How the Rhetoric of Donald J. Trump Is (Sort Of) Changing American Politics
‘Wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who just with his mouth can make things happen that are positive?’
I’m, like, a really smart person.
- Donald J. Trump, at a campaign rally in Phoenix AZ, July 11 2015
In sum, to really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.
- David Foster Wallace, “Deciderization 2007 — a Special Report”
Intro To What I Think’s A Relevant Question About Politics
What’s become increasingly, if not unequivocally clear, thanks to feedback like what you’ll find below in the screenshot, is that politics is divisive (duh!) and fueled to much greater degree by emotion than it is by rationality. Which is interesting in itself, or shoot, at least to me it is, when you consider that emotional intelligence is manufactured and mostly controlled by the limbic system, in particular those two little thumb-shaped regions at the heart of your brain we term amygdalae, and that this limbic system — which is, by the way, an oddly wormy little thing — is itself enthroned at the dark heart of the brain and plugged in to the other really old brain structures — by old I mean hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of years; to provide a rough metaphor, the limbic system plays the Aztec to the neocortex’s Spanish conquistador, or maybe it’s more accurate to imagine a conquistador stumbling across a T-Rex. It is, in sum, the centerpiece of what the brain researcher Paul McLean called the “old mammalian” brain: the limbic system evolved to help complex vertebrates manage primitive threats — things like half-starved predators and huge annihilating ash-storms blossoming from active volcanoes and schizoid weather patterns and mating competitions more vicious than pong tourneys at college bars on quarter-beer nights, and which could often be fatal (and that may or may not be an evolutionary root-cause — along with the need to determine community hierarchy — for our own sports and organized competitions).
In other words the amygdala is one of the oldest structures in your skull, and it’s responsible for that famous fight-or-flight response that horror films cash in on so expertly, re-purposed in a really sort of clumsy way for use in human society. (The third and less frequently discussed physiological response to fear, to freeze, which happens to be my own personal involuntary response, probably doesn’t factor because, evolutionarily-speaking and despite what Dr. Alan Grant believes, it’s not a very effective strategy.)
But so, let’s hang on a second, let’s just pause here, because exactly how does this neuro/behavioral stuff relate to the politics-are-divisive-and-surprisingly-emotional thing mentioned in the very first sentence?
Or, let’s rephrase the question with slightly more coherence: Why is it that a presidential election — an election for someone whose influence on your daily life is virtually nonexistent when compared to the influence of local and state government, or the two branches of Congress, or even compared to the influence of, like, your cat, the one terrified of your vacuum cleaner and who uses your laptop as an underbelly warming pad and bitches at you with surprising vigor in the early mornings — tends to engage our limbic systems to really bafflingly great degree? Why do presidential elections mean so much to us, emotionally?
A Stab At A Response To The Above-Posed Question Which I Thought, Originally, Would Comprise The Meat Of This Essay
So a little further down we’ll talk about Donald J. Trump, I promise, because, shoot, his gravity’s gotten so massive, especially now, after he’s continued dominating headlines with the same Hulkish vigor he once brought to his short-lived professional wrestling career, that we’ve all at this point pretty much “adjust[ed] to his reality” as Clare Malone writes in FiveThirtyEight. But before we go there, I’d like briefly to try some armchair political science, to at least establish a few basic facts we can work from: democracy, as a form of politics, as the form of politics according to our moms and dads and middle-school civics teachers, is a very, very weird clusterfuck of emotions that are (thanks to this clusterfuckish feature) really difficult to untangle and talk about. That’s because democracy, in its most smoothly functioning iteration (let’s put aside for a minute the super PACs and the industry lobbyists, the House-of-Cards-esque scheming-and-dealing, the surreal and antiquated primary and caucus and electoral college processes, the various media’s weird, exhausting, manic-depressive coverage), is built on a paradox, which can be described this way: (1) a democracy gives equal voice to everybody, both the cripplingly shy and the abrasively loud-mouthed, and (2) a democracy is premised on majority rule, meaning the group that collects the greatest number of voices ALWAYS wins the debate. It’s a bean-counting contest, basically, or it’s like Pokémon (gotta catch ’em all!), no matter how much or how stylishly we dress it up.
In other words, your voice technically only matters if it says the same exact thing as a yuge multitude of other voices; democracy, in fact, rewards conformity with a functioning society (the word comes from the Greek dēmokratía, literally “rule of the people,” and you’ll notice “the people” is a singular entity, a sort of Gaia-like hive mind), and conformity, when we’re talking about millions and billions of people, is really only achievable if the issues at play are both simplified and symbolized — which of course means rhetoric, the language of politics, plays an important role, because it’s the preferred tool (really it’s the only tool) we use when engaging in simplifying-and-symbolizing all the varied and complicated socioeconomic and political issues afflicting the really, really big and dynamic whatever-it-is we think of as our country.
(We use our language, in other words, to explain things to ourselves. I suppose that sentence is tautological, but it is, nevertheless, a truth: language — and more relevantly, rhetoric, which I’ll loosely define here as political language, or language concerned with the functions and issues of a polity (the word stems from the Greek rhētōr, meaning, basically, an orator, someone who holds forth on something somewhere public)— is how we transmit information that’s then used in some way to help us survive-and-flourish.)
Democracy is what happens inside Plato’s cave, to paraphrase a recent Dissent article by David Marcus — meaning it’s a collective interpretation of those eerie and dancingly hypnotic shadows on the wall (as a side note, Plato was, in the Republic, put off by the concept, and much preferred a tyranny, as long as that tyrant was also a philosopher).
This simplifying-for-mass-agreement aspect of democracy is why we’ve got just two political parties and why their names mean basically the same thing (a republic is a sub-type of democracy, or you could argue it’s a refinement or even call it a compromise between democracy and oligarchy), and I suspect it’s why so many of us, myself included, tend to laser-like focus on presidential elections and it’s why we tend to lose our shit a little bit along the way: the candidates mean just a whole lot more to us than possibly we realize: someone who #feelsthebern comes to find themselves existentially aligned to Bernie Sanders, and likewise, someone who wants to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN believes in Donald Trump the way he or she believes in him or herself — that is, in a kind of narcissistic or possibly even solipsistic way: instead of organizing experience into Me V. The World, a Trump or Sanders or Cruz or Clinton supporter, or hell, possibly even a Kasich supporter, organizes experience into a Me/Candidate V. The World.
