A blast of noxious gas in the form of pathological narcissism emanates from the re-election of Trump to blanket the world.
The outcome of the 2024 American presidential election has been a referendum on the Democrats’ hubristic and disingenuous kowtowing to the wealthy and corporations — most egregiously, Big Crypto — while still maintaining that they were the party for the working class. It’s also been a referendum on wokeism’s transgenderism and pronouns.
The Democrats did themselves no favor by permitting decrepit Biden to stay in the race as long as he did, whether by delusion or design to gaslight the public on his viability, which effectively sabotaged Kamala Harris with a relatively short runway for campaigning, just three months, as opposed to Obama’s nearly two years.
Further, the Democrats refused to hold a fair contest in an open primary. Without a fully Democratic process, shoehorning establishment Kamala in as a “change” agent, Democrats shot themselves in the foot because energy, enthusiasm, and momentum are the names of the game when it comes to turning out the vote to ascend the presidency.
Some 15 million fewer Democrats voted this election cycle despite a heavy-handed, aggressive $1B campaign, replete with a deluge of daily text messages to a wide swath of Americans that became a cultural meme in late-night comedy. Kamala’s running mate, Tim Waltz, under his breath, apologized for excessive texting for campaign contributions in a post-election concession speech in his home state of Minnesota.
Wokeism
After Hillary’s disastrous loss to Trump in 2016 over the Electoral College and not the popular vote, the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s tone-deaf machine should have been thoroughly rebooted and turned over to new blood. Moving from centrist policies circa 2016 to more progressive policies in 2024 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the “defund the police” movement was diametrically opposed to the pulse of the electorate.
The stench of wokeism did not fade in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and the “defund the police” movement. It was etched indelibly into America’s consciousness, even though woke’s temperature has been dropping as the right has successfully mounted a ferocious defense against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Critical Race Theory (CRT), effectively nullifying the woke scourge to many but not all voters. The Democrats’ brand was forever tarnished.
Americans have been so butthurt over gender culture wars that the country voted to trade in long-fought for democratic human rights in exchange for Trump’s narcissistic authoritarianism — anything for a sense of order and control. Disorder at the border, inflation, and the chaotic withdrawal from the war in Afghanistan underscore the point.
In the re-election of narcissist Trump, who overthrew Roe vs. Wade by stacking the Supreme Court with far-right (in)justices, a growing cohort of women overlooked Kamala by prioritizing the feminist implications of the transgender movement encroaching on women’s sports and single-sex spaces such as prisons and locker rooms over the traditional stalwart backbone of feminism — abortion rights.
Between October 7-20 alone, 41% of Trump’s $95 million ad spending was dedicated to viral anti-trans messaging.
Rounding out the gender culture wars was the swelling of the neo-feminist, hyper-feminine caricaturization of women in the trad-wife (traditional wife) conservative movement, undergirded by the likes of manosphere’s Steven Crowder’s backward calls for no-fault divorce and Nick Fuentes’ anti-choice oppressive charge, “Your body, my choice. Forever.”
In retaliation, women are mounting their own equivalent of the incel (involuntary celibate) movement with 4B, the latest feminist subculture rage out of South Korea. “B” is a shorthand for the word “no” in Korean — and a series of “no’s” is what the movement calls for: no sex, no dating, no marrying men, and no children.
Exposing the degree of its naïveté and pathological hope, America has been pulled off its center — the effects of political narcissistic abuse — losing track of its values in an over-correcting pendulum swing against the left’s moralizing wokeism to the embrace of dark grievances in Trump. If the progressive woke left was on the offense, preaching and looking down on the masses, Trump played defense and America loves a comeback king, whether from cancel culture or out from under the strictures of the courthouse.
When presented with a fork in the road, America — recoiling from nouveau woke totalitarianism emanating from the progressive left — flung itself into the arms of old-school fascistic totalitarianism with Trump. “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” chalks up the self-immolating drive towards familiar oppression.
