Aristotle on the Emotions of a Trump Victory
On election night, 2016, I went to bed around 10:30 when it became clear that, contrary to my hopes and expectations, a Clinton victory was the upset scenario. As my wife and I lay in bed talking things over I realized I felt the way I had felt during the worst failures and disappointments of my life. When I learned I was losing my job. That time in graduate school when I sat shaking at my desk, sure that I couldn’t hack it. When I was rejected by the first woman I thought I loved. Racing thoughts. Heart beating in my ears. Adrenaline surging through my chest. I didn’t sleep well that night, and I didn’t feel much better the next day: I felt so much fear about what Trump’s election along with a very conservative congress will mean for our country. Maybe not so much for me, but for poor people, for immigrants, for people of color, for gays and lesbians, for women. I really wanted to be able to tell my daughter that when she was almost two we elected a woman to be president. Now I’m fearful about what country she’s going to grow up into.
I’ve tried to discipline myself, whenever I feel fear about politics, to think of Aristotle, who in his Rhetoric recognized fear as one of several emotions that politicians can use to persuade. He defined fear as “pain and agitation from the imagining of an impending evil of a destructive and painful sort. People are not afraid of all evils…but only those evils with the potential for great pain or destruction, and those only if they do not appear far away but so near as to be about to happen” (Rhet. 2.5 1381a20ff.; translations adapted from Sachs’ ed.). This describes pretty well the fears I described above. So does Aristotle’s definition of pity: “Pain at an apparent evil of a destructive or painful sort, when it strikes someone who does not deserve it, an evil which we might expect to suffer ourselves, or that someone close to us might” (Rhet. 2.8 1385b15ff.). What about righteous indignation: “being pained at someone who appears to be prospering without deserving to” (Rhet. 2.9 1387a10). Shame: “pain or agitation over bad deeds, present, past, or future, that appear to bring us into disrepute.” Anger: “A desire for revenge, accompanied by pain, for a perceived belittling of us or anything of ours, when the belittling is not appropriate…belittling is putting to work an opinion to the effect that something that we care about is worthless” (Rhet. 2.2 1378a30–1378b15). Hatred: what we feel toward “people who we believe want to harm us; people who are inclined to do evil in matters of money or security; people who make a living off the labor of others” (Rhet. 2.4 1382a1ff., where “hatred” is the opposite of “friendliness”). All these emotions, in a form pretty close to what Aristotle describes, are filling my heart and mind in the wake of Trump’s victory.
What Aristotle helps us realize, however, is that these emotions are not necessarily specific to the result of the 2016 campaign but are part and parcel of democratic practice, at least as it has existed up to this point. Aristotle was describing how persuasion worked in ancient Athens, the world’s first experiment with democratic institutions. He saw that those in power used these emotions to win support for their policies. He did not say that these emotions were essential to democracy, only that they were present in what he observed. But they remain present and powerful today and I would be surprised if we wouldn’t find them throughout democratic history.
Some part of the fear, pity, shame, indignation, anger, and hatred I’m feeling is justified. There is going to be some amount of pain in our country, at least as I conceive of it in relation to what I believe will be beneficial to our nation. But Aristotle’s analysis helps me see that some, perhaps most (since no one can know the future) of what I’m feeling, I’m feeling because “they” want me to feel it. Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic party, and the places I get my news and commentary understand very well what Aristotle understood: that fear, and pity, and all the rest are powerful ways to get me on their side and keep me there. They have powerful tools — many of them theorized by Aristotle himself — to make me feel those emotions. Hillary Clinton wants me to be afraid. And so I am.
The trouble — and this brings me back to the sleepless night — is that it’s so hard to tell the difference between the fear we should be feeling and the fear they use to control us. Not being able to tell the difference is what takes such a terrible toll on our sleep, our work, our health, our relationships. It’s at the root of partisanship. It’s a component of all kinds of bigotry. And not being able to tell this difference is what prevents me from putting aside what they want me to feel and focusing on what I need to feel, and more importantly, from figuring out how to turn those feelings into something that can contribute to bringing about the nation and society I believe we need.
They don’t want you to be able to tell the difference. But we owe it to ourselves to do so. And not just to ourselves: to our country, and to our fellow human beings.