In simplest terms, that candidate comes to stand in for my or for your very own worldview. This is, undoubtedly, a Big Claim, but look, just try Googling some combination of the words “politics” and “empathy” and you’ll find in return hundreds of scholarly articles dealing with some aspect of this, with names like “The Politics of Empathy: Social Movements and Victim Repertoires” and “Institutionalizing passion in world politics: fear and empathy” and “Masculinity, Justice, and the Politics of Empathy”. It goes on and on and on, well established as a field of study.
My point is really just to assert that the stakes feel, to most of us, heart-clutchingly high. To test this out, try having a rational discussion with somebody whose politics and chosen candidate differs from your own. Let me know how it goes; in my own experience, the answer’s always some form of: Not Too Well.
And but, again, to just briefly reiterate, such strict alignment with a candidate’s worldview/platform is necessary to get anything meaningful done in a democracy composed of millions of people. A million voices saying a million different things is anarchy, plain and simple: Have you ever witnessed or taken part in an argument where three or more people are trying to all talk over each other? Nothing much is produced, except for lots of irritating and often headache-inducing noise.
But so, this deep-identification-with-my-candidate feature of contemporary American politics is a major part of the reason for the simplicity and demagoguery of current political rhetoric: the party and the candidate who most effectively and deeply appeals to the limbic system, to the animal part of us that’s constantly assessing threats and benefits, will be — these days — the most successful candidate: recall Barack Obama’s wonky demeanor when he first entered office, and how startling and off-putting it was to many of his supporters, because his emotional message as a candidate had been so electrifying. There were lots of people who’d believed they were receiving a sort of Deliverer-Moses-figure, and felt deceived when instead they got a (basically centrist, thanks to an entrenched Republican Congress) poli-sci professor. This was cognitive dissonance. I had friends who were not just disillusioned, but angry. (full disclaimer — having voted for Ralph Nader out of fear of the mob-mentality surrounding Obama in 2008 and a vague concern for the environment that nobody was (or frankly, still is, or not in any serious way) talking about, I was sort of, kind of, happy with their disillusionment, but kept my schadenfreude to myself and even voted for Obama the second time around.)
Now, there’s another really big and vital component of American society, mentioned in passing above, that aligns to the Us V. Them organizing principle we’re discussing here and which might be useful as an analogy: sports.
American sports, the really popular ones, are pretty much all organized in the same basic way: two opponents square off against each other for prestige and a prize, most often cold hard cash and a really pretty trophy. Which I’m mentioning because lots of us tend to think of national politics as a game or competition, and that’s because (1) it’s framed this way across all news media (radio, TV, internet, newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc.), and (2) our brains are pattern detectors, excellent ones, and so where we see similarities, we often tend toward conflation. Which, (2) is probably the reason for (1), which itself reinforces (2), and so on. It’s very, very hard to resist thinking of a presidential campaign as a competition. Try it. Pundits talk of candidates battling and winning states; debates are premised on scoring points with voters; polls and results are viewed as scoreboards. Seriously. Look at any news article or watch any commentary on CNN or on FOX. This politics-as-sport metaphorical framework, in other words, is deeply entrenched mentally and affirmed hourly (which serves to further entrench) across all media, and basically, it tends to encourage voters to think of themselves as fans. You’ll be struck, if you watch ESPN, at just how much its commentary is structured like political commentary (or vice versa), right down to set design.
(My own little supplemental theory as to why the rhetoric surrounding elections is borrowed from sports: we need, as a society, to make the election cycle — which, while necessary, is essentially composed of hundreds of job interviews and thus it’s not exactly the most exciting thing in the world — more engaging.)
The successful candidate understands this and designs his or her message accordingly, much the same way a star player markets him or herself, and establishes and protects his or her “brand.”
A Few More Salient Details On the Neurological Basis For Empathy, From A (Decidedly) Non-Expert
The political brain is an emotional brain,” asserts the neuroscientist Drew Westen. This assertion neatly captures my first premise. Which yes, I know I’ve already mentioned it, but it’s worth exploring with a little more depth: while it’s true that various and deeply embedded networks in the brain make you predisposed toward one candidate or another (like, i.e., which party your parent(s) identify with, or your friends, etc. — these facts almost always are attached to feelings, meaning how you feel about your parent(s) and/or friends will influence how you feel about their party choice), it’s your empathy that ultimately allows you to make that deeply personal connection with your candidate — a number of fMRI studies have suggested that affective empathy, the sort associated with emotional connection and with romance, with the soft feel-good music cued at the climax of each and every episode of 80s-and-90s-era family sitcoms, happens somewhere in the insular cortex, which projects itself into the amygdala, and receives lots of input in return. The relationship is reciprocal: the insular cortex (or insula), as paralimbic, can’t help but be drawn into limbic processes, because the borders between the regions are (just like most borders turn out to be) indistinct — the neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni calls empathy the “unifying mechanism” of the brain.
What’s happening is that, as you observe your candidate, you experience the emotion they’re projecting: the parts of your brain-network responsible for things like joy, pain, and fear are functioning precisely as they would if you yourself were experiencing directly what the candidate is experiencing. It’s a phenomenon called “mirroring” and there’s growing evidence that specific neurons in the brain — termed, you guessed it, “mirror neurons” — are responsible. Mirroring happens with TV shows and movies, too, and with sports: it was in large part the camera’s ability to zoom in on an actor’s or player’s expression-in-motion that led to the massive-scale popularizing of the television-as-medium. Lots of people think John F. Kennedy essentially won the 1960 presidential election because he was so telegenic in comparison to the pallid and fluish-looking Richard Nixon — this may at this point be more myth than fact, but it can’t be denied that the televised debates played an out-sized role in an extremely close campaign (no, seriously: JFK won the popular vote by about two-tenths of one percent, and actually carried fewer states than Nixon): after the first TV debate, Kennedy, who’d been trailing Nixon in the polls, took his first lead.
