Sunday, January 26, 2025

Living in a Mythocracy: Projecting 2025

From the comic Undiscovered Country

If one looks at the Executive Orders passed by Trump in the first week of his second presidency, and manages to look past the horror, one can see their utter consistency in terms of their vision of government, history, and society. This consistency makes up a universe, what could be called the Fox News Extended Universe. In this universe undocumented immigrants, or "illegals" as they are called, are illegal through and through, the laws they broke to get or stay in this country puts them outside of any law. They can only be harbingers of crime. In this universe DEI, or really any attempt to address this country's history of racism since the civil rights act, can only be understood as racism. To mention race is to divide by race, and the true victims of this racism are the white men and women who have lost jobs, or at least social standing, by having to treat others as equals. In this universe, public health can only be a secret grab for power, and the CDC, WHO, etc., are nefarious tools of domination. In this universe the federal government spends too much money on foreign countries, pointless research, and, as The Simpsons put it the "perverted arts."



These are all myths. I mean that first in the most obvious and banal sense of the word. Each and every one of them is untrue; undocumented migrants do not commit more crimes than citizens, and probably commit less violent crime than US citizens; DEI is an attempt to address the long history of structural racism and inequality, not replace "white people"; the CDC is not trying to control us with chips, just possibly control bird flu; and I am not sure how to put this in DOGE speak, but the amount spent on foreign aid, scientific research, arts and humanities is dwarfed by what is spent on the military maintaining the US empire. That they are untrue should not eclipse two equally important characteristics of these myths. First, this myth has an entire media universe propagating it, and has for decades now, all of these stories, criminal immigrants, reverse racism, government overspending on foreigners and perverts, could be a night of Fox News or its modern spinoffs online. Second, these myths work because they fit together as a coherent myth. They have at the core the ur-myth of modern society, the individual, responsible and isolated, trying to make their way in a world of hostile forces. They point a coherent and simple picture of what is happening and what is wrong. This picture is reinforced by daily experience, to paraphrase Spinoza, people are born conscious of their status of individuals and unaware of what government is for.  Of course the simplicity of this myth is an effect not a given. Even the putative natural givenness of race and genderand their corresponding hierarchies, are an effect of a long history. The immediacy of experience and the mediation of mass communication intwine and reinforce each other, especially as social media becomes the constant chorus accompanying daily life. 

The right has always given lip service to these myths, but for the most part they were aimed more for popular consumption than government policy. Actual governing has always had to deal with the distance between myth and reality. It was necessary to believe in the myth of "illegals" while still relying on undocumented workers to pick crops and clean hotel rooms. It is necessary to pay lip service to the idea that Medicaid and Social Security are drains on state finances, while recognizing that they are popular and necessary social programs. The last thirty or so years have been a perpetual conflict in the Republican party between the "true believers" and the "realpolitiks." This conflict stirs up again and again when it is time to raise the debt ceiling or bail out businesses. Trump is a true believer, and this time he has surrounded himself with true believers, with people whose expertise and understanding is entirely fit for the fictional universe of soundbites and tweets. 


Which is as good of point as any to bring up Citton, whose Mythocracy is coming out in English this Spring. In that book Citton writes the following: 


This brings up a final, equally important point about this myth. It does not have a real counter, no real opposition, at least in the dominant political parties. For years the question for the Democratic Party is how are they going to answer the questions that the Republican Party poses for them; what are they going to do about the "crisis at the border"? How are they going to be tough on crime? How will they restrict spending and so on. This is sharply distinct from setting their own questions, or even defining their own crises, such as global warming, a crisis that not only in part explains the former but dwarfs it. Of course that would be a fundamentally different party. There are occasional ruptures of this myth, the disruptions brought about by Covid brought about a government that did unprecedented things in addressing the needs of everyday working people, from relief checks to student loan forgiveness, everything we are told that government cannot do, but that was a moment of crisis. At every moment when it seems that the Democratic Party is going to construct its own myths, or at least call into question the prevailing ones, it veers back into line, claiming that it will be truly tough on the border, cut government spending, and respond to calls to abolish the police with even more police. There are multiple examples of this rightward turn, but I remember seeing the clip of Kamala Harris and Oprah Winfrey online and thinking how much it showed that the Democratic Party was working from within the myths of the Republican Party. Kamala Harris does not just say that she believes in the right to own guns, but situates that right within the myth of having to protect herself from an intruder. 

For a long time the Democratic Party has been content to dwell within the myth of the other, and to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze, that means they are fucked. 



There are many tasks in the difficult years ahead, and most of them involve actual organizing and working, the stuff that cannot be done on a screen. I think that it is equally important to continue to not only undermine these myths, pointing out the flawed and incomplete vision of the world they come from, but to create our own myths of solidarity, generosity, and joy. 

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