The Politics of Rage: Part I
Introduction.
It turns out that in Australia, “Murdoch papers, with a huge market share in Australia, have been supportive of mask wearing, social distance and vaccines. The conservative federal government, rather than exploiting the anti-mask sentiments of the minority hard right as Donald Trump did, stood behind the country’s medical experts and followed their advice in policymaking.”
Contrarily, here at home, the state of Florida is a seemingly insane example to the contrary. There’s no mystery about why this has happened. “At every stage of the pandemic DeSantis has effectively acted as an ally of the coronavirus, for example by issuing orders blocking businesses from requiring that their patrons show proof of vaccination and schools from requiring masks. More generally, he has helped create a state of mind in which vaccine skepticism flourishes and refusal to take precautions is normalized.”
What on earth is going on in the United States? Here are two instances to think about, only one of which is straightforwardly about the pandemic. First, an heiress, Julie Fancelli, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the organizers of the January 6 Insurrection. When asked about that recently, she replied that she didn’t “believe in violence,” but she had “real concerns” about the counting of the vote.
Second instance: Police around the nation have a terrible record with Covid. Five times as many in this period have died from the virus as from gunfire. Many more are hospitalized. Yet they are among the most resistant of all groups to vaccination….John Catanzara, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police in Chicago, has urged police officers there to ignore requirements by the mayor, Lori Lightfoot, that city employees report their vaccination status. Employees who are not vaccinated will be subject to twice-weekly testing, but vaccinations are not mandatory.
Policemen see their comrades dying, and it means nothing to them…or, what does it mean? That’s the question.
To take up now the first instance: How, we have to ask, can you possibly have “concerns,” real or otherwise, about something that never happened. There’s more evidence, per the U.S. Air Force Blue Book, for the existence of alien UFO sightings, not to mention a supposedly “real” expose in the film Hangar 18. Does any politically involved person have concerns about that?
More to the point, what makes a “concern” “real? The obvious answer is that she feels it strongly, as opposed to weakly or not at all. But then why? Nothing has happened to generate a “concern”– not a single instance of observable miscounting of votes, except one big thing: the President of the United States.
There has been a lot of chatter about the war on facts, and the supposedly fatal influence of academic post-Modernism, and Republican power-grabbing. However, none of that in isolation accounts for what has happened, in that where facts actually don’t exist, someone with real influence has to bring the non-facts to the attention of people who would welcome them. The non-facts become “facts”not merely in order that the realm of truth might be overturned–which is a side-effect — but that the existing power structure might be overturned. Making “our own facts” doesn’t accomplish that. I recollect, for example, that Ron Suskind and the GOP operative he was interviewing were talking about the cost of aid to Africa to suppress malaria: — not exactly a burning issue in its own right.
What it accomplishes is that the new realm of knowledge might indeed transfer power to the Great Man who invents it. What He says is “real,” and thus so is the “concern” that if the entire structure is not overturned, the enemy, or Enemy, may be able to retain power. And this is unacceptable.
The second instance returns us to the pandemic. It has a superficially somewhat different explanation, in that the concern of the police is not about “facts,” but about something entirely different: masculinity. A statistically trivial but I think telling observation: in walking around Greenwich Village I’ve seen many policemen, none of whom, as far as I can recall, was wearing a mask. On the other hand, I don’t recall ever seeing a policewoman not wearing a mask, even when in the company of unmasked policemen. A real man doesn’t surrender his dignity to a fucking disease, even in a pandemic, and doesn’t keep his distance from his buddies in a state of mutual dependence.
Putting these two instances together, the difference is indeed superficial. What we have in both cases is a question not of epistemology, about what you believe and why, but of ontology–of who you are: of your very being.
How the condition they share came about go into more fully in Part 2 of this essay. Here I’ll just note that it did not come about because of some material crisis following 2008 or because the big bankers weren’t prosecuted. The Tea Party was simply anti-Democrat, and most enraged by the comparatively piddling sum that allocated, not to shore up the world’s banking system, but to give aid to industries and their employees, that had suffered from the crash. So much for the “white working class.”
And so, “Nearly a quarter of the more than 600 people arrested in connection with the riot have been charged with assaulting or impeding police officers. But only a handful of that subset have any ties to extremist provocateurs like the Oath Keepers or the Proud Boys. The most violent on Jan. 6, it seems, were the most ordinary — a slice of the Trump faithful….They (are) largely whiter, slightly older and less likely than the general voting population to live in a city or be college-educated. Recent studies indicate that they come from places where people tend to fear the replacement of their ethnic and cultural dominance by immigrants, and adhere to the false belief that the 2020 election was stolen.”
This was the split that Donald Trump saw, and mobilized. In so doing, he turned epistemology into ontology: what kind of person you are, not what you know or believe. The only thing you have to know is that you’re for him, and “they” are against him, and they have to be stopped–by any means necessary. Every exposé of his alleged wrongdoing firms up the attachment to him instead of weakening it. Like Antaeus, he gets stronger every time he hits the ground.
In Part 2, I’ll take up the epidemiology of rage…