And look, make no mistake, even your friendly neighborhood politician is aware of this mirroring thing, if not in those exact terms, and has very likely been coached in how to manipulate it. Because that’s what rhetoric is. It’s why heart comes first in the phrase hearts and minds. Which, here is my overt pitch for the usefulness of this essay and why you should keep reading. Rhetoric, as mentioned above, is central to the politics and governance of a democracy, and its use by politicians is designed, as noted, to activate various networks in your brain — of associations, of memories, of emotions. Networks which, it’s worth noting, have pretty much nothing to do with rationality or reason; which live deep beneath the surface of conscious thought; which are, in fact, primitive, grown from the same tribal mentality which allowed humanity to survive-and-flourish to far greater degree than any other species in Earth’s history: Westen, after spending nearly 30 pages of his book, The Political Brain, discussing case studies proving exactly this point, nails it down with this single chilling statistic: “It is true,” he writes, “that 80 percent of the time we can predict voters’ judgments about complex issues from passions that bear no logical relation to truth.” Passions stemming from the single most successful dichotomy ever utilized: Us/Them.
Empathy-as-neurological-phenomenon is premised, to be succinct, on identifying with someone or some group at the expense of someone else or some other group. It’s a unifying mechanism, as Marco Iacoboni has said, but a major aspect of its mechanics is exclusion — an exclusion which is, thanks to where and how it happens in the brain, almost wholly irrational.
A Necessary But Really Brief Introduction To Rhetoric, In Light Of Its Effect On Us, Neurologically
The ancient Greeks valued rhetoric as an essential tool to well-functioning democracy: they were among the first of societies to embrace and in fact teach the idea that speaking well equates with political success. Bear with me on this. The deeper implication was that such well-speaking automatically meant you were speaking Truth, although this idea was disputed by Plato in his Gorgias dialogue, who was himself (Plato, I mean), and herein lies the paradox, an inhumanly eloquent and now-deified rhetorician (in other words, you can’t dispute the power of good rhetoric without recourse to good rhetoric, which proves the point you’re attempting to dispute). Looking at this eloquence-equates-with-Truth thing neurologically, we can say that emotionally resonant language, the sort that activates the limbic system and that feels right, was highly valued in Greek democracy, possibly because emotional intelligence had not yet been fully cleaved from rationality.
The Greeks, however (specifically, the Athenians), were also the first of societies to fall victim to demagoguery on occasion; just take a look at the Wikipedia pages of Cleon and Alcibiades, or even of Pericles, if you’re curious — it’s partly why, these occasions of rapid power consolidation and the attendant nagging fear that it might happen again, Greek society was so profoundly stratified, even during the supposed Golden Age of democracy. If you keep the Us v. Them thing in mind, you’ll actually start to notice that demagogues of all stripes and historical eras tend to make explicit and to exploit an Us/Them distinction that either went previously unacknowledged or was left implied and/or latent — in other words, past demagogues preyed on certain brain networks connected, emotionally, to anger, fear, and survival. The amygdala’s domain. The most basic example is Hitler’s Aryans V. Jews dichotomy, which activated a latent yet powerful European anti-Semitism, but too, if you look at Cleon in particular, you’ll find the ancient Greek version of a populist exploiting a poor/working class v. aristocracy dichotomy, and which Donald J. Trump’s current campaign echoes (Cleon was a member of the aristocracy who defected, essentially, in order to curry the favor of the general population).
Around one hundred years or so after Cleon’s death, Aristotle laid out what he felt were the three basic elements to a persuasive argument: (1) ethos, or the ethical appeal, which has to do with establishing one’s authority on a topic; and (2) pathos, or the emotional appeal, which this is exactly what it sounds like, it’s an appeal to the emotions and values of an audience; and (3) logos, or the rational appeal — one does this using a blend of logic and data — this is, ostensibly, the favored appeal of substantive political debate, but, as we’ll find below, all worldviews are generally untenable in basic ways having to do with how we know stuff, or how knowledge works (what philosophers call epistemology), and so, as Jill Lepore writes in a recent New Yorker article, “much of contemporary discourse and pretty much all of American politics is a dispute over evidence.” Plus, as we’ve seen above, emotion plays a much larger role than reason does, in politics as elsewhere.
This stuff sounds familiar, doesn’t it, at least some of it?
What Aristotle had hit upon was a strategy to achieve both cognitive and affective empathy, to hook a listener’s or a reader’s neocortex and limbic system into mirroring the speaker/writer. The person who masters the art of rhetoric or “the dark power of words,” as a recent Times article terms it, can persuade, and even control, his or her audience, on both intellectual and emotional levels. Which is, regardless of the intentions of the person doing the speaking, a spine-rattling idea.
And Now: On To Donald J. Trump, As Promised
There have been lots of theories advanced in the last few months about DJT’s weirdly seductive appeal and increasing political clout. Here are just a few, to give you an idea of how complicated and, frankly, interesting, the whole thing is:
(1) The meteoric rise of a radicalized Right thanks to (mostly white) working-class frustrations (this argument is supported, in recent articles by Alexander Hurst (at Soapbox DC) and Adam Gopnik (at the New Yorker), by the analogous rise, in France, of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the National Front in 2002);
(2) the exponentially-outsized share of free media coverage Trump has received (thanks of course to his celebrity but also in large part to his Just Say Yes policy to any and all interview requests), leading to his campaign’s increasing leverage over said media, and its ability to “define events”, a theory succinctly floated in Soapbox DC by Will Rinehart;
a. the 1st corollary on this being that Trump is uniquely qualified, as a reality TV star, to both court and take advantage of all that free media — it’s what John Mappin, a wealthy British investor who was possibly the very first person to take the Trump-for-president thing seriously (seriously enough to place about $10,000 in wagers on Trump since last July), calls “icon control”;
b. the 2nd and way more troubling corollary being that news media, which is struggling financially pretty much across the board, to the point it’s become an identity crisis and an issue of survival, has witnessed a ratings renaissance during the Trump candidacy, and has thus continued to feed into it to increase ratings and revenue, which of course erodes credibility and gives DJT a dangerous leverage — as Les Moonves, the CEO of CBS, says: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”;
i. which to just briefly offer a corollary on this corollary: that quote above is why socialists consider capitalism a profoundly unsocial economic practice and almost totally at odds with the concept of democracy: thoughtless, unregulated capitalism is driven by greed, by individual, rather than communal, incentive (whereas democracy in theory is exactly the opposite).
