{"id":113622,"date":"2018-07-02T12:01:37","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T11:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=113622"},"modified":"2018-07-02T07:59:48","modified_gmt":"2018-07-02T06:59:48","slug":"trump-the-shakespearean-fool-a-new-look-at-the-dynamics-of-trumpism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/07\/trump-the-shakespearean-fool-a-new-look-at-the-dynamics-of-trumpism\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump, the (Shakespearean) Fool: A New Look at the Dynamics of Trumpism"},"content":{"rendered":"

2 Jul 2018 – <\/em>Not long after Donald Trump\u2019s accession to the presidency, I found myself arguing with fellow oppositionists who insisted that the new POTUS was either insane, moronic, knowingly corrupt, or a Russian agent \u2013 or all four simultaneously.\u00a0\u00a0 It seemed to me \u2013 and still does \u2013 that these characterizations misconceived the real problem.\u00a0 \u201cListen,\u201d I told my friends, \u201cthese insults won\u2019t work.\u00a0 You are using conventional terms of abuse to describe something for which we have no political vocabulary.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich is what?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhich is that this president is a fool<\/em>.\u00a0 He is not stupid, diabolical, or mentally out of control.\u00a0 He is not Vladimir Putin\u2019s bitch.\u00a0 He is a foolish man who tends to act without calculating the consequences of his actions; a hothead who disdains polite discourse and loves to violate taboos; an actor who plays a boastful, threatening, oversexed, occasionally (but rarely) warmhearted character called Donald J. Trump in an ongoing reality drama that he seems to identify with reality itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have not had a fool in the Oval Office before, and I think that I was right to emphasize the self-directed aspects of Trump\u2019s character.\u00a0 But the President\u2019s foolishness has turned out to be more complex and dangerous \u2013 and in some ways more instructive to his opponents \u2013 than I had thought.<\/p>\n

Consider the difference between the small \u201cf\u201d fool, a simpleton whose ignorance and poor judgment make him an object of scorn, and the Fool with a large \u201cF\u201d \u2013 a far more complex and challenging character who appears in plays by Shakespeare, Beckett, Pinter, and other dramatists of note.\u00a0 The large \u201cF\u201d Fool is not simply a dunce and target for other people\u2019s tricks, but an important figure whose chief function, aside from comic relief, is to expose the false pretences and pretensions of the play\u2019s highborn protagonists.\u00a0 Shakespeare\u2019s Fools are employed by the one percent \u2013 nobles like King Lear, Duke Orsino, and Henry IV, who outrank them by miles, but who can never outwit them.\u00a0 Despite hardships and insults, they remain loyal to these patrons, but their job is to undermine elite complacency by telling unpalatable truths.<\/p>\n

Fools \u201cdo share a sort of capacity to stir things up, to say things that other characters in their social bracket couldn’t possibly get away with saying,\u201d notes the University of Birmingham\u2019s Jacquelyn Bessell.\u00a0 \u201cThey deflate pompous, socially superior characters. They’re able to criticize kings.”\u00a0 What enables them to perform this task is a sardonic, illusion-free vision of the world: what we might call an alienated consciousness.\u00a0 As Jan Kott puts it in his classic study, Shakespeare, Our Contemporary<\/em>:<\/p>\n

The Fool does not follow any ideology. He rejects all appearances, of law, justice, moral order. He sees brute force, cruelty and lust. He has no illusions and does not seek consolation in the existence of natural or supernatural order, which provides for the punishment of evil and the reward of good. Lear, insisting on his fictitious majesty, seems ridiculous to him. All the more ridiculous because he does not see how ridiculous he is. But the Fool does not desert his ridiculous, degraded king, and accompanies him on his way to madness. The Fool knows that the only true madness is to recognize this world as rational.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How does this help us to understand Trump and Trumpism?\u00a0 First, consider the alienated consciousness through whose lens Trump perceives organizations long considered sacred, non-partisan, and politically untouchable, such as the F.B.I., NATO, and the G7 Alliance, as rankly self-interested and politically partisan.\u00a0 Note also the ironic consequences of this perception, as many of Trump\u2019s liberal\/progressive opponents scramble to defend these agencies\u2019 sanctity against the Fool\u2019s acid criticism.\u00a0 \u201cTrump Wants to Destroy the West,\u201d howls The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 David Leonhardt in a front page opinion piece.\u00a0 (Fools often provoke this sort of overreaction.)<\/p>\n

