TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 3

Here's a follow-up statement to my two July issues on the above topic, originally written on DEBATE POLITICS.

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The original "shame culture" was the one that a dominant WASP population promulgated against all those who were not WASPS. It was bound to fail as Classic Liberals showed its ideological stupidities.

The current "shame culture," though, has an advantage. It's just as stupid as the first version, but it piggybacks on the genuine accomplishments of  Classic Liberals, much the way a dum-dum like Al Sharpton piggybacks on the accomplishments of Martin Luther King.

I think that real racism still exists, as can be seen with the much delayed, and just, firing of Daniel Pantaleo. However, there is as yet no real metric, no standard of measurement, for what is or is not a racist act. Joe Biden telling a black audience that Mitt Romney wants to put them back in chains is not a just identification of a racist act or even a racist attitude. It's just bad, overblown rhetoric, much like the supposed anti-racist rhetoric that Biden still attempts to use against the Donald.

As I said in the OP, Trump is not even close to being a person able to evolve or enable such a standard. But now that he's stood up to the new shame culture, maybe someone better than him will come up with such a metric.

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As it happens, in the last week the racial politics of anti-Trumpery manifested in a minor comic-book kerfluffle, courtesy of Art Spiegelman. As detailed on this BOUNDING INTO COMICS essay, someone or other asked Spiegelman to write an introduction to a collection of Golden Age reprints from Timely (later Marvel) comic books. An editor asked Spiegelman to remove a political reference that had nothing to do with Timely Comics in the 1930s: one in which the artist compared the CAPTAIN AMERICA villain the Red Skull with Donald Trump, cleverly disguised as "the Orange Skull." Spiegelman refused to remove the reference and retracted his essay. He then publicized the disagreement, with the result that, as he himself states, far more people saw what he wrote through online news-media than would have read the intro in the Timely reprint.

No one will be surprised that, whatever my own reservations about Donald Trump, I find comparisons between the President and Nazi leaders to be yet more "bad, overblown rhetoric," much like the anti-Trumpery that appears at the conclusion of Spike Lee's BLACKKKLANSMAN. Spiegelman went on to claim that Marvel wanted to be "apolitical," which just shows that he's apparently read less current Marvel comics than I have. Though a lot of current Marvels use their fictional platforms as bully pulpits, it seems likely that someone on the editorial staff thought that an introduction to a bunch of Golden Age funnybooks was not a fit place for such a pulpit.

Most of the respondents on the BOUNDING thread tended to agree, and I for one thought it ironic that a comics-artist who has made much of his Jewish heritage would align the Donald with Nazism, given that he's been pretty supportive of both Israel and Jewish heritage, even if he's shown his usual goofiness by, say, claiming that all Jews ought to vote Republican. Nevertheless, I chose to chime in with the following:

All political leaders, before entering office, must ask themselves, "What Would the Red Skull Do?" And of course, the logical conclusion would be-- acknowledge Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Yep, that's just what the Red Skull would do

While Spiegelman is free to make any comment he pleases to anyone willing to give him a podium, no one is required to give him such a podium, particularly in a venue that has a dubious relationship to politics. Yes, Captain America was seen punching out Hitler, and other Marvel heroes made forays against the Axis or doppelgangers thereof, but the stories were barely "political" in the true sense of the word. And though Trump is certainly guilty of his own political sins, conflating them with the heritage of even fictional Nazis like the Red Skull is ridiculous in the extreme.

TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 2

When I said at the end of Part 1 that the ultraliberal turnabout resulted in Donald Trump coming to power, I was in no way agreeing with the view expressed by many ultraliberals (like the moronic newscaster Don Lemon), to the effect that Trump rose to power as part of a "whitelash." In fact, I denied that facile interpretation when I first commented on Trump's victory in SO-- PRESIDENT TRUMP in 2016. I ended that essay with these words:

None of these observations should be taken as conferring approval on Trump or his noxious campaign. But I think our Clown-in-Chief put his finger on a lot of ways that poor whites feel marginalized-- and it's not all about either money or the fear of liberal policies.

I did not specify what I found "noxious" about Trump's campaign. For the most part, I did not like Trump's clownish persona, five parts vulgarity and five parts narcissism. Both of these factors resulted in him making awkward statements like this one:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
— Donald Trump, announcement speech, June 2015

Now, at the time I heard this, I did not agree with the Left's dominant interpretation, that Donald Trump was revealing his deep and thoroughly entrenched racism against people of color. To me he was simply following in the tracks of numerous Republicans before him in objecting to the incursions of illegal aliens. A more sensible politician would have foregrounded his remarks against said aliens by leading with something along the lines that, "even many of the illegals may be good people, nevertheless there are criminals and rapists among them, etc."  Trump was simply a terrible speaker, and at some other time, his clumsy words would have sunk his campaign immediately.

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has frequently said (and I paraphrase) that for years the Left constantly accused any number of relatively centrist conservatives of being racist, with the result that over time the Right became so inured to such accusations that they decided that they might as well support a candidate who refused to apologize when twitted with accusations of deep-dyed racism.

Shapiro's idea is persuasive. He has pointed out that although current pundits have championed John McCain against Trump, liberals in the past often used the same rhetoric against earlier conservatives that they now use against the Donald. Recently on THE VIEW Whoopi Goldberg asserted that if Democratic Congressman John Lewis said that someone (such as Trump) was racist, then that person was indubitably racist. Then Shapiro noted that Lewis had made the same pronouncement against John McCain that Lewis made against Trump. Somehow, this nugget of information was not communicated on THE VIEW, and even John McCain's daughter Megan seemed either sanguine about, or ignorant of, Lewis's denunciation of her father.