(3) the unprecedented mobilization of old-working-class-white-guy nostalgia (my favored theory, originally), thanks both to long-term economic immobility (the fact that working and middle-class white people can no longer seem to “get ahead” — which in all fairness is empirically true, but it’s not just true for them: it’s true for everybody except rich people like Donald Trump) and bewilderment/existential fear about the mind-blowing complexity of current American society and culture (what David Foster Wallace called, back in 2007, “Total Noise”);
a. there’s a corollary on this one, too, which comes from Scientific American; Melanie Tannenbaum uses the social-psychological concept of ambiguity intolerance to argue that Trump’s support comes almost wholly from those segments of the population who are profoundly uncomfortable with uncertainty — the idea being that DJT, whose reputation as a candidate is built on “speaking his mind”, is far more transparent than any of the other candidates: many of his supporters, in other words, support him despite their disagreement with what he says, simply because they believe that he believes what he is saying, and that this is far less dangerous than a politician who may have a favorable message but you can’t tell if they’re telling the truth or not — according to Westen, this is a pretty classic Republican rhetorical strategy;
b. and shoot, there’s a second corollary here, best captured in Kevin Maney’s assertion in Newsweek that “Trump is the voice of those hurt by technology” — in other words, shifting technologies and the elimination of “industrial jobs and traditional society” is what’s largely responsible: “Look today at red states v. blue, or Trump supporters vs. ‘establishment’ Republicans,” writes Maney. “Those divisions broadly define where digital-cloud-mobile technology and the modern economy work in favor of the population vs. where they work against it.”
(4) racism, plain and simple, long-simmering, and now finally, almost thankfully, here’s the overboil, here’s the candidate who “says what we’re all thinking” and just gets it out in the open;
(5) narcissism, plain and simple, thanks to the decades-long self-esteem movement and coddling of children, i.e. the rise and increasing ubiquity of an Everybody-Gets-A-Trophy Syndrome (“He’s the white Kanye West!” claims Bill Maher).
(6) Donald Trump as Loki, the Norse trickster god, in disguise, thanks to a kind of mass psychosis, as explained by Corey Pein via Jungian psychoanalysis in a really fascinating article at The Baffler;
a. Which, okay, this one’s corollary is also (2.a), sort of: at Politico, Roger Simon’s penned an interesting editorial about the Trump campaign’s injection of fun into a traditionally stolid and grueling election cycle — it’s presidential politics as a circus;
(7) George W. Bush and/or the Bushes-as-political-dynasty;
(8) the gradual “de-branding” and descent into incoherence of the Republican party, which began with the “compassionate conservatism” and unchecked spending-on-defense of the G.W. Bush administration, and which only intensified during the Obama administration, to the point that GOP ideology was gutted, reduced to plain emotional resistance to every action, utterance, and proposal Barack Obama ever made, sort of like a jellyfish reacting mechanically to immediate stimuli;
a. And now it shouldn’t surprise anybody that this plain emotional resistance can be seen in the actions of Mitt Romney, who endorsed Ted Cruz just days after campaigning with John Kasich — it’s not because Romney likes Cruz (on the contrary, it’s more likely he loathes him), but rather, that he hates Donald Trump and “Trumpism” — the GOP is reacting to DJT the only way it knows how: by Just Saying No as loudly as it can, over and over and over, ad infinitum: it’s a machine caught in an infinite loop.
None of these theories offers a wholly satisfying explanation in itself — they’re synecdoche(s) or quanta, little chunks of a gestalt that’s only going to be perceivable in hindsight. What all of us do seem to agree on, though, is that a shift is occurring. Something is changing, something fundamental, and probably has been for a while, and the suspicion is that the “going viral” of DJT’s campaign (and on the left, of Bernie Sanders’ campaign) is a result (or symptom) of that shift.
Here Is Where, If You Were Inclined To Divide the Essay Into Sections, You Might Say PART II Begins: Let’s Call It The Rhetorical Analysis of Donald J. Trump’s Talks and Tweets
One way the truly curious might go about attempting to understand this shift is by examining the rhetoric of those involved. And I guess to just go ahead and get to my point: it’s not particularly difficult to see that Donald J. Trump’s rhetoric is nothing like what you’d expect from someone running for president of the United States of America in the 21st century.
What you’ll be struck by, should you find yourself fascinated (or concerned) enough to watch the YouTube videos of his rallies and debates and town halls, and to explore his tweets and his website, and to slog through the mountainous quantities of commentary and reportage (of which there are, at this point, probably tens of thousands of pages and millions, possibly billions, of words — lots of them his own, because, remember, he has “the best words”), are two basic features of Trump rhetoric:
(1) The reduction of presidential campaigning to simple animal competition (see sub-point (a) below for a few examples);
a. These come from Twitter (compiled by the New York Times in December): “totally lost;” “if Jeb Bush were more competent he could not have lost the skirmish with Marco,” “a loser,” “can’t win,” “chances of winning are zero,” “will be soundly defeated,” “so easy to beat,” “he came in dead last,” “almost last,” “so easy to beat,” “so easy to beat,” “lightweight,” “a lightweight choker,” “once a choker, always a choker!” “Mr. Meltdown,” “the lightweight from Florida,” “only won the debate in the minds of desperate people,” “he would be so easy to beat!” “I loved beating her!” “a total loser,” “totally biased loser who doesn’t have a clue,” “just doesn’t know about winning” “not a fan,” “cheats,” “major loser, zero credibility,” “lightweight,” “lost an election that should have easily been won,” “he choked!” “terrible ‘choke’ loss to Obama,” “doesn’t know how to win,” “didn’t win one race,” “total loser,” “pushing Republicans down the same old path of defeat,” and so on, ad infinitum, pretty much, literally.
(2) The very, very weird and significant lobotomy of ethos and logos from pretty much everything he says, and the resulting intensification of the pathos element, which he effects using a couple of strategies:
a. He uses insulting, divisive language to discredit his opponents, which, applying our ethos-pathos-logos framework for analysis, means he’s deploying pathos where ethos is typically called for — “just doesn’t get it,” “pathetic,” “stupid message,” “weak,” “puppet,” “dummy,” etc. — and then he goes ahead and uses pathos where logos is typically used — “dishonest reporting,” “lied,” “dishonest,” “liar,” “covers me very inaccurately,” “know nothing,” “one of the worst reporters in the business,” “wouldn’t know the truth if it hit him in the face,”, etc.
b. In the same way, he uses emotional appeals to forge bonds with his audience, most often the formulations “We love X” or “Do we ever love X,”, as in “We love the Mormons,” or “Do we ever love the Hispanics,” and assures both himself and his audience of his and their intelligence — “when you’re really smart, when you’re really, really smart like I am — it’s true, it’s true, it’s always been true, it’s always been true.”