It’s too simple to paint with a broad brush that the American populace is swept up in Trump’s cult, even given that he is a narcissistic cult leader. To claim so would be a monomaniacal quick and dirty assessment that would fail to take into account the American course correction with the election of Biden as a stopgap between Trump’s soon-to-be two administrations.
The number one reason cited for voting for Trump is kitchen table economics — “It’s the economy, stupid!” — and its associated meme riffing off of soaring rent costs — “the price of eggs is too damn high!”
Trump as an escape hatch from wokeism is premature and miscalculated. Re-electing Trump does not exempt a populace from postmodernism and its brainchild wokeism. Wokeism can be defined as identity politics or identitarianism for shorthand.
Peddling in conspiratorial pseudo-realities (“alternative facts”) and a narcissistic fantastic space, Trump is far from exempt from wokeism; he is the reification of the newfangled woke-right. Existential postmodernism with its reality-adjacent thinking has spread its tentacles into every aspect of our “modern” life. There’s no getting away from it with its surrealistic, fantasy-based, compensatory qualities and makeshift out-of-reality solutions for daily hardships. Injecting bleach for Covid or nuking hurricanes, etc., does not solve problems.
Shoring up traditional gender roles through narcissist Trump’s oncoming regime represents a backlash to the woke-left as an umbrella concept housing transgenderism and its radical gender breakdown. Resuscitating retrograde “traditional” gender roles induces a surrealistic retro-futurism suggestive of compensation for perceived modern sexual decadence and waywardness. The underlying mandate is control, the narcissist’s specialty, as the Paracosm is a delicate fantastical space, easily punctured by reality.
Also minimized until the eleventh hour, if not overlooked in the sweep that was Trump’s re-election, is the role of Elon & Co, the tech bros-in-arms. This incel-enabling cohort pushed Trump and MAGA over the finish line.
Now that America has decided to return to its abusive, adjudicated rapist “ex” in president-elect Donald Trump (Because it’s all a dream, isn’t it? Nothing’s real in our postmodern, post-truth age, right? It’s all a reality TV show, a spectacle, a circus! None of the consequences will affect me!) for a second Administration after a four-year interim under Biden, the media is conducting a rigorous postmortem, or at least they think it’s rigorous.
The time for an in-depth, psychological post-mortem would have been after his first election in 2016. If the American media, in conjunction with the American people, had done a rigorous post-mortem involving the history of fascism and the psychopathology of narcissism, we may not have landed in these dire straits.
The reluctance to consider the psychological ramifications of malignant narcissism is exposed and laid bare with the re-election of Trump. Americans didn’t do their homework.
Contemplating Donald Trump’s potential win on December 20th, 2023, narcissism expert Prof. Sam Vaknin stated in a YouTube interview with me, “It will be very difficult to defeat Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not reality-based. He is fantasy-based, and fantasies are all-encompassing and comforting. It’s a form of self-soothing.”
In the blame game, Democrats are habituated to maudlin navel gazing and fault-finding with their approach to campaigning when the elephant in the room is why did Trump win?
Autoplastic defenses, blaming oneself, are not called for when reeling from political narcissistic abuse. Ironically, when going toe to toe with a narcissist, it’s time to employ alloplastic defenses, in other words, to flex narcissistic defenses in one’s favor by blaming the other, in this case, the head narcissist in Trump.
Another consideration for why Trump won is the role of repetition compulsion. Just as one is doomed to repeat history if one is ignorant of it, the principle holds with psychological repetition compulsions to somehow get it right with the narcissist again. Machiavellian Trump successfully hoovered the American public back into his thrall. The collective unconscious wants to get it right this time because the nectar of fantasy is a siren song of sweet oblivion aka La La Land.
Additionally, there can be no doubt sexism and racism played a significant role in Kamala’s tragic defeat. However, the left accuses the right of not electing Kamala because of her race and gender, as though this is the silver bullet analysis. The left can’t let go of the distorted woke lens of thinking of identity groups as monoliths (e.g., Republicans equal bigots), which is counterfactual, as evidenced by the election post-mortem. Hispanics did not fall in line as a cohort against Trump, even given his threats of deportation, nor did women fall in line over abortion. Similarly, this bottom-line analysis of boiling down Kamala’s defeat to gender and race is facile.
