The Century of the Other
The Century of the Other
As a rule, no American election means as much as the shouting immediately afterward might lead you to think. Every four years, with a regularity that clockwork rarely matches, the supporters of the winning party pile all their daydreams of Utopia onto their candidate, while the partisans of the losing side howl that this time the jackboots and armbands will show up for certain. Then the new president is inaugurated, and something close to business as usual resumes.
This time, granted, the yelling is unusually loud. Some of that is an unintended byproduct of the losing side’s demonizing rhetoric during the last weeks of the campaign. Having convinced themselves (if no one else) that Donald Trump is literally Hitler, many Democrats are quaking in their shoes, sure that he must now act out the role they assigned him and throw them all into camps. Those camps have featured so relentlessly in recent rhetoric that I’m starting to think that the people who babble about them actually want to be flung into some such institution, where Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, will personally spank them with a riding crop or something. The return of the repressed really can take strange forms.
Then there’s the Twitter campaign now under way to encourage Democrats never to use Donald Trump’s name in speech or print. In one sense that’s a reflection of just how terrified they are of our next president—am I the only one who remembers how the cowardly characters in the Harry Potter novels were afraid to speak Voldemort’s name aloud?—but it’s also revealing in a deeper sense. It speaks of the Democratic establishment’s desperate longing to return to the world before 2015, before the working classes found ways to speak up for their own needs and interests, in place of those it was convenient for wealthy liberals to put in their mouths.
I’m beginning to wonder, though, if the current example may be the exception that proves the rule. Get past the giddy excitement of the winners, the fainting fits and dismayed shrieks of the losers, whatever dubious longings might be shaping our national rhetoric around those vividly imagined camps, and the rest of it, and what remains is a sense that something may have shifted on a deep level in American life with Donald Trump’s comeback election. Partly, of course, he confounded the stereotypes by taking a commanding majority of the popular vote as well as a huge lead in the Electoral College. Partly Trump and his inner circle are promising sweeping changes in some of the core policies of the bipartisan consensus that, in recent decades, has done so much to run this country into the ground.
To my mind, though, the most striking aspect of it all is the curious fact that Kamala Harris did everything she was supposed to do, according to the playbook of early 21st-century American politics, and still crashed and burned. She had armies of pundits and talking heads on her side. She had a glittering list of celebrities eager to shill for her. She raised three times the money the Trump campaign did, and spent it so freely that her campaign ended the election millions of dollars in debt. Nearly all the big corporate media venues bent over backwards to promote her campaign, to the extent of suppressing news stories that might reflect badly on her while flogging every available story that could be used to assail Trump. She had all these things lined up on her side, and yet she got a world-class drubbing once voters went to the polls.
Some of that, it has to be said, was the candidate herself. I’ve never met Harris and have no idea what she’s like as a person, but the kindest label that can be applied to her political career is “undistinguished,” and she has an odd inability to speak coherently in public without a teleprompter telling her what to say. That might just be stage fright, but it does not give the rest of us any confidence in her ability to handle the pressures of one of the world’s most stressful jobs. Like him or not, Trump thrived in the high-pressure world of commercial real estate and handled his previous stint in the White House without undue signs of stress. At a time when the US is caught up in two intractable proxy wars and faces a rising tide of challenges around the globe, that in itself may have been enough to settle the matter for many voters.
Here again, though, I think there was more going on than this. All the way through the campaign, it felt as though the Harris campaign was off in a corner somewhere, talking to a small coterie of privileged liberals about issues that don’t matter to most other people, while the issues that do matter to most other people never entered the discussion When people tried to bring up those issues in Democratic venues, furthermore, they got ignored, shouted down, or told to their faces that things they themselves had experienced weren’t real and they should believe what they were told by the Democrats and their media allies instead. Meanwhile the Trump campaign was hammering night and day on the issues Harris’s people wouldn’t address.
It’s heartening to note that some Democrats have grasped this. Since the election, in fact, there have been a certain number of essays and talks in mainstream venues talking about why the Democrats lost, and bringing up some of the points just made. Social historian David Kaiser, in a post that ran through a litany of standard accusations against Trump, still took the time to notice that his rise was made possible because both parties had given up addressing the concerns of ordinary Americans in a time of increasingly serious crises. His was far from the only such sign of dawning insight among Harris supporters in the wake of her ignominious defeat.
Yet it’s the pushback fielded by such obviously sensible efforts that is, to my mind, the most revealing thing about our current political life. Nearly all that pushback has focused on finding something to blame for Harris’s failure other than the obvious fact that she never got around to addressing the issues that most Americans care about. Some of it has been predictably petty—I’m thinking here especially of the attempts by Harris allies to blame Joe Biden for what happened, and the corresponding efforts by Biden allies to push the blame back on Harris.
On a much higher level of discourse is this article by Michael Tomasky, which appeared in The New Republic on November 8. I encourage my readers to take the time to read it carefully before proceeding. As you’d expect from an essay in one of the premier liberal magazines in the country, it’s cogent, logical, and clearly written. It’s also stunningly obtuse. As with most examples of really high-grade cluelessness, its weakness lies not in itself but in the unstated preconceptions that underlie it, and the fact that Tomasky doesn’t appear to have questioned or even noticed these preconceptions is far and away the most fascinating thing about them.