Taken together, these features signify an important, and dangerous, shift in the ecology of contemporary American discourse, an unstable intensification of a nativist-populist Us v. Them dichotomy, and for that reason deserve a closer look (I promise I’ll keep it as brief as I can).
Trumping His Competition (Sorry, Couldn’t Resist)
First let’s examine the Charlie-Sheenish obsession with “winning”. It would be extremely easy to label DJT a narcissist (as many already have) and then by implication his most loyal supporters as scared and desperate (enough to fall in, lockstep, with a narcissist) and delusional (enough to buy in to what he’s selling thanks to how he’s selling it). And then it would be just a short second step from here to attach a sort of poignancy to the whole affair via theorizing about faded American exceptionalism and living in the past, and possibly arguing for the nativist-populist Trump phenomenon as a kind of growing national mid-life crisis. And yes, there’s possibly something to this, although you would need to disclaim pretty explicitly about the homogeneity of Trump supporters (their overwhelming white-guy-ness) in comparison to the rest of the country, which is polyglottal and culturally diverse: in other words, there is no real hard evidence that America-as-cultural-entity even exists as a single, coherent idea outside the minds of white people or, like, pre-2010 Hollywood movies.
I made this argument a few weeks ago, in “Donald Trump and the politics of nostalgia,” and while I stand by its basic premise, I don’t think it’s telling the whole story.
Instead, if you examine the rhetoric, you may come to the conclusion that the winning-losing dichotomy works, for DJT, as an ethical appeal: calling Mitt Romney a loser is enough, in Trump’s mind and the minds of his supporters, to discredit him. Who needs evidence? Trump says. Just look at the guy!
Calling himself a winner is, likewise, enough to validate DJT as one, and thus, worthy of the presidency, which has for far too long been occupied by losers.
The ethical appeal, in other words, is no longer established using credentials or endorsements — it’s established via childish name-calling and combative behavior; it’s ethos-as-“Come at me, bro”-frat-boy chest-pumping. And listen, this is important, because when there’s no longer a point of reference, nothing to hang your red trucker hat on as an expert, then ethos is transformed into pathos: it’s all about what feels correct, or who you like better or find more entertaining or convincing. It’s why a man who, according to Politifact, makes Mostly False or plainly False statements a full 77% of the time is perceived by supporters as someone who “tells it like it is.” Which is an absolutely surreal and unprecedented development in American politics, as best I can tell. Or maybe not, now that I’m thinking hard about it, maybe it’s simply a continuation of the G.W. Bush rhetorical strategy, only more so, if that makes sense.
I’ve got one last brief personal observation to make about DJT’s rhetoric of “winning,” which is that, to me, it most resembles a locker-room speech, the very specific down-big-at-halftime sort, in which the humiliation of the first half is transformed into an animal rage channeled toward Them, the ominous Other who’s inflicted all that humiliation, the amygdala lit now and positively humming with activity, and thus, I suspect, it’s this that was, in large part, engendering the rugby-like violence we saw at Trump rallies for a couple weeks in March, and which still to this day haunts his events: “Get him out of here!” cries DJT, with an undisguised gleefulness. “Get out. Out!…Knock the crap out of them, would you?”
It’s why, too, RNC delegates are currently receiving all sorts of death threats from Trump supporters.
We Love Love
This locker-room speech thing, in which Trump sets himself up as coach and encourages his supporters to view themselves as his players, also helps to strengthen the remarkable emotional bond we’re all seeing his supporters express. This corresponds to point (2.b) above, the “do we ever love X” rhetoric. You’re already aware of the most notorious instance, which occurred about two weeks before the Iowa caucus, when DJT boasted he could shoot a man on 5th Avenue and he “wouldn’t lose any voters.” The fact that he’s since made gains and attracted voters, both in the polls and at the primaries, sort of attests to this, and too it marks I think the official entrance (“official” because we’ve been trending toward this for a while now) into a whole new and terrifying era of political discourse, what David Denby in the New Yorker terms “anti-rhetoric” but which might more usefully be called meta-rhetoric — DJT consistently uses language that mocks traditional ways of political communicating (the ethos-pathos-logos thing we’ve been discussing), which mocks journalism and journalists as untruthful and driven by ratings and clickstreams (which, as mentioned above, has become true to some extent, which really is just so weird, because it means DJT has somehow engendered it — the whole thing’s too meta for me to even try and unpack, but I’m deeply comforted by the fact that there’s a graduate student somewhere out there feverishly tapping away at his or her keyboard), which reduces the candidate-voter relationship to its most basic and least productive iteration: his message can be boiled down to, well, to Us V. Them, which he transmits simply by asserting that They are stupid and dangerous and We are smart and patriotic and know how to make good deals. And this Us V. Them thing’s logical endpoint, which DJT has made the rhetorical centerpiece of his campaign, is a literal, physical, and strikingly “beautiful” wall that will literally — and beautifully, I guess — keep Them out.
But, listen, good news: as long as you stand with Trump and you’re willing to pledge your allegiance to him and you promise not to vote at all if you’re not voting for him, then he loves you. He really, really does. He loves you. Or, he doesn’t love you per se, not you specifically, but he does love your demographic and is willing, like any rock star at any rock concert (Hello, Cleveland!), to call your demographic out by name at rallies and debates, or really any time he’s on TV, which these days, is most of the time: “Iowa, we love you,” “We love Florida,” “We love Nevada!” “We love Michigan,” “We love people that faint,” “it’s a love fest and we love each other and we’re going to do so well,” “I love the poorly educated! They are the smartest people, the most loyal people,” “Do we love our police?” “We love our vets,” and so on, etc.
What’s unclear is whether the “we” that DJT always uses is meant as (1) self-reference, or i.e. the royal “we,” in keeping with the Trump-as-Kanye-level-narcissist theory or (2) a collective “we,” as in Trump and Co., the Us portion of the Us V. Them dynamic. Which would imply that “we” loves “us” — it’s still narcissism, in other words, a self-esteem booster, talking to oneself in a mirror, etc. Probably what we’re seeing is both (1) and (2): DJT’s rhetoric is that slippery and protean.