Next, observe Trump\u2019s practice of redefining world leaders who many Americans consider enemies or bad people (Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, Rodrigo Duterte, General Sisi, et al.) as actual or potential allies.\u00a0 If interests, not values or human needs, make the world go round, and if violence is the normal means of defending them, the hypocrisy of the Good Leader\/Bad Leader distinction becomes evident.\u00a0 (Shall the killers of more than six million Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Afghanis, et al. get their knickers in a twist over Kim Jong Un\u2019s assassination of his uncle?)\u00a0 The Fool\u2019s perspective also exposes sacrosanct doctrines such as human rights and social equality as pious shibboleths honored more in the breach than in the observance.\u00a0 Trump\u2019s well-known tolerance of torture rests on his perception that this is the way of the world.<\/p>\n

Third, think again about Mr. Trump\u2019s highly distressed relationships with Truth and the news media.\u00a0 Recall that the Fool\u2019s signature characteristic is an ability (or compulsion) to say the unsayable even when it hurts.\u00a0 \u201cTruth\u2019s a dog that must to kennel, he must be whipped out,\u201d King Lear\u2019s servant tells him.\u00a0 Yes, the Fool\u2019s mission is to expose fakery and lies.\u00a0 On the other hand, though, his implicit nihilism undermines the whole notion of a Truth unsullied by self-interest.\u00a0 The way the Fool tells partial truths annihilates trusting relationships and dissolves communities.<\/p>\n

Thus, Trump begins by charging his journalistic opponents with the creation of \u201cfake news.\u201d\u00a0 At the same time, beginning with his own description of the size of his Inauguration crowd, he is unable to avoid promulgating \u201calternative facts.\u201d\u00a0 In the smoky air produced by repeated charges and counter-charges, the Truth\u00a0 becomes a Platonic Idea flickering on the walls of the cave \u2013 an allegorical figure as old-fashioned, alluring, and unreachable as Botticelli\u2019s Venus.\u00a0 Once again, the President\u2019s opponents are tempted to oppose his Fool-ish skepticism with professions of faith in the Establishment \u2013 in this case, the respectable news media and their alleged capacity for objective truth telling.\u00a0 We will see in a moment that this is a major political mistake as well as a philosophical error.<\/p>\n

First, though, it will be helpful to recognize two key differences <\/em>between Trump\u2019s perspective and that of the Fool.<\/p>\n

One: Fools are total cynics, not political ideologues.\u00a0 Therefore, no authoritative person or idea is immune from their criticism. By contrast, the President and his minions are<\/em> ideologues, and their right-wing nationalism exempts certain sanctified institutions and concepts from critical analysis.\u00a0 For example, a modern Feste or Falstaff might well decide to deconstruct the Nation on the ground that that \u201csacred entity\u201d is, in essence, an ideological con game designed to convince workers and people of color that their true interests and identities are identical with those of a wealthy white elite.\u00a0 President Trump, however, is not about to expose concepts like American Greatness or the Free Market to the same acid bath that he employs to de-legitimize past norms of diplomatic practice, journalistic objectivity, and free trade.\u00a0 In these respects, Trump is more fool than Fool; here is where he is most vulnerable to radical attack.<\/p>\n

