Trump, Metaphor and the Mythos of Election 2016
*For the past few months, I’ve been trying to wrap my head around just what the ever loving &*(^ is going on with Trump, the election, and America in general. This is what I’ve come up with. I’d love to hear what you think.**
A Wall By Any Other Name
Early in his campaign, when most folks discounted the whole thing as a publicity stunt, Donald Trump uttered these words:
‘I will build a great wall–and nobody builds better walls than me, believe me.’ –Donald Trump
This wall, a great wall, the best wall, would rise between the United States and Mexico. The assembled masses cheered. Members of the opposition and the press immediately went to town on the idea of a wall.
Economically, it’s utterly impractical.
Logistically, it’s impossible.
Ideologically, it’s abhorrent.
And so on.
None of it stuck. The Wall had taken hold in the imagination of Trump’s supporters and no amount of rational argument could shake it loose.
This is because the Wall isn’t a wall at all. It’s a metaphor.
Whether he’s done it consciously or not (I tend to think he knows exactly what he’s doing), Trump created a compelling metaphor that allows him to acknowledge, legitimize, and give voice to a seething undercurrent of anger, fear, and confusion hardwired into the American psyche.
What does the wall represent?
It represents safety and protection.
It represents strength.
It represents the preservation of the mythical American Dream.
The use of the word ‘great’ associates it with the Great Wall of China, one of the seven wonders of the world.
The invocation of the Wall is a clue to Trump’s ascendance: he’s taken the campaign out of the realm of traditional politics and into the realm of myth.
Logos and Mythos
The ancient Greeks proposed two lenses through which to see the world.
The first, logos, relies on logical thought. Much of modern science, infographs, polling data, policies, and party platforms lie in the land of logos.
The second, mythos, relies on a more subjective, symbolic interpretation of the world. All of the Avengers movies sit squarely in the land of mythos as do campfire tales, traditional stories from around the world, poetry, and metaphor.
To the Greeks, these views were not mutually exclusive. In fact, they advocated for a balance between the two. Logos and Mythos were both required to create a balanced, complete picture of the world.
American politics has always had a bit of mythos in it. Bill Clinton’s campaign video, The Man from Hope, created a mythic depiction of his life using the facts (logos) of his biography. George W. Bush’s rise to the Presidency was, in part, fueled by his mythic lineage. The iconic posters of Obama created by Shepard Fairey were mythic in scope.
Mythos is not new to the political landcape. But, for the most part, it has always been led by logos. At the end of the day, candidates might mangle the truth a bit. Occasionally they might fudge or spin a fact so aggressively that even it wouldn’t know which way was up. But ultimately, they realized that their campaigns, and the office of President itself, was rooted in the land of logos.
Trump has turned this dynamic on its head. His campaign is almost entirely mythic, with only a glancing relationship to logic.
Trump and Modern Myth Making
Trump is no stranger to mythos. His entire life has been an exercise in public myth making.
The Myth of Trump goes something like this (note that I’m doing this without doing a lick of research; this is all stuff I’ve absorbed over the past 40 years simply by living in this country):
Donald Trump, heir to a great fortune, is one of the world’s leading businessmen. In fact, he may be the greatest businessman to ever do business. He has built his fortune through shrewd deal making and ruthless protection of his assets. Emblazoned on the side of majestic structures the world over, his very name connotes elegance, class, luxury, and an uncompromising commitment to quality.
A lover of beauty, he has surrounded himself with beautiful women. It is an indication of his magnetic charisma, power, and virility that these women are drawn to him.
Trump, the myth, is a larger than life figure only tangentially related to Trump, the man. As such, he is not bound by conventional expectations of morality, common sense, or other logical considerations with which others must grapple.
Leading with mythos rather than logos, Trump has effectively protected himself from rational objections. Looking at the logos side of things, we can see that he’s a fairly mediocre businessman, his buildings aren’t that great, and his ‘love of beauty’ looks a lot more like attachment disorder and chauvinism. But none of that matters because once a story, a myth, takes hold of the popular imagination, it’s almost impossible to dislodge.
Myth in Trump’s Campaign
Trump’s campaign style and rhetoric is utterly consistent with his public persona and personal mythology. He makes large statements that are unrelated to logos, but tap into a collective myth churning just beneath the surface of the American psyche. Here are two examples:
I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.
When somebody called for a moment of silence to this maniac that shot the five police, you just see what’s going on. It’s a very, very sad situation.
The first quote refers to an imagined phenomenon that took place after 9/11. The second to an imagined event that took place after the recent shooting of officers in Dallas. Neither one happened.
A quick review of the media response to both utterances illustrates how utterly ineffective it is to respond to a mythic projection with logic.
In both cases, print, online, and network media pounced on the pronouncements, pushing Trump and his campaign for any evidence that either event occurred. In both cases, Trump replied by attacking the media for its unfair portrayal of his campaign, doubled down on the myth, and ultimately defaulted to saying something like ‘I’m just saying what other people told me.’
The net effect: People who don’t support Trump have more reasons not to support Trump. People who do support Trump remain undeterred, hewing close to the Trump mythos.
I believe that Trump’s rhetoric is so potent and resilient to attack because, as mythos, it taps into a collective American mythology that has been hidden in the shadows since the founding of the country.
America’s Two Founding Myths
Modern America has grown from the roots of two inextricably linked mythic origin stories. One is lifted up, passed on explicitly through education, entertainment, and public celebration. The other has existed in the shadows, surrounded by fear, anger and shame.
