For a long time, I was bothered by the whole notion of right-wing populism. Now left-wing populism, I could understand. It represented poor and working- class people who felt they were otherwise being left out of the political process. Under the rubric of left-wing populism, disadvantaged people could form a movement that would protect their interests in both the private sector as well as the government. Decent wages, livable hours of work, clean working conditions when possible (coal mines, ranches, and farms are not places that one can associate with clean working conditions). Also, fair representation in the Congress. So, there is a logical connection between left-wing populism and the bulk of the people who make up its followers.
However, no such connection can be drawn between right-wing populism and the bulk of the people who constitute its membership. How can poor and working-class people identify with a philosophy that believes in tax cuts that primarily help the very wealthy, and deregulation of business that will allow businesses to exploit their workers more easily as well as pollute the living environment in which they all have to live? Wouldn’t it be more logical to support a group and a philosophy that represents their interests more directly?
The answer is that poor people have not one but two major situations in their lives in which they are struggling to survive in today’s world. One is, of course, poverty, which is an economic problem. The second is numbness, which is an environmental problem and which is much more subtle in its presentation. And as modern technology increasingly transforms more and more aspects of modern living environments and enlarges and deepens the experiential vacuum in which people live, their capacity to withstand the sensory distortion that is created dramatically diminishes. And numbness becomes a bigger danger to their being than poverty.
And so, they latch on to an authoritarian leader, who stimulates them to life through intermittent shocks based on lashing out at individuals or groups who have done some alleged harmful acts or participated in some alleged potentially harmful conspiracies both of which boil down to some actions or conspiracies that primarily affect the authoritarian leader from some psychological point of view\authoritarian leader has a way of making it seem as if the actions or conspiracies are affecting his followers with the same intensity that they affect him. So, one way that the lower classes have of pulling out of their numbness is by merging psychologically with their authoritarian leader. And this is when they become zombies.
When I use the term zombie, I am not talking about the transformation of a person that comes from the priests using voodoo in Haiti. I am instead using the term metaphorically to indicate a person who has a diminished personal will as a result of being immersed in a growing expanding experiential vacuum. The process by which a person absorbs the effects of living in an experiential vacuum is called conative anesthesia. As a person absorbs the effects of living in an experiential vacuum, his will becomes paralyzed. He freezes up as it were.
So along comes an authoritarian leader like Trump. He shocks people to life with his outrageous statements, his conspiracy theories, his sudden shifts in strategy and policy. In the news media right now, the single thing that commentators are complaining about is that he is going to bring chaos to the American government and the American society. But his followers aren’t worried about chaos. On the contrary, they love it. Chaos is that state of affairs that is most likely to pull numb people out of their experiential vacuum. It is like a machine gun of abrasive stimuli.
Actually, a machine gun is a perfect metaphor for the onslaught of abrasive stimuli that all extremely numb people like to experience in order to feel more alive. A machine gun is usually sprayed in many different directions and is totally overstimulating. This is the level of stimuli that the Maga people feel comfortable with (again metaphorically speaking). But whereas a machine gun physically kills lots of people, Trump and his Maga Republican allies are out to tear apart and destroy American government and society. And the right-wing populist followers nod their heads in approval, and when they are given the go-ahead, they participate in the destruction as was the case with the events on January 6.
The Chinese have a saying, “May you live in interesting times.” Depends on how interesting.
© 2024 Laurence Mesirow
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