Iran, Trump and the US right’s post-modern swerve

How we can get our heads around Trump. Image: TNW

A few months back, I was trying to get my head around the origins of Trumpism, and the whole depraved buffet of political depravity that he represents. Where had it all come from? Phenomena like Trump don’t just drop out of the sky, wholly formed. They have to have a back-story – they have to have come from somewhere.

The resulting essay for The New World, which you can read here, began with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The historian Antony Beevor, who I spoke to for the piece, distilled the origin story of populism and Trumpism into a single remark, when he said: “what we failed to understand… was that the Cold War had actually kept the world together, in a sort of straitjacket.”

On reflection, it was perhaps telling that Beevor reached for a metaphor that relates to mental health – and once that straitjacket was torn off, anything was possible. The patient is now on the loose. We see him now, starting a war over which he has no control, against a nation he does not understand with no plan for what he actually intends to do.

It is, in other words, like madness.

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That detachment from reality was obvious from the beginning of Trump’s political project, and he was so open about it, so brazen, that it became almost his political trademark, his defining political characteristic. As I wrote in the piece:

“On the face of it, Trump’s insinuations about Obama’s birth certificate reflected the growing alarm within the US over immigration. Another way of looking at it was that Trump was engaged in straight-up race baiting. But beneath that, his fixation on the “birtherism” scandal was a demonstration of another shift under way in the US.”

“Trump told lies – outright lies. When it became clear that he was lying it didn’t seem to faze him, or any of his supporters. He simply repeated the lie. Even when Obama published his birth certificate, Trump stuck with his insinuations…”

“Something very strange was happening – the right was beginning to take on a new, post-modern form, in which outlandish lies became a new kind of political tool. The advice was that it was important to take a politician like Trump “seriously, but not literally”, which meant accepting that what he said wasn’t always true. But it also suggested the possibility that a deeper, unspoken message was buried somewhere in the great Trump word-salad, just waiting to be inferred.”

“In a political culture where trust in politics had been shattered by Iraq and shattered all over again by the financial crisis, voters were surprisingly susceptible to this new, flexible attitude towards truth. They lapped it up.”

“This post-modern swerve was all the more remarkable because until then the idea of truth as a subjective variable had been associated with the left. But now it crossed over to embed itself in the radical right where an all-new breed of po-mo populist was beginning to say ridiculous, idiotic things that were self-evidently not true, for example: that there were no parties; that US drug prices had been reduced by “1,500%”; or that immigrants were eating all the dogs, the cats, the swans.”

His latest untruth is that the US was forced into attacking Iran, that it had to be done in order to keep America safe. That is obviously not true. Though undoubtedly a despicable regime, Iran posed no direct threat to the US. The idea is ludicrous. It is just one more step in a political career that has been little more than an ascending staircase of lies.

People often cite a piece of dark wisdom from Europe’s totalitarian past, that says the bigger the lie, the greater the number of people who will believe it. History shows that that works – but only up to a point.

Because inevitably there comes a moment when the bombs fall and the war spins out of control when people are shocked into recognising the truth, which is that they’ve been lied to all along.