Tomasky argues that the real cause of Trump’s rise and Harris’s fall was the ascendancy of right wing media over the last few decades. It was only when media venues began to slip free of the grip of the liberal consensus, he insists, that it was possible for a candidate like Donald Trump to attract any attention at all, much less the passionate mass support that saw him easily brush aside Republican rivals in two primary campaigns and spread his appeal widely enough to win the narrow victory of 2016 and the much more robust triumph of 2024. It’s plausible at first glance. Like so many examples of catastrophic cognitive failure these days, however, it suffers from a peculiar defect: it fails to ask the next obvious question.
How was it, after all, that the media venues that Tomasky lambastes as spreaders of right-wing misinformation clawed their way in from the fringes to become wildly popular among ordinary Americans? What caused people to listen to these insurgent voices? That’s not a question Tomasky addresses. The right-wing media appeared, and hey presto! All of a sudden, for no reason at all, people just started believing them.
The unnoticed ironies in Tomasky’s essay get an edge sharp enough to shave with when he proposes that back in the days when Edward R. Murrow was the most respected figure in broadcast news media, the rise of a figure like Donald Trump would have been unthinkable. Here again, let’s ask the next obvious question. Why was Murrow accorded the kind of respect that today’s media figures can only dream of having? Two key factors come to mind. The first was the fact that in those days all broadcast media in the United States was subject to the Fairness Doctrine—the rule, imposed on them as a condition of being licensed to use a share of the broadcast spectrum, that they had to present both sides of politically controversial news stories. The second was that Murrow himself was known as a man of integrity who wouldn’t distort news stories to fit a preconceived agenda.
The Fairness Doctrine went whistling down the wind long ago, however, and so did the standards of journalistic ethics that gave Murrow the reputation he had. It’s a source of bleak amusement that some of the journalists who have been quickest to scream “misinformation!” have been involved in spreading and covering up misinformation on the grand scale. Do you recall, dear reader, when Barack Obama insisted that if Obamacare was passed, you would be able to keep your physician, and your health insurance premiums would go down? Do you recall when Joe Biden insisted that once you got the Covid vaccine, you would not catch Covid? Both those statements were false; both of them misled and harmed millions of people.
If Edward R. Murrow had still been around when those statements were made and disproved, he’d have asked all the hard questions our media avoided, followed up the story no matter what pressures he faced, and crucified the government officials responsible on a cross made of newsprint and radio airtime. He was not the kind of man who would cover up a scandal just because it might hurt the party he favored. His epigones in today’s corporate media, by contrast, lack the ethics and the backbone that earned Murrow his reputation. They’ve earned a different sort of reputation, for which the phrase “partisan hack” will do as well as any.
Mind you, I freely grant there’s no shortage of partisan hacks in conservative media as well; the absence of the Fairness Doctrine and the collapse of journalistic ethics cuts both ways. Here again, though, we need to go deeper. Over the decades just past, conservative media venues have seen their viewership climb steeply upward, while liberal media venues have had their viewership plunge just as steeply downward. Tomasky never gets around to explaining why this happened. It’s as though he thinks that the mere appearance of right-wing media was all that it took to get voters to turn their backs on the wise and trusted pundits of the mainstream media and flock mindlessly to Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and ultimately Donald Trump.
Notice what’s being left out here. Nowhere in his essay does Tomasky appear to consider the possibility that ordinary people might have taken an active role in this process. Nowhere does he wonder whether maybe, just maybe, voters compared the mainstream media to the alternatives and came to the conclusion that they had reason to choose the latter. The idea that American voters might have agency is apparently alien to him. In fact, he ignores one of the most crucial details of the 2016 election in order to avoid dealing with the agency of the ordinary individual.
His article claims that the torrent of dank memes that sent the Democratic party reeling in 2016 came from the right-wing media. This is inaccurate. Those memes were created by a loose and sprawling network of alienated young men linked by online imageboards, of which 4chan is the most infamous. It was there, in the crawlspaces of the internet, that enthusiasm for Trump’s brash antics built a raffish subculture that embraced Pepe the Frog as its mascot, the Euro-pop song “Shadilay” for its anthem, and Kek the Frog God for its half-serious deity. This subculture flooded the internet with memes supporting Trump’s campaign and gave him a crucial boost. The rise of the “chans” was one of the most astonishing twists of recent political history—and it is quite literally unthinkable to people who share Tomasky’s views.
Here the bottom drops away and we plunge into very deep waters.
Back in 2002, the BBC aired a documentary titled The Century of the Self, which focused on one of the more dubious offshoots of Freudian psychotherapy. Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, the central focus of the documentary, was the man who launched public relations as an industry. He insisted, based on his uncle’s theories, that human beings would respond like automatons if stimulated by the right words and imagery, and he claimed to be able to make this happen for his corporate and political clients.