In the end, though, Shapiro's concept may be a little too intellectualized. One should not forget that most "insider" Republicans did not support Trump during his campaign, and that he derived much of his support from the rank-and-file. Some voters may have liked Trump for explicitly monetary issues, as with employees of the coal industry. However, I think Trump gained ground not because he was definitively racist, but because he projected an indifference to being called racist.

In other words, Trump's very existence was a thumb in the eye to the Left's shame culture, which insists that nothing is more worthy of total condemnation than white racism. (Thus, the Donald's "both sides" Charlottesville remark far outpaces George Dubya getting the country mired down in Iraq in order to make money for the oil companies.) Sadly, Trump himself is not capable of enunciating an actual credo that might fight back against the virulence of shame culture; he merely says whatever he wants to say and basks in the attention it earns for him. Half the time conservative intellectuals like Shapiro ends up denouncing Trump's more inflammatory statements, and Trump merely goes on to his next bothersome tweet.

Trump may or may not go on a second term. I don't believe that his presidency will bring about the sort of sea-change necessary in order to reverse the incursions of ultraliberal shame culture. Still, to the extent that he subverted that particular dominant, perhaps he will serve as an "opener of the way" for a greater intellectual examination of the issues-- a proliferation of the spawn of Jordan Peterson to counteract the tides of Sartrean ideologues.

TRUMP VS. SHAME CULTURE PT. 1

I've often discussed the problems of "victimage addiction" here, as in this 2015 essay. However, I confess that until recently it never occurred to me to relate the ultraliberal penchant for victimage to the concepts of "guilt culture" and "shame culture."

Wikipedia opines that Ruth Benedict's 1946 THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD did not originate the terms, but popularized them at a time when postwar Americans became curious as to how the culture of defeated Japan differed from that of the United States. Benedict observed-- admittedly on incomplete evidence-- that America was dominantly a guilt culture, in that its citizens were expected to feel internalized guilt if they did wrong, while Japan was dominated by shame culture, in that its citizens were expected to subordinate their personal desires to society's view of what was shameful.

I find this distinction useful in a general sense, and not only with respect to Japan and America. This HUFFINGTON POST essay provides this broad summation:

Shame cultures focus less on individual responsibility and abstract legal transactions, and more on how one’s betrayal of the community creates estrangement and stigma. In a guilt culture, if I do something wrong and the public does not know about it, I am still expected to feel guilty and to seek to make amends by being punished. This is not the case in a shame culture. In a shame culture, if I do something wrong and there is no public knowledge of it, then I experience no shame, and have no motivation to seek amends.  Shame is all about public identity, and whether or not one is honored or dishonored.

However, there is one particular arena in which American culture seems entirely governed by the shame ethos, and that is the arena of race relations.

For roughly three hundred years since the colonization of the U.S., there seems to have been little doubt regarding the supremacy of Caucasian Americans over that of "persons of color," as well as certain Caucasian groups regarded as "outliers," such as immigrants from Ireland. A representative example of the cultural distance between Whites and Others appears in Fenimore Cooper's "Natty Bummpo" novels of the early 1800s. Natty, despite frequently hanging out with various tribes of Indians, summarizes his separation from the Red Man by occasionally stating that "there is no cross in my blood," by which he means no interaction with non-whites. The clear implication is that to have sexual interaction would be shameful to a white person. There were certainly exceptions in which certain romantic entanglements were viewed through a sympathetic lens, as with Cecil B. DeMille's 1914 THE SQUAW MAN (which DeMille remade twice). Yet shame was still the dominant response to the idea of "mixing the races." Even simple interaction with non-white persons could be viewed as eroding the distinctions between the ruling white race and those not so privileged, and this emotion too would evolve not from personal guilt but from socially imposed shame.

During the 19th and 20th centuries assorted philosophical and literary works put forth the case for the equality of the races and for the necessity of equal treatment, but in the United States the case did not gain any ground until the 1950s, marked by the legal ramifications of Brown vs. Board of Education. Having myself been a liberal of a slightly later period, I would assert as civil rights continued to make advancements, most liberals celebrated them, in the belief that true parity would evolve. The only exception would seem to be the hardcore Marxists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote this sentence in a prologue for a 1961 Franz Fanon book:

To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time: there remains a dead man and a free man.

About forty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, though, Sartre's ugly nihilism became emblematic of the Left's politics of ressentiment, as I summarized in COMBAT PLAY:

This mood of continual ressentiment leads, ironically enough, to its own form of "lynch law," in which the ideologues can condemn anybody for anything, without providing any sort of internally consistent proof. 

Now, without making the assumption that the Left deserves total credit for the valorization of "people of color," it can be fairly said that liberals were most known for attempting to turn the earlier shame culture's priorities around. Natty Bummpo's assumptions of a beneficent whiteness gave way to portraits of white supremacists as either entirely vile, as seen in popular films like the 1951 anti-KKK film STORM WARNING, or as harmless by reason of sheer stupidity, as with Norman Lear's Archie Bunker. But even in these liberal attempts to reverse reactionary thought, one does not see the extremism of the Sartrean POV, in which ultraliberal pundits view "whiteness" to a source of shame as a *bouleversement* of the way non-white races were formerly treated.

And it's because of that massive reversal that Donald Trump came to power.

More in Part 2.