They cannot exist without each other.
The American Dream
The celebrated myth frames the founding of the United States as a victory of justice over tyranny. A dedicated group of righteous and peace-loving Founding Fathers took up arms against of sea of troubles, represented by the oppressive British Empire, and by opposing ended them.
The strength and dedication of these founders was inherited from the original European settlers who ‘discovered’ America. These brave souls, unjustly cast out from their homelands for their deep commitment to their religious beliefs, set forth on a grand adventure across the world. These first settlers sacrificed blood, sweat, and tears to tame the savage, but beautiful, land that they found at the end of their voyage.
Today, we are the inheritors of this bold lineage. Through hard work, grit, and the power of belief, we can achieve anything. We Americans are exceptional. As history has shown, there is nothing we can’t do. The ‘American Dream’ grows out of this narrative.
The Shadow Narrative
Beneath the ‘American Dream’ courses another story. In this narrative, the the ‘brave settlers’ tame the land by wiping out its original inhabitants. Beyond simply killing them, the European settlers went further, taking concrete steps to strip the Native Americans of their cultural heritage, language, and core beliefs.
Having ‘tamed’ the Natives and realizing that they needed more workers to continue their conquest of the ‘new’ world, the Founding Fathers and their progenitors cultivated a thriving slave trade, importing people from Africa as property to provide an ongoing source of cheap, expendable labor. In order to justify slavery, America consciously cultivated a narrative in which the slaves were somehow less than human.
This narrative fueled the Civil War, was codified in the Constitution as the Three Fifths Compromise, and is clearly evident in the (objectively proven) way people of color, particularly African Americans, are perceived and treated on a day to day basis in modern life.
In this reading, we are inheritors of a shameful lineage based on the exploitation and de-valuation of human life in service to social and economic gain for the Founders and their offspring.
This shadow narrative, while rarely if ever acknowledged, is inextricable from the American Dream. It sits, poisonously, at the deepest roots of that dream.
I believe that, through the Trump campaign along with other events unfolding throughout the country and the world, we are seeing that poison bubble up to the surface.
Trump and the Shadow Narrative
When Trump invokes the image of crowds cheering as the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 or Black Lives Matter protesters calling for a moment of silence dedicated to the Dallas shooter, he’s invoking a deep seated fear of the ‘other.’
Like a finely honed acupuncture needle, his fabricated stories go straight into a nerve cluster at the heart of the shadow narrative invoking an instinctive response.
In order to preserve the American Dream, the mythic order must be preserved. The ‘other,’ codified as those with darker skin in the documented DNA of our nation (i.e. the Constitution), must be kept in place. Imagined celebrations in the face of national tragedy and commemoration of a dark-skinned man who hid in the shadows picking off representatives of the established order speak to an mostly-unspoken fear that the old myth and its core beliefs are at risk.
The metaphor of the Wall promises the restoration and preservation of the established order.
A Mythic Election
I believe that what we’re seeing play out is a conflict between the country’s entrenched and divided existing mythic structure and a new, integrated core mythology that wants to emerge.
On the one side, we see a deeply rooted, semi-unconscious collective attempt to shed light on the shadow narrative, re-write it, and integrate it into a more coherent national mythos.
We see this in the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, directly addressing the deep wound that lies at the heart of the shadow narrative. This movement brings the degradation of human life upon which the much-heralded American Dream sits into the open and seeks to bring healing through awareness and advocacy.
We see this in the ratification of gay marriage at a national level, in President Obama’s recent visit to Hiroshima, in the increased visibility of social iniquity at all levels of society.
On the other side, we see a commensurately strong response pulling in the opposite direction. The ‘American Dream’ narrative clings to its mythic dominance, attempting to snuff out attempts at integration, change and evolution. Significantly, no one is attacking the American Dream narrative. Instead, the attacks are against the poisoned Shadow Narrative that lie at its roots. In order to preserve the glory of the one, the ignominy of the other also must be preserved.
We see this in increased incidence of gun violence.
We see it in the devolution of our educational system into a series of standardized tests and the erasure of slavery in textbooks that refer to slaves as ‘immigrant workers.’
We see this in the resurgence of supremacist groups and in proposals that members of certain religious groups (in most cases Muslims) be indexed, documented, and tracked.
And most glaringly we see this in Trump’s candidacy for President and in his signature policy proposition: the construction of a Wall to protect America and its wounded mythology.
In a sense, Trump’s candidacy is the old myth struggling to protect itself by speaking through him.
Eventually the Wall Will Come Down
In stories, Walls always fall. And they tumble in real life, as well.
The Berlin Wall fell while George H. W. Bush was President of the United States.
The Iron Curtain, a metaphorical wall, fell when Ronald Reagan was President preceded by one of Reagan’s most mythically memorable quotes: ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall!’
Even the Great Wall of China, built to preserve the Ming Dynasty, fell preciptating the downfall of the Ming Dynasty and the ascendance of the Qing Dynasty.
Trump’s Wall recently took a step from the land of mythos towards the land of logos with its adoption as a plank in the Republican National Party’s platform. Even if it is never built physically, the Wall already exists, dividing the dual narratives that underlie American life. And dividing the fractious, poisoned past from the potential for a future that grows from healed, healthy (or at least differently poisoned) roots.
If history and mythology are any indication, the Wall will fall. It’s just a question of when and how turbulent and uncomfortable things will have to get before it happens.
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