ascendancy, the latter values have become associated with conservative religiosity (Evangelical Christianity in the U.S., Brazil, and Bolivia, Orthodoxy in Russia, Catholicism in Poland, Muslim traditionalism in Turkey, Hindu nationalism in India, et al.) and with strong opposition to homosexuality, abortion (and women’s rights more broadly), and other perceived “deviancies.” These issues have become foci for a growing sense that the country (and world) have “spun out of control,” with the search for scapegoats focusing on those who are “defiling” the body politic and who are, in essence, “not like us” — whether they be urban liberals, academics, non-whites and immigrants, or others who threaten the traditions, values, jobs, or whatever else is identified as “ours.”
The key to understanding the conservative grievance complex, however, is that it is not a spontaneous and grassroots development. Rather, it has been cultivated by institutions that have recognized they can benefit from it. It is what Cooper calls a “conservative grievance industrial complex,” an array of wealthy actors, institutions (including think tanks and media corporations), and strategies designed to lure popular support away from liberalism, social and environmental regulation, civil justice activism, and other expressions of a post-1960s sensibility, and toward the candidate that can speak to the combined suite of conservative cultural and economic demands.
The presidency of a Trump-like personality is causally linked to the cultivation of an electoral “base” that has been shaped by the suite of grievances and demands that was forged into a coherent series by this industrial complex — demands for upholding “family values,” gun rights, the freedom to plunder public lands and pollute endlessly, and so on. (With Brazil’s Bolsonaro, for instance, it’s a coalition of “bullets, beef, and Bible”; with Trump, just add oil and a wall to that trio.) All of this has in turn become connected to the next factor.
3) “Political technologies“: The term comes from Russia, but it’s as good as any to capture the array of tools for manipulating public opinion in support of political parties and candidates. The U.S. had of course been quite good at this for many years, shaping a consensus within which only one of two political parties could come to power, with the differences between them being wider on some issues (usually domestic and “cultural”) and quite minor on other, quite substantial ones (usually foreign or economic). But while the more subtle forms of propaganda developed in the world’s most powerful country might be seen as complements to the more overt forms of authoritarian countries like the USSR and China, neither was enough for Russia when its post-Soviet economy was tanking and its political system floundering. Russia under Putin has needed to evolve other means of staying relevant and powerful, which it did by developing sophisticated tools of information warfare that have added to the arsenal of methods available to power wielders everywhere.
If the goal of influencing public opinion has existed all along and the motivations for it have grown in the post-Cold War world, the infrastructure for it has begun even more powerful… which brings us to the next factor.
4) Unregulated digital capitalism: I use this phrase in place of “surveillance capitalism,” which is more focused on the surveilling of populations rather than the end goal, that of profit, and the largely unregulated environment in which it has flourished. It is digital because it is concentrated within digital media (especially the internet) and because its mechanics include the “datification” of everything that’s made possible by digital computing. The rise of these technologies undergirded by the profit motive and enhanced by the relative lack of regulation has enabled the spread of mechanisms of influence the old “political technologists” could hardly have dreamed of. The result is that vast numbers of people in the given nation-state (the U.S., in our model example, but this goes for nearly every other case mentioned) spend much of their online time in echo chambers of misinformed hyper-emotionality. The role of social media in electing strongmen populists has been especially well demonstrated in Brazil, India, and the Philippines, but probably applies across the board.
5) A world careening out of control: Finally, and this may well be the causal trump card (no pun intended) that makes our time different from others: the world really is careening out of control. Coronavirus is only the most obvious, most sudden and unexpected visitor to invade a world (or at least the sense of a world) that is already under threat on multiple fronts: from global climate chaos and ecological disruption on several levels to massive refugee movements across borders and continents, intensifying wealth inequalities (made more visible by global media), the multipolar disorder of endless real and proxy wars over resources, land, and geopolitics, and cultural clashes capable of being harnessed toward any end by any party to any conflict.
There you have it. Five ingredients: mix them together, bake, and here we are.
What I think should be clear now is that these five factors are not at all exclusive to the United States. Patriarchal bluster and conservative grievance complexes can be found almost anywhere. Their antidotes are also readily found: they are especially notable in the Scandinavian countries, New Zealand, and Germany, though their transferability may be uncertain. Skillful cultural politics are what it will take to render each of these two negative factors less powerful.
Political technologies, as I’ve mentioned, are varied in their provenance and linked more closely to Russia (at least in this context) than to most other countries. The way to deal with them is to strengthen existing pluralistic democratic institutions that monitor and constrain governmental overreach. As for digital capitalism, it may seem the most American of the factors (at least if Silicon Valley counts as America), but it is also global in its spread. The antidote to it is a regulatory framework of the sort that has begun to appear in Europe and is at least part of the conversation on the American left.
This fifth factor, finally, is one we all have to live with, so it cannot be quarantined and isolated, though we can certainly address some of its components much better than we have up to now. Leadership is what has been most lacking, especially around climate change.
More work is obviously needed around each of these, but analyzed into this set of factors, “Trump-like derangement syndrome” is seen to be both much more global than it at first appears and, potentially (I hope), more manageable. If, as I’m suggesting, it is caused by an interlocking set of factors that are found in different forms around the world, the antidotes to those factors may also be an interlocking set of strategies that could be developed globally and applied locally.
