No question America has experienced worse eras in its history than it faces today like slavery, Jim Crow, and the Great Depression. What makes the current era so unique is not its degree of tragedy but its eeriness. The world has gone absurd, case in point the currently elected President of the United States who, by conventional reason, should have never even gotten close to clenching a nomination, much less winning, twice. When Trump first announced his candidacy in 2016, the world laughed. It was just too absurd.
And its not open racism or vileness that makes Trump stand out. We have plenty of Presidents who meet that description. It’s the oddity of his administration and success. While corruption has always been rampant in American politics, a convicted criminal does has never become President of the United States. For all its flaws, the transfer in power of the American President has never been violent until 2021 and, until 2024, people who advocated that violence couldn’t be imagined to be re-elected President. We know that racism is a feature, not a bug, of American society since the beginning of this country. But since when does a President in the 21st century get away with saying “both sides” are to blame when white supremacists marched down the street chanting, “Jews will not replace us?”
Absurdity is fun and liberating. That’s why we found it so funny when Trump announced his candidacy...until things get serious and it won’t go away, then it’s uncanny. When the uncanniness doesn’t stop, that’s when things get eerie.
Eeriness comes from something this country has not experienced in a long time. A phenomenon so rare that, until the 2024 Presidential election results, most of America’s best and brightest nervously lived in denial that it even existed. Until then, 2016’s election was a fluke of history to be pacified away with conventional tools, but the results are now damning: We live in an Era of the Fanatic.
In his 1951 book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer writes why conventional wisdom fails us in a time of fanaticism:
We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are but names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are…Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware and are made to look like visionaries who cling to things that do not exist. p. 91
Future books that capture our modern times cannot rely on realism (even gritty realism) but will have to resort to the to the eerie, the uncanny, and the absurd.
In 1960, Absurdist Romanian-French playwright, Eugène Ionesco, to release a play called Rhinoceros. In it, high-functioning town drunk, Bérenger, goes through life in his ordinary French town when, suddenly, a rhinoceros goes rampaging through the street, causing a public stir and becoming the talk of the town. Over time, more and more rhinoceroses appear unexpectedly until it is discovered these rhinoceroses were once town residents transformed into rhinoceroses. Once more, it’s a growing fad to become a rhinoceros and more and more people are inexplicably opting to join their new horned brethren and embrace their new lifestyle. To Bérenger’s dismay, people he considers sophisticates and upstanding members of the community, people he looks up to, are willingly reducing themselves to the state of roaring rhinoceroses. Just when he thinks there might just be some time to stop this growing frenzy and get it under control, he finds the whole town has become rhinoceroses, even the authorities and public servants. In his despair, Bérenger resolves that at least he will not give up his own humanity even if he is alone. Fin.
Ionesco wrote his play as an allegory of his own experiences as a Romanian university student during the rise of Naziism. Professors and fellow students who started out adamantly opposed to Naziism would go to hemming and hawing (“I don’t agree with EVERYTHING they say” type of people) to becoming full on supporters. To becoming a Rhinoceros.
It's not just Naziism. Ionesco lived at the intersection of several fanatic movements in his circle, including the prolonged support of Stalinism in France, which he also addresses in the play. Ultimately, it’s about fanaticism. How alone and powerless the non-fanatical can be when they are left to screech reason, but no one is left to listen. Many readers will relate in seeing family members and friends they’ve loved through their childhood, and were often foundational in forming their own sense of right and wrong, echoing unshakable xenophobic narratives.
Like every good non-fanatic (or moderate - as I’ll call them for convenience), Berenger’s first impulse is to find order and explanation. Starting with his personal responsibility. Maybe it’s all his fault. Maybe he wasn’t sensitive enough to the people who turned Rhinoceros. If he’d just been a little nicer and more sympathetic. He speculates, “For my own part, I shall never forgive myself for not being nicer to Jean. I never managed to give him a really solid proof of the friendship I felt for him. I wasn’t sufficiently understanding with him.”
The point is moot. Whether or not his conclusion is correct is unknowable. The trumpeting and braying rhinoceroses have no means of communicating with him as an outsider human, or even understanding him for that matter. Sensible explanations are futile. In his conversation with his love interest, Daisy, he laments:
Berenger: Do you understand them?
Daisy: Not yet. But we must try to understand the way their minds work, and learn their language.
Berenger: They haven’t got a language! Listen…do you call that a language?
Much has been made about modern Americans’ similar inability to communicate “across the aisle” and what more could have been done to reach out sooner. This is nothing new. Across cultures and generations, the fanatic and their counterpart is rendered unintelligible to each other. There are three reasons the fanatic and the moderate cannot communicate.
The first reason, according to Hoffer, is the fanatic is generally someone in denial of the uncertainty of their own worldview. Someone who joins an extremist collective movement because they do not have another group to depend upon (like a naturally moderating community) or cannot uphold individual conviction. To not face the possibility of being wrong, they engage almost exclusively with each other in their own echo chambers and artificially enforce their faith with actions like enthusiastic proselytizing. Words and phrases that do not reinforce and accept their underlying assumptions are rendered either antagonistic or incomprehensible. Far from making him feeble, this weakness makes them more zealous and dangerous.
The second reason is because the doctrine of the fanatic is deliberately beyond scrutiny. Donald Trump’s logic is famously lacking in consistency. In a time of moderates, this is a weakness, but for fanatic followers, this is a strength. The more inscrutable the better. According to Hoffer, “It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its of its strength.” (emph. mine) p. 100. In the triumph of the fanatic, politics is rendered nonsensible.
The third and final reason is what is probably the most fundamental unaddressed difference between the fanatic and their counterpart that goes unaddressed. For the moderate of all stripes, the present life is precious and worth preserving. For the fanatic it is not. From Eric Hoffer again:
The conservative doubts that the present can be bettered, and he tries to shape the future in the image of the present. He goes to the past for reassurance about the present: “I wanted the sense of continuity, the assurance that our contemporary blunders were very ancient heresies, that beloved things which were threatened had rocked not less heavily in the past.”…The liberal sees the present as the legitimate offspring of the past and as constantly growing and developing toward an improved future: to damage the present is to maim the future. (emph. mine) p. 92-93
On the other hand:
The radical and the reactionary [left- and right-wing fanatic respectively] loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice. p. 93.
The last words of one human before turning into a rhinoceros is, “we must move with the times.”
Thus, fanaticism comes across as nihilistic to its non-adherence. When our context for our existence springs from our present moment, an attack on the present is an attack on reality itself. As of the 2024 election, that reality is battered and shaken so only the absurd, the uncanny, and the eerie can speak to our present circumstance.
When talking about Trump and his band of deviants, Tim Walz, as a good Midwesterner, made the point I’m trying to make more succinctly: they’re just weird. The subsequent ignition of Harris’s base, and the panic of Trump’s, shows how precisely Walz hit the nail on the head. It’s a shame the Harris campaign chose to reel in that kind of rhetoric in favor of a more conventional campaign.
And to be fair, Harris’s loss wasn’t for nothing. By running as effective a campaign as could be expected and still losing, she proved how weird the fanatics have made this country. There is no longer any doubt that 2016 was not just a fluke of history, but a mandate. If the Democratic party, the last major party not ruled by fanatic leadership, is to restore a semblance of sanity in this country, it must find a way to engage with the eeriness of our times. Not to succumb to it, but to confront it honestly. It is time to wake up. Not from a dream, but to a new dreamlike reality. Lest we wake up to a nightmare.
Comentarios