The Brutality of Certainty

Fighting the War on Nuance

As with many who voted against Donald Trump, I’ve struggled to manage conflicting emotional states. The very nature of my psychoanalytic education is that I must confront my own feelings — those unconscious patterns that make me act out like the tantrum-throwing toddler I was or sulk like the affirmation-starved perfectionist I still am. The point of being in analysis myself is that a therapist must understand his or her own emotions to affectively work with a patient’s.

Since Trump won, I have thought deeply about how to best orient myself emotionally during this transfer of power. The election, to which I admittedly paid entirely too much attention throughout its 16 despicable months, was traumatizing. I don’t care how presidential historians compare it to the vitriol of past campaigns — it is all terrible. We should be ashamed of ourselves, Republican and Democrat, for finding increasingly innovative ways to rationalize our worst impulses.

Needless to say, I am discouraged.

I’ve had a lot of fantasies about throwing objects through windows: namely an oversized table in the undersized activity room where I’m currently working with patients at a mental-health center. (Oh, and I can’t seem to shake a desire to heave a newspaper box through the sliding glass doors of a casino. Any casino, really.)

But I’m trying to hold myself to a higher standard: the more honorable, albeit uncomfortable, alternative of moderation and scrutiny—of resilient nuance.

I suspect many of us have temporarily quarantined ourselves from Facebook. At least, I have. Whenever I spot a self-congratulatory post about “Trump’s America,” I can’t help but burp up stomach acid. Worse, I’m wracked with guilt whenever I read posts from friends and colleagues about their refusal to validate a Trump presidency or accede to its normalization. I knew at 11:00 p.m. on Tuesday November 9th that I didn’t do enough to stop Trump (i.e., support Clinton). But now I already feel like I’m not doing enough to preemptively save us from his presidency.

Many of those who read my previous essay, “An Open Letter to Our Better Angels,” respected its nuance yet ultimately disagreed with the central premise that democracy, as ugly as it is and was, worked. In other words, Trump is our (incurious, race-baiting, incompetent, blowhard of a) president. And whether or not he won “fair and square,” he earned, on his own merits, our native tongue’s worst descriptors: bigot, liar, misogynist, nationalist, phony. The list could and should go on.

But in the blunt-force trauma that was his campaign, we have collectively overlooked Trump’s most insidious quality: the brutality of his certainty.

America fetishizes the “courage of conviction.” The electorate has a long-standing love affair with outing flip-floppers and playing gotcha with intellectual inconsistency. Remember the quaint mid-aughts when John Kerry lost, in part, an election for “being for it before he was against it”? Changing one’s views for political expediency alone is certainly icky — though by any other standard this strategy might simply be called “compromise.” But I’m disturbed by our collective war against changing one’s mind according to the facts on the ground. My sense is the Bush administration transformed being often wrong but never in doubt into the Republican Party’s guiding ethos.

This war on nuance truly epitomizes the soft bigotry of low expectations (a quote that might prove to be George W. Bush’s only positive contribution to politics). No doubt there was a strain of liberal elitism inherent in the conversation about the “white non-college educated voter.” We liberals must own this. But worse than placing political bets on a college degree, or lack thereof, is pandering to one’s constituency by serving up easy answers to complex questions. (Remember the first time you caught an adult lying to you for the sake of convenience or, worse, his or her own benefit? I certainly do.) At best, politicians — namely, Republicans — sacrifice nuance for effective talking points.

But marketing is not governing.

Ambiguity and ambivalence are central tenets within psychoanalysis. The quality of having conflicting feelings is both natural and essential. To deny that you might be able to love and hate someone at the same time is to ignore the very complexity of our psychic lives. In other words, this state of uncertainty is what makes us human.

And as certain as I am that Trump is terrible for our country, I am just as despondent about the impact that his campaign rhetoric and subsequent victory will have on the essential role of uncertainty and ambiguity in not only our discourse but also our very humanity.

It is incumbent on us to fight for justice, liberty, and the inalienable promise of our own sentience. (Like it or not, liberals get to care about freedom, too.) We must hold Trump and his administration accountable for both word and deed. But this election has proven that is our duty to carry the torch for the cause of nuance. After all, the adults have not only left the room—they left rotting food behind the couch and urinated on the carpet.

Certitude is a cancer.

We have a moral responsibility to protect the rights of minorities, immigrants, Muslims, the LGBTQ community, and those most vulnerable within and without our borders. But we must also ardently fight to preserve our privilege to be wrong on an occasion, to change our minds when a better idea comes along, to see life for its complexity, and to work together for the common good—no matter our disagreements. Trump might embody the transposition of the “get rich quick” scheme into our American politics. But defending the constitution and the rights guaranteed by our very personhood is not the sole domain of some flimflam artist.

Public debate, on all sides of the aisle, cannot be reduced to pithy slogans, easy talking points, or provocative equivalencies. The very nature of the American project is too complicated—too ambivalent. And if you’re not conflicted about it, then you’re not human.