Such vagaries and slipperiness are what you get when you neatly replace ethos and logos with pathos — there are no such things as facts anymore, and thus the message comes to feel both unmoored and intimate, more late-night-stoned-or-punchdrunk-conversation than official job interview for President of the United States: Donald Trump, along with the famous language philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (perhaps the first and only time you’ll ever see these two names in a sentence together), subscribes to the view that “at the end of reasons comes persuasion.” And it’s exactly this excision of ethos and logos from political discourse — and the resulting reliance on emotional manipulation and what the philosopher Michael P. Lynch calls “big sticks”, the specter of violence— that’s so dangerous about the campaign-for-president of Donald J. Trump.
PART III, Or: Here’s Where We Discuss The Deeper Implications About All Those Words That Donald J. Trump Knows
Google the word epistemology and you will see it’s defined as “the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.” Or should you choose to go analog and consult good old Webster, you will find the word defined as “the study or theory of the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge.” The word comes from the Greek (no surprise there) epistēmē, or “knowledge”, and epistanai, to “understand, believe.”
Pretty much any worldview or value system worth its salt has had to deal with this issue of epistemology, aka knowledge, which is surprisingly thorny yet can be stated really simply as: How do you know? It turns out that question pretty much always leads right back to itself, as in:
How do you know that rabbit was bejeweled?
(A: Because I saw it, bro.)
Well I mean, then how do you know that you saw it?
(A: Because I was there. Because I was standing right there and I used my dang eyeballs.)
Well, how do you know you were there?
(A: Hell do you mean, how do I know was I there? Because I was there! Because I felt the prickly blue grass between my toes and the bright warm sun on my bald spot and the wind blowing northeasterly and whistling a Taylor Swift song in my ear…)
Hang on a minute, because how do you know you felt the grass and the sun and the wind? How do you know?)
(A: disbelieving snort, incoherent babbling, frustrated little noises…)
This issue, termed “epistemic circularity” by philosophers and by critical theorists, is a serious one. Because, for a society to function, it’s got to define and then defend a border to this question how do you know that’ll keep everybody sane and relatively satisfied. You can see this right in the word’s definition, in its emphasis on the scope and limits of knowledge. Jill Lepore, in her essay “After the Fact,” identifies the year 1215 (i.e. the signing into law of an obscure little document called the Magna Carta) as the moment Western society established this border, what she quotes the historian Barbara Shapiro as calling the culture of fact, defined as “the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing — the substance, the matter, of fact — is the basis of truth and the only kind of evidence that’s admissible.” You might point to the subsequent Renaissance and Enlightenment eras as proof of this culture of fact’s dissemination, or even this sentence, which uses a fact as proof of something, thus implying a truth. You can see how tricky it is to talk about something when the only language you’ve got is the language of that thing itself: how do I make observations about the culture of fact without using its tools (i.e., facts)? In other words, since you and I are contained within this culture of fact, since we live inside it like slugs in a terrarium, we can’t really accurately talk about. We just can’t. It’s like going faster than light-speed — the culture of fact has borders that we can’t cross.
But, look, and here’s the trick, they can, these borders, be negotiated (just like space itself can move faster than the speed of light, to extend the metaphor), which *in fact* (sorry) is what philosophers and critical theorists do, mostly in really small and esoteric ways that rarely affect the general population.
However, let me now pose the relevant question: what happens when you try and change what the word “fact” means?
‘You Don’t Have To Know The Details, Let Me Do It’
Crazy shit, is the short sweet answer.
The longer answer is that we’re witnessing — and complicit in the creation of — the establishment of a new sort of relativism formed from the confluence of a number of things, but which can be roughly grouped into two causes: (1) the rise of Internet and Big Data culture, or i.e., the replacement of “facts” with “data” and with “information” and the establishment of a tremendously huge analytic/marketing matrix to produce and consume and produce and consume ad infinitum all this new data and information; and (2) the reemergence of moral/ethical/political absolutism as a kind of reaction to the Onslaught of Data and Information re cause (1) — absolutism is, it seems to me, a defense strategy against what appears to be the monstrous, and hopelessly complicated, bigness of culture and society: the (literally) endless vectors of meaning, the infinity of patterns and connections to read, interpret, and utilize, the ever-advancing streams of knowledge and attendant perpetual motion machine of analysis and tracking of and commentary on those streams of knowledge, like dense spiderwebs or the various constellations of stars, like flight maps, like the crisscross of upraised veins on a guy who’s just worked out really hard, etc. etc. I can’t be the only one who feels awed and totally confused and ignorant — sacred, stupid, like the apes in 2001 on encountering the obelisk — in the face of such Infinite Data.
The aforementioned Michael P. Lynch writes of our “recalcitrance in the face of new information,” and argues against Drew Westen’s (pretty well established) assertion that reason is basically irrelevant to politics, vestigial wings on the Chicken of Democracy — Lynch claims that it’s not that rationality doesn’t play a role in how we mentally process data and make decisions, it’s just that “reason often works slowly.” Which is nice and seems, possibly, historically correct when you consider how long it takes on average, for example, a society to accept something that overturns an established paradigm(e.g.: a scientific finding like the heliocentric solar system; a social more like equal socioeconomic rights and respect for women, ethnic minorities, and the LGBT communities), but I mean, look, it does beg the question: what happens when “new information” is steadily discovered and constructed, more or less continuously, at alarmingly fast speeds and incomprehensible quantities? What happens when we’ve got no time to digest any of the data/information that’s being fed to us?
My own theory is that we’ve got two strategies, both of which traject toward the same end point. The first strategy is that our recalcitrance becomes, as mentioned above, absolute. We shut ourselves off to what’s new, simply because we can’t handle any more information. Or else, and here’s the second strategy, we curate and filter, or more accurately we outsource the curate-and-filter function to tools like Google and Facebook and Twitter (and, well, Medium), which often tend to make our worlds really, really small: “The real worry,” writes Lynch, “is that the Internet is increasing ‘group polarization’ — that we are becoming increasingly isolated tribes.”
Both of these strategies are exclusionary or narrowing strategies: in both, we’re shut off as the information is networked and made coherent and consistent with the worldview we already hold. A worldview which, by the way, is structured as a narrative, a story.