I discussed that documentary in a post here a little more than two years ago. As I noted then, the most interesting thing about it is that the documentary never challenged Bernays’ claims. Rather, it took them at face value, despite the fact that the campaigns Bernays carried out were by no means as invincible as he claimed. (To cite only one of many examples, though Bernays was hired by Herbert Hoover’s reelection campaign in 1932, this did nothing to keep Hoover from suffering a thumping defeat.) I argued that the program was aimed, like most highbrow BBC documentaries, at members of the managerial class, and that it was an exercise in reassurance, meant to keep doubters believing that the corporate-bureaucratic system they served really did have the power to tell the restless masses what to think and how to feel.
Deficient as it was as an account of history, in other words, The Century of the Self accurately reflected the consciousness of the Western world’s privileged classes just when the corporate-bureaucratic system and its reigning ideology—call it “corporate liberalism”—were beginning their long slide down from the zenith of power. It’s indicative that the same attitude was expressed at nearly the same time by a Washington bureaucrat (persistent rumors insist that the speaker was Karl Rove) who famously told reporter Ron Suskind, “When we act, we create our own reality. We’re history’s actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Does this remind you, dear reader, of the ideas splashed across the mental landscape of our time by Rhonda Byrne’s pseudospiritual bestseller The Secret, or by thousands of less efficiently marketed New Age speakers and writers? It should. Across the whole sweep of elite culture in the Western industrial nations, and above all in the United States, a set of beliefs took root that treated the individual member of the Western world’s comfortable classes as the measure of all reality, and assigned to everything and everyone else in the cosmos the roles of painted marionettes jerked around by strings to play parts in some childish melodrama.
It’s far from inaccurate to label the era over which this ideology reigned the Century of the Self, because the ideas that gave Byrne, Rove, and her many equivalents their fifteen minutes of tawdry fame did in fact get their foothold a little over a century ago, as the subtler and more reasonable teachings of what was then called New Thought got simplified, distorted, and marketed to a fare-thee-well by figures such as Napoleon Hill. The idea that we each create our own reality was a central theme in this ideology of the imperial ego, but inevitably it turned in practice into ideas like those marketed by Edward Bernays and his many heirs, in which the privileged call the tune and everyone else has no choice but to dance mechanically in step.
You can see the same thing reflected in the way that, during the Century of the Self, people in the privileged classes assumed as a matter of course that their peculiar subculture, with all its beliefs and prejudices and odd obsessions, was the natural goal of human cultural evolution, and that every person of good will would of course gravitate toward it once they were shown the error of their dissenting ways. That’s the attitude that put classes in queer theory in universities in Afghanistan during the American occupation of that country, to cite only one tone-deaf absurdity among many, and it also explains the frantic hatred and rage flung against those who fail to fall into line. The ideology of corporate liberalism is so obviously superior to the alternatives, the logic goes, that only the deliberate embrace of evil can explain anybody’s refusal to buy into it. That, in turn, was the attitude that led Kamala Harris and her prodigiously funded campaign straight to electoral disaster.
Thus the change that we’ve just passed through can be described easily enough. The Century of the Self is over, and the Century of the Other has begun.
All around the world, people who reject the values of the Western world’s privileged classes are in the ascendant. Russia, which shrugged off Western sanctions with aplomb and is nearing victory in the Ukraine war, is returning to its roots in Orthodox Christianity; across the Middle East and North Africa, traditionalist Islam is resurgent; further east, the ancient civilizations of China and India are rising to reclaim the preeminent role in the global system they had before the age of European world conquest. In Africa and elsewhere in the global South, one nation after another is throwing off neocolonial arrangements and establishing social and political forms relevant to their cultures and needs rather than those the liberal elite wants to assign them.
Around the globe, as a result, the Western elites who like to think of themselves as history’s sole actors now face intransigent Others who refuse to accept a role as bit players in someone else’s melodrama. Our would-be lords and masters are confronted by hostile and increasingly confident rivals who reject the values that corporate liberalism considers self-evident, and embrace visions of destiny that are antithetical to everything that corporate liberalism stands for. The monolithic future imagined by the Western world’s privileged classes has thus shattered into a thousand glittering shards. What is rising in its place is a kaleidoscope of possibility in which the dreams of Harris and her allies are only one option among many.
In much the same way, Donald Trump united a wildly diverse coalition of supporters, embracing Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, midwestern factory workers, Amish farmers, Muslim immigrants, and much more, to bring about his victory. What drew these disparate interests together, more than anything else, was their rejection of the claim by the liberal elite that the reality it likes to imagine is the only one that counts. Harris’s campaign insisted that sky-high grocery prices and mass migration across the southern border didn’t matter, because it was inconvenient to her that these things should matter. To the voters, on the other hand, they mattered a great deal.
Thus the Century of the Other has dawned in the United States as well. The flailings of Democrat pundits as they try to respond to Trump’s election may actually be a hopeful sign, for these might mark the first step in the process of coming to terms with that reality. A principled liberalism of the kind Edward R. Murrow exemplified, one that can explain and defend its viewpoint in the public arena instead of shrieking abuse at those who won’t conform to its fantasies, has an important place in American public life. Too many of today’s liberals have a long and difficult road to walk if they want to return to that standard, but I hope they make the attempt.
Source: Ecosophia
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