Neoliberalism
The chickens have come home to roost in that globalization has chipped away at citizens’ sense of security and identity.
In the West, neoliberalism — a blend of free trade, deregulation, and deference to financial markets — hollowed out communities while enriching a global oligarchy.
Without a foundation of trust, the entire capitalist system as we know it is running on the fumes of a civilized bygone era. It’s in this climate of distrust that capitalism, expressly neoliberalism, is currently pushing the envelope of a functioning economic system and, as such, has nearly, if not, effectively, run its course.
Neoliberalism, the form of capitalism in place since Reagan’s 1980s up until today, is ideologically deregulated capitalism and, in practice, nearly laissez-faire capitalism with little to no government checks and balances. Neoliberalism is capitalism run amok with minimal constraints.
Income inequality, a natural byproduct of neoliberalism coupled with immigration and refugee crises, are perfect breeding grounds for fascism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism. Radical income inequality, which happens to be a characteristic of feudal societies, is a recipe for the scapegoating of immigrants through Nazism and its concordant civilizational collapse.
If 40% of the population of the United States qualifies as subclinical narcissists, the United States will end up as a totalitarian country, because this is the political manifestation of narcissism.
Economist Richard Wolff discusses how Americans are in denial about America’s decline. “I do believe we are at a major transition point in the history of the United States and probably of the whole world; it’s the end of the American empire.”
When America moved away from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal to instead embrace neoliberal globalism for the last approximately 50 years, of many consequences, America neglected to raise the minimum wage. Wolffe states, “That’s cruel and unusual punishment given to people whose only crime is that they’re poorly paid in the first place.”
Wolffe continues, “Mr. Trump won the election because he positioned himself with a dramatic gesture, the sort favored by Madison Avenue advertisers: I am the great protector. Mr. Trump understood far better than the Democrats that people feel attacked, undermined, frightened, scared, and worried for themselves and their children as well as they should be. They glimpse fearfully where things are going. They want to be protected from it all. So he put himself forward as the Great Protector, and his two images were walls: walls at the southern border to protect us against the invasion of the immigrants and another wall, a “tariff wall” to protect us against the evil Chinese. These are powerful, successful images. But in terms of economics, it’s total, incoherent nonsense.”
Ben Rhodes, deputy national security adviser under President Barack Obama, reports for the New York Times, “Many voters have come to associate democracy with globalization, corruption, financial capitalism, migration, forever wars, and elites who talk about it as an end in itself rather than a means to redressing inequality, reining in capitalist systems that are rigged, responding to global conflict and fostering a sense of shared national identity.”
Prof. Timothy Shenk (George Washington University), captures the echo of history in his guest essay for the New York Times that the Democrats, newly defenders of the status quo, were up against a populist uprising in Trump’s MAGA movement: “Reflecting on Hitler’s rise in her native Germany, Hannah Arendt pointed out that by the final days of the Weimar Republic, politics had split into two irreconcilable factions: “those who wanted the status quo at any price” versus “those who wanted change at any price.”
Divided and conquered, America is fractured and siloed in alternative realities, as evidenced by the proliferation of conspiracy theories and subcultures such as the manosphere, Christian nationalism, and tech fascism.
Tech fascists are winning, with Elon Musk raking in $70 billion in one week after the election and crypto’s valuation soaring the day after the election. Tech proposed network states may be the only way a post-dollar post-America can quasi-live in “harmony” in a faceted diaspora of loosely held coalitions.
In the meantime, before Trump’s inauguration on January 20th, 2025, Biden, as America’s half-dead lame-duck president, will remain pollyannaish (“We’re going to be okay!”) and feckless in the face of preparing America for an avalanche of distressing mind-bending values-inverting reformation from a chaotic and capricious president-elect with a track record of two impeachments, four criminal investigations, and a 34 felony count conviction. Already this first week out from the election, Trump is filling out his swampy, criminal cabinet with a steady stream of norm-busting creatures from the black lagoon.
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