Put simply, we mostly just allow for information that can be neatly included in the story we’re already telling ourselves about ourselves.
In sum, and let’s make it relevant to presidential campaigning: someone like DJT establishes a “fact” based on data found on the Internet (direct quote: “All I know is what’s on the Internet”) while someone like Ted Cruz also establishes a “fact” based on data found on the Internet, only this fact contradicts the fact established by DJT and thus, as Lepore writes, “all of American politics [becomes] a dispute over evidence.” Because there is no longer “a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry.” Lynch agrees on this point, and admits that “usually the data admits of more than one interpretation, more than one explanation.” Which all you need to do to get an overt sense of this is to read, say, the Washington Post’s take on an event, and then read the New York Times’s coverage of/opinion on that same event. Or do it with Fox News v. MSNBC. Or think about the various polls, the different numbers they tend to shoot out, and how those numbers are subsequently interpreted. These are examples of how the curate-and-filter function leads to different worldviews.
So then, here’s the very, very difficult question that’s been among the motivations for this now-ridiculously long essay: what happens when you and I, as voters, are asked to choose between two established facts?
The answer is not pretty, nor is it upliftingly humanist; it does not speak to the better angels of our nature — in fact, it’s primal, it ratifies the potency and the deep epistemic sway of the animal parts of our brains. And I mean, you can probably at this point guess what happens. Basically, it’s this: we just use our instincts. We vote with our respective guts, and then rationalize our decisions afterwards: “there is considerable data,” Lynch writes, “suggesting that much reasoning about value is post hoc. We judge intuitively first and then make up explanations later.” Westen, likewise, writes that “gut feelings are about three times as powerful as more ‘rationally’ derived preferences in predicting electoral choices.” What these guys leave out is that we’re sort of compelled to do this, given very little choice in the matter, because reason and rationality are rendered sterile in a political climate in which “there is disagreement over not just the facts, but over the best method for knowing the facts.” In which disagreements aren’t petty or political but fundamental.
All we can do in light of this stuff is choose the candidate who seems most trustworthy, and the candidate who seems most trustworthy is, more often than not, the candidate whose “fact” aligns most closely with our worldview (our story), and seems in our personal interest.
These days, we tend to do our choosing very quickly, intuitively: Lynch cites multiple studies in which, for example, “people judge the competence of an unfamiliar face within a tenth of a second.” One example: participants are asked to use “gut feeling” to predict the outcome of a Senate race between candidates they’re unfamiliar with and do so with over seventy percent accuracy, even when just given 100 milliseconds to look at the faces of the candidates and then decide. Which, 100 milliseconds is, by the way, about a third of the amount of time it takes you to blink — way too fast for the neocortex, where the great bulk of our rationality-complex is housed, to do much of anything (except to try and justify its role in the decision afterwards, like a lazy corporate employee trying to save his or her job). Possibly these lightning-strike judgments are indicative of an I-can’t-even-deal mentality (itself based, this mentality, on the previously mentioned bigness of society, and the contradictory value-driven “facts” which make every single political issue a clusterfuck, and other contextual factors like voting history and family partisanship, etc., plus the basic truth that we’ve all got lots of other responsibilities and don’t really have the time or energy to devote to studying the candidates and issues exhaustively— this all relates to the influence of context and (repeated) action on the brain). No doubt the political judgments of these studies’ participants are so accurate because the vote-with-your-gut thing is so widespread as a strategy.
Or here’s something else that confirms our vote-with-your-gut-in-face-of-fundamental-contradiction theory: as Westen has established, people tend to conflate rationalizing with reasoning: in one of his studies, participants were presented with two statements by their chosen candidate which explicitly conflicted with each other, and not only did these participants rationalize the contradiction away (“with little involvement of the neural circuits normally involved in reasoning”), but their brains “worked overtime to feel good, activating reward circuits that give partisans a jolt of positive reinforcement for their biased reasoning.”
What such absence-of-reasoning means, probably, is that we’re relying on the really old and ill-adapted parts of our brains to make such decisions. From these studies, Lynch concludes that “many people may make their political judgments unreflectively, even on appearance alone. Thinking only gets in the way.” Which Donald J. Trump, more than any other candidate, seems to recognize: “You don’t have to know the details,” he promises, like a father cooing to his infant daughter. “Let me do it.”
This, guys, is politics as narcissism, literally: political decisions based on “appearance”, on a candidate’s saying exactly what you already think or what you’re emotionally invested in (or else your brain twisting what he or she says until it means what you want it to mean). It’s empathy seduced, victimized. Westen’s book, The Political Brain, expends lots of time and effort, about four hundred pages worth, describing exactly this via case studies and close rhetorical analyses of political ads and debates, and offering smart strategies for political success in light of it. And, honestly, that politics relies on emotional manipulation via rhetoric is not the new idea; what is new, however, at least to American politics, is an increasing irrelevance of facts to the process and subsequent overt twisting or flouting of them, best exemplified in a Bush aide’s sneering identification, in 2004, of a “reality-based community,” and his subsequent assertion that “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.” He goes on to say:
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.
Solipsistic rationales like this one are terrifying because they’re fundamentally nihilistic, they’re not tethered to anything, and what’s even scarier is that, as the word “fact” continues to lose its power and its meaning, they’re increasingly becoming the political norm. Which, you know: holy shit.
The Culture Of Brand
So finally what I’d like to suggest is that when we’re asked to choose between two established facts, we rely, neurologically, on brand, what Westen calls “networks of associations, bundles of thoughts, feelings, images, and ideas that have become connected over time,” and that, as previously mentioned, fit neatly into the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
But let me back up. I’d like to return to the meta-rhetoric thing mentioned above, and suggest that its use in pop-culture, most notably in TV shows like Seinfeld and like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Simpsons and Family Guy, and in Mad Men and House of Cards — all of which tend to flirt with the “fourth wall”, although in distinct ways — as well as its (meta-rhetoric’s) dissemination into marketing through increasingly magical segmentation techniques courtesy of Big Data, has fundamentally changed how we see and interact with each other and what we expect from these interactions. Which of course has implications that stretch into politics.
OK, deep breath. Almost done, I promise.
