Call Them by Their True Names Read online

  We keep each other honest, we keep each other good with our feedback, our intolerance of meanness and falsehood, our demands that the people we are with listen, respect, respond—as we are allowed to, if we are free and valued ourselves. There is a democracy of social discourse, in which we are reminded that, just as we are beset with desires and fears and feelings, so are others. There was an old woman in Occupy Wall Street whose words I always go back to, who said, “We’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important.” That’s what a democracy of mind and heart, as well as of economy and polity, would look like.

  In the aftermath of Trump’s triumph, Hannah Arendt has become alarmingly relevant, and her books have been selling well, particularly On the Origins of Totalitarianism. Scholar Lyndsey Stonebridge pointed out to Krista Tippett, on the radio show On Being, that Arendt advocated for the importance of an inner dialogue with oneself, for a critical splitting in which you interrogate yourself—for a real conversation between the fisherman and his wife, you could say. She concluded, “People who can do that can actually then move on to having conversations with other people and then judging with other people. And what [Arendt] called ‘the banality of evil’ was the inability to hear another voice, the inability to have a dialogue either with oneself or the imagination to have a dialogue with the world, the moral world.”

  Some use their power to silence that dialogue and live in the void of their own increasingly deteriorating, off-course sense of self and meaning. It’s like going mad on a desert island, only with sycophants and room service. It’s like having a compliant compass that agrees north is wherever you want it to be. The tyrant of a family, the tyrant of a little business or a huge enterprise, the tyrant of a nation—power corrupts, and absolute power often corrupts the awareness of those who possess it. Or reduces it: narcissists, sociopaths, and egomaniacs are people for whom others don’t exist.

  We gain awareness of ourselves and others from setbacks and difficulties; we get used to a world that is not always about us; and those who do not have to cope with that are brittle, weak, unable to endure contradiction, convinced of the necessity of always having one’s own way. The rich kids I met in college were flailing as though they wanted to find walls around them, leaping from their inherited heights as though they wanted there to be gravity and to hit the ground, but parents and privilege kept throwing out safety nets and buffers, kept padding the walls and picking up the pieces, so that all their acts were meaningless, literally inconsequential. They floated like astronauts in outer space.

  Equality keeps us honest. Our peers remind us who we are and how we are doing, providing that service in personal life that a free press does in a functioning society. Inequality creates liars and delusion. The powerless are forced to dissemble—that’s how slaves, servants, and women got the reputation of being liars—and the powerful grow stupid on the lies they require from their subordinates and on their lack of need to know about others who are nobody, who don’t count, who’ve been silenced or trained to please. This is why I pair privilege with obliviousness; obliviousness is privilege’s form of deprivation. When you don’t hear others, they become unreal, and you are left in the wasteland of a world with only yourself in it. That surely makes you starving, though you know not for what, if you have ceased to imagine that others exist in any true, deep way. This need for egalitarian contact is one for which we hardly have language, or at least lack a familiar conversation.

  A man wished to become the most powerful man in the world, and by happenstance and intervention and a series of disasters was granted his wish. Surely he must have imagined that more power meant more flattery, a grander image, a greater hall of mirrors reflecting back his magnificence. But he misunderstood power and prominence. This man had bullied friends and acquaintances, wives and servants, and he bullied facts and truths, insistent that he was more than they were, than truth is, that truth, too, must yield to his will. It did not, but the people he bullied pretended that it did. Or perhaps it was that he was a salesman, throwing out one pitch after another, abandoning each one as soon as it left his mouth. A hungry ghost always wants the next thing, not the last thing.

  This man imagined that the power would repose within him and make him great, a Midas touch that would turn all to gold. But the power of the presidency was what it had always been: a system of relationships, a power that rested on people’s willingness to carry out the orders the president gave, a willingness that came from the president’s respect for the rule of law, truth, and the people. A man who gives an order that is not followed has his powerlessness hung out like dirty laundry. One day early in his tenure, one of this president’s minions announced that the president’s power would not be questioned. There are tyrants who might utter such a statement and strike fear into those beneath him, because they have instilled enough fear.

  A true tyrant does not depend on cooperative power but issues commands, enforced by thugs, goons, Stasi, the SS, or death squads. A true tyrant has subordinated the system of government and made it loyal to himself rather than to the system of laws or the ideals of the country. This would-be tyrant didn’t understand that he was in a system where many who worked in government—perhaps most, beyond the members of his party in the legislative branch—were loyal to law and principle, and not to him. White House aide Stephen Miller announced that the president would not be questioned, and we laughed. The president called in, like courtiers, the heads of the FBI, of the NSA, and the director of national intelligence, his own legal counsel, to tell them to suppress evidence, to stop investigations, and found that their loyalty was not to him. He found out to his chagrin that we were still something of a republic, and that the free press could not be so easily stopped; the public itself refuses to be cowed and mocks him earnestly at every turn.

