336. Odysseus Has Your Back, Donald

Isn't this something?  Our political analysts, by the number of explanations they are pouring out, must be completely stumped.  It's probably the most urgent, difficult case they've ever seen.  With only one person out of the way Donald Trump could be President of the United States!  In a matter of months.  This fellow who can't even talk straight. 

Are the Republican males who got him nominated not listening to him?  Is a fifth of the electorate deaf?  If they are — or worse, if they are not — what does that say about democracy's faith in the common man?  Oh our poor, naive Founders.

Worse yet now, after the New York primaries, what does it say about the educated man?  Surveys (NYT, 4-28-16) show that he went for him too.  There in the well-off suburbs.  Oh our poor high-school civics teachers.  Hell, our poor Ivy League professors.

In Post 34 I offered my own explanation: that it's backlash against political correctness, which is essentially a backlash against Christian love.  There is a question, though, of whether it's love that's being lashed at or whether it's the way it's being channeled.  Huck Finn is lashing back at nicey-nice, Miss Watson's way of channeling it — sort of the way Nietzsche's aunts channeled it to him, provoking his gigantic backlash.  If it's just the extremes political correctness has gone to, into blue-nose finger-wagging, then Christian love is safe and Trump's people don't look so bad.  If it's not then the U.S. is in deeper trouble than anybody realized.

You have to remember, we're not talking about Trump's astonishing support, we're talking about what's fueling it.  Whether these males will admit it or not.  They might tell a visiting journalist or exit pollster that they voted for Trump because they're sick of losing jobs and being neglected and seeing America taken advantage of, and they might be right, but here we're not believing it.  Those are good, respectable reasons, and good respectable reasons are given in public when the real reason is not respectable.

Here the real reason, down deep, is that they're sick of being required to show love.  They're sick of being rebuked for insensitivity, for being unhelpful to the handicapped, cold to the foreigner,  suspicious of the sexually different, blind to the racial and ethnic marks of suffering.  They're sick of tip-toeing around the emotionally fragile.  But most of all  they're sick of being reprimanded by a lot of gah-dam pussycats.

And on top of all this they're sick of the gag order society has put on them.  They can't reply to the pussycats. The speech of liberal, educated, enlightened Americans is now the national norm.  Violate it and your offense goes viral.  Along with all the tuts from the pussycats.  Up on the moral high ground.  Who, in our country, can talk back to anybody up there?

Ah, but as a voter anybody can.  With anonymity.  So, the testosterone-swollen male goes into that voting booth and casts a ballot for Donald Trump.  That'll stir 'em up.  Hens, you want to squawk?  Here's something you can squawk about.  Pundits, you want to analyze motives?  Well analyze this.

Oh blessed anonymity.  As one dog at his computer said to the other dog at his computer, "Nobody knows we're dogs."  Nobody knows that the votes that turned Trump's total from large to overwhelming, and kept it there, came from people in whose mouths butter wouldn't melt.  Or in which it melted only in the hearing of an interviewer alert to causes and stands, movements against oppression, cries for deserved attention.  This is no place, reporters, to listen for movement in the grass roots.  No, no, the back story here is hormonal.

What, even the educated, the highly educated, driven by their hormones?  Of course.  They're men, aren't they?  It won't come out though, especially these days, until they get some anonymity, and feel safe.  Didn't we have a university president a while back who felt so safe in his office on Sunday afternoons that he made obscene phone calls?  Full of hate speech.  There's pressure in every male.  My most liberal colleague saw what he thought would be its most comical, but plausible, release: leaving the party drunk, going out in the car with his buddy, closing the doors tight, and yelling, "Nigger! Nigger!  Nigger!" at the tops of their voices.  He was a good Presbyterian.  For too long, I guess.

Underestimate the thrill of transgression  and we miss what's behind the rise in Trump's vote after Mitt Romney scolded him.  Romney's the schoolmarm, adding spice to badness with every wag of the finger.  You can't talk back to her in class, she's so smart, she's so good, but find yourself alone? with the means at hand?  Voilá the vote, a dirty phone call to Miss Watson.  It's the bad boy talking back to the good woman.  The dumb student talking back to the smart ones.  Yeah, talking back to the prof, the liberal intellectual, moonlighting to think tanks.  Well, baby, here's the total we're building up in the suburbs.  Put that in your tank and think it.

Yes, you can hear pressed American testosterone talking back to American liberals, American panty-waists, American women, but if you're a historian you can hear more.  You can hear all the testosterone in the ancient world talking back to Christianity, the religion that, with the backing of slaves and women, won out over noble Roman worship of the emperor, a being who had some balls.  It's what was working in Odysseus when he put out the eye of the Cyclops and showed he was rich in "spirit," a wealth Christians were to gain by showing meekness, and humility, and patience under persecution, estrogen-fed virtues.  It's what was working in Sir Thomas Malory's peers when, despite his many violations of the Peace of God (the church's attempt to "Christianize the feudal structures of society through non-violent means" — Wiki), they kept him in good standing as a knight. 

Christian love has a long history of conflict with what's powering Trump and charging up his followers.  And it has a long history of humbling those so powered.  When the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire offended he he had to go barefoot to Canossa and confess to the Pope.  When a contemporary politician offends he has to go on TV and confess to the American public.

In every era you can hear "real men" gagging at such sights.  And, from one era to the next, feel what's happening to the old testosterone.  Love, sliding century by century into sensibility, into psychology, and into, now, politics, cuts off the flow, raising the pressure.  And raising resentment, oh the resentment.  There's the power.  The resentment of the morally conquered.  Not as strong as the ressentiment of the physically conquered (Nietzsche), maybe, but still, in a breakout, strong enough to flood a convention.