So what a really good and talented marketer does is two-fold: (1) they establish a brand that’s much greater and more intangible than the sum of its parts; and (2) they try and insinuate this brand into your life, to convince you that it’s integral to your existence (both (1) and (2) turn out to be really hard and really lucrative if done successfully, which is why marketing is such a massive industry and growing exponentially even as you read this). Think for example of both Coca-Cola’s and Macy’s connection to Christmas (both of these companies target consumer nostalgia), or of the ubiquity of Facebook and Google, of social media’s long, long fingers, it’s insertion of itself into literally every aspect of contemporary human existence, and the basic narrative we tend to hew to: that social media is a “democratizing” force, that it allows us to make and maintain new connections in dynamic ways, etc. Studies have shown consumers will often choose a product or service based on brand over price, because a brand establishes expectations that go far, far beyond price point: stuff like quality, like prestige, like easy/intuitive interfacing that serves to help establish a relationship between you and the product/service (think of how much time and effort you spend on your smartphone, how friendly you are with it, how close it is to you, at all times, physically) — basically, a brand offers intangibles, things designed not to be just functional or nice to look at, but emotionally satisfying in ways once reserved for human relationships. A stellar branding campaign is one that hooks you onto a service or product (or plugs you into it), that establishes a dense network of positive associations, and an emotional reliance once witnessed only in drug addicts and young lovers. It’s Pavlovian conditioning.
Brand is what now establishes our society’s epistemological borders, is what I’m suggesting. A culture of brand. I’m sure you’ve already sensed this in your daily life, or as you assess the candidates. In other words, when a candidate for political office these days is discussing or debating a fact, what they’re probably actually doing is establishing their brand, or trying really hard to, reducing themselves and their message down to something that’s easy for a voter to digest and make quick judgments about. The various media facilitates this process, homogeneous really in just this one way. Facts, in our new culture of brand, become overtly value-driven — less empirical and more ideological: think, for example, of the facts each presidential candidate uses to support their view on the state of the economy, or on foreign policy, or on abortion. Or hell, if you don’t know each candidate’s view on the issues, you can still probably guess: what’s Ted Cruz think about abortion, e.g.? How’s Bernie Sanders feel about corporations? You know the answers to these questions because you’ve been assaulted by media coverage and because you’re aware of the basic positions of Republicans and Democrats — all of the candidates begin with those two pre-established brands as they develop their own. They go “left” or they go “right”. Facts are cherry-picked and neatly packaged to support a stance on an issue, itself held (this stance) purely to strengthen a candidate’s brand — by “strengthening brand” what I mean is that a candidate is trying to grow and activate certain networks in your brain, networks which you’ll then assign, sub- or unconsciously, a positive or negative emotional value.
But so, the point is, we’re all aware there is no single individual American who relies more on brand, or who even talks about it or thinks about it as much, as Donald J. Trump. There is Trump-brand meat, and Trump-brand vodka and wine, and bottled water, and of course there are those hotels, and Trump University, and, for a tragically brief span of time, a Trump board game. There’s probably lots of other stuff. For a long time now Donald J. Trump has been amassing fortunes based on his name alone and establishing, firmly, his brand as a savvy, successful businessman. Which works for him, as we all continue to worry primarily about personal and national economic issues, as an ethical appeal — DJT’s brand is what gives him the initial opening with a certain subset of the GOP electorate, and he’s continued to wield it as the campaign has carried on.
Which, so this is certainly impressive, but also it’s frightening, because thanks to all that practice, DJT is now so good at branding himself that he often comes across as human — much of his appeal stems, we know, from the image his supporters have of him as an “outsider,” as someone who “tells it like it is.” Donald J. Trump, to try and wrap this discussion up, is a brand, “the ultimate media creation,” as Darren Dochuk writes in New Labor Forum; he’s a dense network of associations, and his slippery rhetoric is reflective of this: its whole design is to appeal emotionally and to insinuate — it’s ambiguous in a sort of literary way that allows different people to read different kinds of things into it (one of the most popular portions of his rally speech is when he reads a poem, in fact, which he does with great and moving panache, the guy is a seriously talented poem-reader). Having watched and/or listened to a full seven of his stump speeches, I can tell you it’s eerie for someone to deliver the same speech day after day after day and still it sounds like he’s delivering it for the very first time; it seems unpolished, amateurish, totally off the cuff, when it’s precisely the opposite. This is both brilliant acting and a little bit sociopathic, frankly, and extremely seductive, because a message delivered over and over that does not lose its urgency or its intimacy starts to seem, despite its (lack of) substance, reasonable. Call it tonal authority. Bernie Sanders’ stump speech has this same feature, but his tonal authority is more prophetic and/or sanctimonious, he’s like a hammer hitting the same nail again and again, or a metronome or drum, his right hand rising and falling unconsciously, and pointing, always pointing, like a maestro directing a symphony.
It’s no coincidence these two candidates have captured the lion’s share of the emotional support given out so far in this election cycle — they’ve got the two best-established brands, and they’re telling the most coherent and emotionally-engaging stories. And they’re doing it over and over and over, which it’s just inevitable that the message repeats its way to resonance — it’s like a pop song getting stuck in your head.
Here is the end of the essay, I promise
The gist of my fear about Trump is that his political brand, indelibly infused with an Us. v. Them dichotomy that’s both nativist and populist, as mentioned, but also unbelievably selfish, and that’s stirring up lots of violent angry feelings in lots of people both for and against his vision, is going to leave its mark on the brand of the GOP. Meaning this: going forward, the brain-networks activated by Republican candidates and policies will encourage and enforce the sort of dichotomous emotions Trump is currently engaging, which will lead to ever-deeper and angrier and more violent partisanship. My fear is that the Republican brand of the future will appeal to the sorts of emotions and strategies humanity used to survive-and-flourish and then exploit and oppress: the tribalism, anger, and fear that is, at the moment, doing great harm to our economy and our planet, that’s led to what is most likely an unbridgeable income gap between rich and middle class, and to more or less permanent global conflict and aggression.
I think it’s right to hold this fear. I think we ought to fear the sort of close-mindedness that America was founded against, which leads to stagnation and increasing fragmentation. I think we ought, as well, to fear this rightward pull’s effect on the political Center: will it drag all of us toward the right, or will progressives, by establishing a cogent and emotionally-resonant brand, tug back?
And then, how do you feel about all of this?