  A true tyrant sits beyond the sea, in Pushkin’s country. He corrupts elections in his country, eliminates his enemies (journalists, in particular) with bullets, poisons, with mysterious deaths made to look like accidents—he spreads fear and bullies the truth successfully, strategically. Though he too overreached, with his intrusions into the American election, and what he had hoped would be invisible caused the whole world to scrutinize him and his actions, history, and impact with concern and even fury. Russia may have ruined whatever standing and trust it had, may have exposed itself, with its interventions in the US and European elections.

  The American buffoon’s commands were disobeyed, his secrets leaked at such a rate his office resembled the fountains at Versailles, or maybe just a sieve. Not long into his time in office, an extraordinary piece was published in the Washington Post with thirty anonymous sources. His agenda was undermined, even by a minority party that was not supposed to have much in the way of power; the judiciary kept suspending his executive orders; and scandals erupted like boils and sores. Inhabitants of the United States engaged in many kinds of resistance, inside and outside the arenas of electoral politics, at unprecedented levels. The dictator of the little demimondes of beauty pageants, casinos, luxury condominiums, fake universities offering fake educations with real debt, fake reality TV in which he was master of the fake fate of others, an arbiter of all worth and meaning, became fortune’s fool.

  He is the most mocked man in the world. After the Women’s March on January 21, 2017, people joked that he had been rejected by more women in one day than any man in history; he was mocked in newspapers, on television, in cartoons, by foreign leaders; was the butt of a million jokes; and his every tweet was instantly met with an onslaught of attacks and insults from ordinary citizens, gleeful to be able to speak sharp truth to bloated power.

  He is the old fisherman’s wife who wished for everything, and sooner or later he will end up with nothing. The wife sitting in front of her hovel was poorer after her series of wishes because she now owned not only her poverty but also her mistakes and her destructive pride, because she might have done otherwise but brought power and glory crashing down upon her, because
she had made her bed badly and was lying in it.

  The man in the White House sits, naked and obscene, a pustule of ego, in the harsh light, a man whose grasp exceeded his understanding because his understanding was dulled by indulgence. He must know somewhere below the surface he skates on that he has destroyed his image, and, like Dorian Gray, will be devoured by his own corrosion in due time, too. One way or another this will kill him, though he may drag down millions with him. One way or another, he knows he has stepped off a cliff, pronounced himself king of the air, and is in free-fall. A dung heap awaits his landing; the dung is all his; when he plunges into it he will be, at last, a self-made man.

  CODA (July 16, 2018)

  I wrote this coda on July 16, 2018, the morning that Trump emerged from his private meeting with Vladimir Putin and shocked the world (even if he didn’t surprise most of us) with his overt deference to the latter:

  Once upon a time a man made a pact. He would be king of the world, or would appear to be, but only by letting a menacing man be king of him, a king who held all his secrets and records and could unmake him at any moment. He lorded and gloated and boasted and swam downstream in his own greasy self-regard until it was time to meet his maker, and in a private session his maker fixed him with a glittering eye and reminded him what was what and who owned him, and where the bodies were buried. They were buried in an open grave, and the grave itself grinned up at him, showing its pearly gravestone-teeth.

  He came out of that room knowing that to be the king of everything but himself was to be no king at all but someone’s pawn, and at that moment his leash felt very short and his collar very tight and his lordliness a mockery. He was sad and miserable and cowed, and crawled out of the chamber, and his usually whining, preening, shouting voice was defeated and flat and fearful. His king looked on him balefully, indulgently, smiling like a cat looking at its kill, and none of the monsters in the name of Jesus around him had ever thought to ask him at any crucial juncture what profiteth a man if he gains the whole world but sells his soul to someone who might come collecting in this lifetime?

  His followers turned away—scurried away to denounce him—for he had not gone anywhere new, but the world now saw that he had gone too far into the trap of the Cheshire cat grinning next to him, and they no longer dared be there with him or deny that it was a trap. That was a day that ended his era and began a new one, the one of his downfall that would be as dramatic and strange and unforeseen as his rise. That was a day his followers made statements that were new traps, traps to prevent them from going back to their old lies to exculpate him, and they began to try to wash themselves of his crimes, but the stains were who they were. They were trying to wash themselves of themselves. But the servants and former servants of the government he more or less headed—the people of his administration he had insulted again and again when they told the truth of what he lost that he might win his office—rose up and condemned him, one after the other, as a traitor, a liar, a fool, a saboteur of everything he was supposed to shepherd.

  Something changed that day, a shift that was as huge and tangible as it was incalculable. Or perhaps it would be calculable when the histories of the next few years were written, but on that day they could hardly be imagined.

  Milestones in Misogyny*

  (2016)

  Women told me they had flashbacks to hideous episodes in their past after the second presidential debate on October 9, 2016, or couldn’t sleep, or had nightmares. The words in that debate mattered, as did their delivery. Donald Trump interrupted Hillary Clinton eighteen times (compared to fifty-one interruptions in the first debate). His reply to moderator Anderson Cooper’s question about the videotaped boasts, released a few days earlier, of his grabbing women “by the pussy,” was this: “But it’s locker room talk, and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of ISIS… And we should get on to much more important things and much bigger things.” Then he promised to “make America safe again”—but not from him. That week, women and ISIS were informally paired, as things Trump promised to assault.

