
Tara Westover on Trump and Rural America - rrauenza
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/tara-westover-trump-rural-america/600916/
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wahern
> Social media has flooded our consciousness with caricatures of each other.
> Human beings are reduced to data, and data nearly always underrepresent
> reality. The result is this great flattening of human life and human
> complexity. We think that because we know someone is pro-choice or pro-life,
> or that they drive a truck or a Prius, we know everything we need to know
> about them. Human detail gets lost in the algorithm. Thus humanity gives way
> to ideology.

 _sigh_

The problem with blaming social media is that Donald Trump is a walking,
talking caricature of a human being. We've become so cynical about politics
that a majority of the population deem caricatures of corrupt leaders--i.e.
those who make outrageous promises and categorically false statements--somehow
_more_ _honest_ _and_ _trustworthy_ than politicians who bother wrestling with
our (collectively, individually) conflicting desires. The notion that we'd
accept the sincerity or legitimacy of such people merely because of television
or computers is ridiculous. Not even 5-year-old children hold such firm
beliefs that they would so credulously accept a claim of an adult as having
comic book super powers, despite being presented nothing else in their daily
media diet. Lived experience is much more powerful than we give it credit for;
to believe in someone like Trump and his ilk says far more about how we
experience, frame, and explain our day-to-day lives and personal interactions,
not how we see it reflected in the media. Not to mention the fact that, once
upon the time, the political elite and "the system" would never have permitted
the electorate such a fatal choice. Unsurprisingly, we never make such
arguments when we try to explain the emergence and endurance of corrupt but
popular leaders like Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin; leaders who walk, talk,
and behave exactly like Trump.

Neither social media, nor media generally, is capable of creating such bitter
partisanship and shocking suspension of critical thinking. It's a consequence
of an unadulterated cynicism and cultural contempt that became mainstream with
the intellectual left, then adopted and perfected by the right, long before
mainstream media turned the corner. If we dig deeper such partisan colors
begin to disappear, but we at least can trace it back that far.

As one example, a major tenet that emerged in the intellectual left, which
slowly became mainstream on the popular left, was that poverty and oppression
was predominately (if not _entirely_ ) structural and institutional. This was
a reaction to the long-standing framing of poverty as a moral failure (i.e.
what was once called the "culture of poverty" by conservative commentators and
theorists); a framing with obvious pedigree in Victorian English culture and
deep religious origins in Puritanism and Calvinism. The reaction was also, I
believe, a response to the failure of civil rights reforms and other political
and legal successes to quickly deliver on their promises.

Whence comes our overly credulous belief that social media is so powerful, an
accelerator or even principal driver of our cultural dynamics. That's a
purely, even radically structuralist argument. Of course, this belief is held
not just by those on the left but also those on the right. Just as those on
the left are now adopting theories of cultural poverty and other socio-
cultural arguments. We now live amongst political ideologies that lack even
the basic elegance and internal consistency of mid-century radical political
theory, but nothing has to make sense when cynicism and fatalism becomes so
deep-seated.

American politics was always tribal. Tribal, partisan politics was baked into
the American constitution, and in more ways than not the exact same political
and even geographic divisions persist. We inherited the conflict between
industrial interests pursuing the future and agrarian, rural interests
clinging to the status quo and mythology. What's changed from mid-century is
the rejection of individual responsibility--not morally, but in our civic life
--and a loss of faith in the capacity of political compromise to have any
salient qualities. The whole notion of individual responsibility is of course
tainted by its association with the right and what they believe it connotes.
Thus as those on the left have become our primary moral arbiters they're
incapable of generalizing their morality, mired in the particulars of how to
behave in an ever increasing list of social situations. Both those aspects--
rejection of individual responsibility and a loss of faith in political
compromise--can be most directly traced to the intellectual left, at least in
the American context. That's why process no longer matters, only rigid
solutions and their simplified consequences. (Structuralist theory has
Continental origins, of course, but context matters and blaming Marxism or
French literary criticism is a cop-out; it's thinly disguised, intellectually
dishonest red-baiting that whitewashes the American left. Plus Marxism and
French literary criticism have meaningful truths to share; their conclusions
and particular premises and arguments can be rejected independently; failing
to be so discerning and careful commits the precise same errors as did the
American intellectual left in accepting so much of it wholesale.)

I don't see how we can move on without admitting that. And I've held this
opinion ever since 1998, when I got into a heated argument with a sociology
professor in class about the simplistic, categorical dichotomy she and the
reading material presented regarding the intellectual origins behind then
contemporary left and right political-economic policies. My beef wasn't with
the framing of conservative policies as reflecting moralistic notions, nor
even the framing of liberal policies as reflecting the empirical research
regarding structural dynamics; it was with her presenting structuralism as the
antithetical, _superior_ approach, without any appreciation of its failures or
its shared characteristics with culturalism as a radically reductionist and
unnecessarily expansive theory. But now every time I hear about social media
this or social media that, I become just a little more disheartened. We've
systematically externalized our culpability as a polity by internalizing
radical structuralist theory, among other simplistic and conveniently self-
serving ideologies. Tragically, it's one of the few political opinions we all
seem to share.

(Of course, I do believe structural dynamics are immensely important. Just not
in the same ways or to the same degrees as now widely accepted and presumed.)

