Friday
For the next few months, I will be devoting my Friday columns to a general examination of what aid literature can provide in the battle against Trump and Trumpism. At stake is our country, the global community, and the planet.
To be sure, I have been regularly examining matters Trumpian for the past three years and will continue to do so. This project, however—which I plan to gather together in a book–will look at my old essays to arrive at an overarching view. What can poems, plays and novels teach us about the man, the phenomenon he represents, and the prospects for fighting back?
Looking back through those essays, I see that I first started paying attention to Trump in 2015 when he launched his presidential run. Before then, I thought him a mere carnival sideshow and shrugged off his claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, viewing them as a bizarre means of attracting attention. For far too long I didn’t take him seriously.
Once he started gaining political traction, however, I did what I always do when faced with life’s mysteries: I turned to literature. To be sure, literature wasn’t my only recourse, and many seasoned commentators on American politics have helped me out. Literature, however, made its special contribution. As Salman Rushdie has observed, when political leaders undermine our grasp on reality, literature delivers “the truths of the great constant, which is human nature.”
The Roman poet Horace tells us that great literature simultaneously entertains us and speaks truth, and the most truthful literature is the literature that lasts. Times may change but (to cite some of the authors I have turned to) Mark Twain, Herman Melville, John Gay, John Milton and William Shakespeare knew a con man when they saw one. Meanwhile George Orwell, Milan Kundera, and Shakespeare (always Shakespeare) understood authoritarian impulses, Dante and Melville gave us unforgettable images of flatterers and enablers, and authors as ancient as Aeschylus and Euripides wrote dramas where victims push back.
We need truth tellers more than ever as America’s president lies constantly while assaulting such institutional guardrails as the justice system, the academy, the press, the intelligence agencies, religion, and science. If Trump can cavalierly shift the grounds of reality, then society is left floundering. That he is aided by powerful forces like Fox News, rightwing billionaires, and Vladimir Putin makes resistance to him particularly challenging.
Literature always steps up when truth and morality are under assault. In his mock epic masterpiece The Dunciad, for instance, Alexander Pope imagines stupidity, embodied in the Goddess Dullness, extinguishing everything that upholds civilization. At her universal yawn, all the lights of the world go out:
Religion blushing veils her sacred fires,
And unawares Morality expires.
Nor public Flame, nor private, dares to shine;
Nor human Spark is left, nor Glimpse divine!
Lo! thy dread Empire, Chaos! is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
As I read through my early Trump essays, I see that I regarded him initially as a relatively harmless (albeit nasty) con man. In my later essays, however, I became alarmed and began exploring his authoritarian tendencies (Trump as a wannabe Macbeth). From a mere Tolstoyan grifter like Prince Vasili, I came to see him as a Iago, malevolently and spitefully whispering into America’s ear on his way to destroying all that is honorable and innocent.
Literature also explains how and why Trump commands such loyalty from certain followers. For instance, after Milton’s Satan corrupts Adam and Eve, he doesn’t have to explicitly direct Sin and Death to rampage throughout the earth. Instead, they themselves sense their moment has arrived, with Sin discovering,
Methinks I feel new strength within me rise,
Wings growing, and Dominion giv’n me large
Beyond this Deep…
If there has been an uptick of white Americans verbally harassing, physically assaulting, and sometimes even gunning down Jews and people of color, it is because they feel a new strength within. Their wings are growing.
Likewise, H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man helps us understand why members of the GOP establishment have surrendered to Trump. By getting away with behavior that would have ended any other politician’s career, Trump appears to have suspended the laws of political gravity, just as Griffin suspends the laws of physical reality. Griffin’s exhilaration when he realizes he can get away with anything has spread to Republican politicians:
I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realize the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do.
Trump’s impunity made an impression on Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who worships at the feet of libertarian Ayn Rand. When Trump threw political correctness and common decency to the wind, Ryan must have felt he was witnessing the living embodiment of John Galt. After all, this new Atlas casually shrugged away the “pussy grabbing” scandal, making Ryan’s momentary attempts to condemn Trump appear weak. “So this is what an Übermensch looks like,” one imagines Ryan thinking.
Literature doesn’t only articulate the problems we face, however. It also shows us people working to solve them, and in ways that provide a powerful resource for activists. I have periodically looked at different ways that literature pushes back against Trumpian politics.
For instance, Agamemnon’s Cassandra, Euripides’s Bacchae, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Margaret Atwood’s Offred, and Ursula Le Guin’s Omelas protesters resist patriarchy, racism, and scapegoating generally. Heinrik Ibsen’s 1882 play Enemy of the People could not be timelier as it shows a man courageously fighting against manufactured reality. Sometimes Stockmann behaves well, sometimes not, but always in illuminating ways.
I see that I’ve also written essays about poems that show a way forward. While it is true that good art is not prescriptive–“the poet he nothing affirms,” wrote Sir Philip Sidney–it does manage to capture our complicated reality while providing a framework within which to explore our options.
As I look back the book I wrote seven years ago–How Beowulf Can Save America: An Epic Hero’s Guide to Defeating the Politics of Rage–I realize that I have become less optimistic. In my defense, I correctly identified America’s monsters, especially our resentful Grendel (lower class status anxiety) and our dragon (threatened upper class entitlement). I may, however, have had too much confidence that our foundational values would fend them off. I underestimated the lengths that GOP Republicans would go, led by dragon Mitch McConnell, to protect their privilege. I didn’t anticipate that Machiavelli, not the U. S. Constitution, would become the new playbook.
Barack Obama may have thought he could appeal to our better angels, but now we see Trump attacking the free press and the GOP packing the courts. If, as I argued then, the Declaration of Independence is our version of the giant sword Beowulf uses to slay Grendel’s mother, then what happens when the sword itself is neutered? Like Beowulf’s dragon, McConnell and Trump threaten to burn down our great hall.
While Grendelian resentment and dragon entitlement are proving more intractable than I anticipated, however, the same counter measures still apply. Fighting the monsters requires people to come together like Beowulf and Wiglaf. The ideals upon which America was founded still make our hand grips firm, our giant swords sharp, and our warrior unity purposeful.
Having made the case for literature’s continuing importance, I must add a caveat. Reading is no substitute for canvassing, making calls, giving money, participating in protests, running for office, voting, and much more. The arts have never defeated tyranny by themselves. Rather, they should be considered an indispensable ally, a safe space where one can center oneself amidst all the lying, corruption, and underhanded tactics. Think of literature as a “No Bullshit” zone.
Literature, in other words, provides tools and perspectives that we can find nowhere else. As such, it can be a treasure house for frontline activists, community leaders, commentators, political scientists, legislators, teachers, lawyers, journalists and others. These Friday essays are written to provide those fighting back against Trump and Trumpism with plays, poems, and fictional stories that will serve them.