Second, Trump is not a lower class counselor or gadfly to the monarch; he is President of the United States \u2013 his own fool, as it were.\u00a0 Rather than being chastened by some brave but passive underling, he has the power to adapt his conscience to his will and, within certain limits, to create his own political world.\u00a0 The President\u2019s apparent lack of self-reflexivity, combined with his enormous capacities for delusion and destruction, rightly give his opponents (and even some of his allies) cause for acute concern.\u00a0 But they would do well to remember how popular<\/em> the character of the Fool was in Shakespeare\u2019s time and ours, and to avoid siding with the respectable elite against his cynical jeers and bad manners.<\/p>\n

In Elizabethan times, the \u201cgroundlings\u201d \u2013 workers and farm laborers who couldn\u2019t afford expensive theatre seats \u2013 adored these comedic aggressors whose scurrilous language exposed the greed and hypocrisy of their \u201cbetters.\u201d\u00a0 The Fool\u2019s speech, like that of today\u2019s stand-up comics, was the antidote to political correctness.\u00a0 In extreme cases (one thinks of Thersites, the fool in Troilus and Cressida<\/em>), it unleashed repressed rage and contempt in ways reminiscent of an overflow of raw sewage.\u00a0 Is this dangerous today?\u00a0 You bet, especially considering Mr. Trump\u2019s tin ear for the music of racial equality, democracy, and social justice.\u00a0 But the way to defuse this danger is not to adopt the \u201cTsk, tsk\u201d attitude of those who continually take Trump to task for his rudeness, sulfuric language, harsh view of the world, and violations of revered norms.\u00a0 Today\u2019s groundlings cheer these latter-day manifestations of Fool-ishness just as loudly as did their Elizabethan ancestors.<\/p>\n

Where Trump is most vulnerable is in his (non<\/em>-Foolish) character as a right-wing nationalist ideologue, an abuser of power, and a deceiver who promises working people what he can\u2019t possibly deliver.\u00a0 One can and should call out the racists, xenophobes, mysogenists, and lovers of violence.\u00a0 Even so, it seems clear that defending the manners and ideas of the respectable rich will not deprive the Fool in the White House of his audience.<\/p>\n

Why should it?\u00a0 For the past 40-odd years, the pretentions and depredations of the elite have brought working people little more than indignity, social insecurity, and communal decay.\u00a0 Fewer than 10 percent of Americans own well over 90 percent of the nation\u2019s wealth, and income inequality is higher here than in any other industrial nation.\u00a0 Deep poverty and \u201cprecarity\u201d destabilize families and destroy communities.\u00a0 So long as no one offers people an effective cure for these ills, they will continue accept the patent medicine (dispensed by most Democrats as well as Dr. Trump) that convinces them to \u201ckick down\u201d on their social inferiors rather than challenging the system that degrades and disempowers them.<\/p>\n

Shakespeare understood, if the Democrats do not, that trying to shame the Fool is not a winning strategy.\u00a0 Sadly, most of Trump\u2019s opponents seem to think that the American masses will rally to a campaign stressing the President\u2019s anti-elitist style rather than his pro-elite program.\u00a0 Do they do this because they have no program of their own that is radical enough to challenge the elite and make a difference in ordinary people\u2019s lives?\u00a0 You tell me.<\/p>\n

Those inseparably wedded to Wall Street, the American Empire, and the profit-driven status quo; those who want to define political identity exclusively in cultural terms; those who, deep down, divide humanity into respectable people and \u201cdeplorables\u201d will never produce an effective people\u2019s program.\u00a0 The anti-Trump forces could use a dose of Fool-ishness themselves if they hope to stem the right-wing tide.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Richard E. Rubenstein is<\/em> a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and a professor at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University<\/em> in Arlington, Virginia.<\/em>\u00a0 His recent book,<\/em> Resolving Structural Conflicts, was published by Routledge in 2017<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He is not stupid, diabolical, or mentally out of control. He is not Vladimir Putin\u2019s bitch. He is a foolish man who tends to act without calculating the consequences of his actions; a hothead who disdains polite discourse and loves to violate taboos; an actor who plays a boastful, threatening, oversexed, occasionally (but rarely) warmhearted character called Donald J. Trump in an ongoing reality drama that he seems to identify with reality itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":103021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}