  But words were secondary to actions. Trump roamed, loomed, glowered, snarled, and appeared to copulate with his podium, grasping it with both hands and swaying his hips, seeming briefly lost in reverie. The menace was so dramatic, so Hitchcockian, that the Hollywood composer Danny Elfman wrote a soundtrack for a video edit that played up the most ominous moments. “Watching Trump lurching behind Hillary during the debate felt a bit like a zombie movie,” Elfman said. “Like at any moment he was going to attack her, rip off her head, and eat her brains.” Friends told me they thought he might assault her; I thought it possible myself as I watched him roam and rage. He was, as we sometimes say, in her space, and her ability to remain calm and on-message seemed heroic. Like many men throughout the election, he appeared to be outraged that she was in it. The election, that is. And her space.

  In the ninety-minute debate, Trump lurched around the stage, gaslighting, discrediting, interrupting, often to insist that Clinton was lying or just to drown out her words and her voice; sexually shaming (this was the debate in which he tried to find room in his family box for three women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment or assault); and threatening to throw her in prison. Earlier in the campaign he’d urged his supporters to shoot her. “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish the Second Amendment,” he rumbled at one of his rage-inciting rallies, following a patent untruth with a casual threat: “By the way, if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.” At the Republican Convention, former New Jersey governor Chris Christie led chants of “Lock her up!” In the spring, Trump retweeted a supporter who asked: “If Hillary Clinton can’t satisfy her husband what makes her think she can satisfy America?” Perhaps the president is married to the nation in some mystical way; if so, America was about to become a battered woman, badgered, lied to, threatened, gaslighted, betrayed, and robbed by a grifter.

  Trump is patriarchy unbuttoned, paunchy, in a baggy suit, with his hair oozing and his lips flapping and his face squinching into clownish expressions of mockery and rage and self-congratulation. He picked as a running mate buttoned-up patriarchy, the lean, crop-haired, perpetually tense Mike Pence, who actually has experience in government, signing eight antiabortion bills in his four years as governor of Indiana, and going after Planned Parenthood the way Trump went after hapless beauty queens. The Republican platform was, as usual, keen to gut reproductive rights and pretty much any rights that appertained to people who weren’t straight, or male, or white.

  Misogyny was everywhere. It came from the right and the left, and Clinton was its bull’s-eye, but it spilled over to women across the political spectrum. Early on, some of Trump’s fury focused on the Fox presenter Megyn Kelly, who had questioned him about his derogatory comments on some women’s appearances. He made the bizarre statement on CNN that “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.” He also denigrated his opponents’ wives and Republican primary opponent Carly Fiorina’s face; in a flurry of middle-of-the-night tweets he obligingly attacked Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe, after Clinton baited him about his treatment of Machado; he attacked the women who, after the “grab them by the pussy” tape was released, accused him of having assaulted them.

  Trump’s surrogates and key supporters constituted a sort of misogyny army—or as Star Jones, a former host of The View, put it, “Newt Gingrich, Giuliani, and Chris Christie: they’ve got like the trifecta of misogyny.” The army included Steve Bannon, who, as head of the alt-right site Breitbart News, hired Milo Yiannopoulos and helped merge the misogynistic fury of the men’s rights movement with white supremacy and anti-Semitism to form a new cabal of far-right fury. Roger Ailes—following his dismissal from Fox News in July 2016, after more than two dozen women testified about his decades-long sexual harassment, grotesque degradation, and exploitation of his fe
male employees—became Trump’s debate coach, though they soon fell out; some reports said Ailes was frustrated by Trump’s inability to concentrate. Fox anchor Andrea Tantaros claimed that, under Ailes, Fox was “a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion–like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency, and misogyny.” It seems telling that the rise of the far right and the fall of truthful news were, to a meaningful extent, engineered by a television network that was also a miserable one-man brothel. But that old right-wing men are misogynists is about as surprising as that alligators bite.

  Clinton was constantly berated for qualities rarely mentioned in male politicians, including ambition—something, it’s safe to assume, she has in common with everyone who ever ran for elected office. It was possible, according to a headline in Psychology Today, that she was “pathologically ambitious.” She was criticized for having a voice. While Bernie Sanders railed and Trump screamed and snickered, Fox commentator Brit Hume complained about Clinton’s “sharp, lecturing tone,” which, he said, was “not so attractive”; MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell gave her public instructions on how to use a microphone; Bob Woodward bitched that she was “screaming”; and Bob Cusack, the editor of the political newspaper the Hill, said, “When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses.” One could get the impression that a woman should campaign in a sultry whisper, but, of course, if she did that she would not project power. But if she did project power she would fail as a woman, since power, in this framework, is a male prerogative, which is to say that the setup was not intended to include women.