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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsHow Do We Cope With Trump? By Andrew Sullivan
February 23, 2018
8:58 am
There are times when I genuinely wonder whether I can hold up psychologically in our current politics and culture. My shrink tells me I am far from alone in this, and that everyone she listens to is consumed with a depression that swings from despair to rage to what can only be called learned helplessness. There are moments when everything I have come to believe in reasoned deliberation, mutual toleration, liberal democracy, free speech, honesty, decency, and moderation seem as if they are in eclipse. Emotionalism, tribalism, intolerance, lies, cruelty, and extremism surround us (and I have not been immune in this climate to their temptations either). Trump has turned the right into a foul, spit-flecked froth of racist reactionism, and he has evoked a radical response on the left that, while completely understandable, alienates me and many others more profoundly with every passing day. Hell, there have been many moments in the past couple of years when I have alienated the better part of myself. There is something about the current toxicity that has seeped into everyone.
Trump himself seems hard to oppose without in some way mimicking him. Take the high road and you risk genteel irrelevance. Go down to Trumps level and you find yourself wrestling with a brawler whose indecency eventually defines you as well. (In some ways, the dynamics of the GOP primaries continue to this day.) And so the opposition party has found not a single spokesperson who can counter him in any compelling way, and, more to the point, it is constantly in danger of becoming simply a mirror image of the Trump right: based primarily on racial and gender identity, defined by rage, bent on revenge, and empowered by moral certainty. I will vote for a Democrat this fall and encourage everyone else to do so, because it is our only hope against accelerating authoritarianism. But Ill do so with the same kind of nausea that led me to support Hillary Clinton in 2016. I dont think there is a way out of this cycle of tribalism in the foreseeable future, given Trumps inexhaustible capacity to fuel it every minute of the day. Radicalization is a dynamic process. It can occur rapidly. I feel it in my own gut, if not my own head. In the end, it will consume all of us until some kind of catastrophe wakes us from this fraught and intensifying nightmare.
And so I walk the dogs. And I meditate. And I smoke more weed in the evenings. And I browse the apps. And I find myself searching for figures outside this time and place who were in similar circumstances and yet kept their heads. You can never go wrong reading Orwell. But Im particularly drawn to W. H. Auden these days, not simply because of the transfixing wisdom and beauty of his poetry, but because of who he was, and how he led his life. I recommend two essays about him, one by Hannah Arendt in 1975 in The New Yorker and one by Edward Mendelson in The New York Review of Books. I stumbled upon both recently and am glad I did.
Auden is an antidote to Trump and to our times. He despised celebrity; he ran from fame and money; he never signaled his many virtues to anyone; in fact, he went to great lengths to hide them from view. Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Marks in-the-Bowery in New York, Mendelson recalls. She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again. He privately paid for the tuition of a succession of war orphans until his death; he made himself look like an asshole in demanding immediate payment for some work but only so he could quietly give the money to Dorothy Days homeless shelter in New York. Mendelson also recalls how I got a phone call from a Canadian burglar who told me he had come across Audens poems in a prison library and had begun a long correspondence in which Auden gave him an informal course in literature. Auden was especially pleased to get him started on Kafka. It turns out that there were countless such acts of quiet generosity.
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https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/02/andrew-sullivan-how-do-we-cope-with-trump.html
Glamrock
(11,802 posts)Crawl back under your rock Andy. Saving dreamers, defending healthcare, gun control, etc. You find this nauseating? I find you nauseating. Take your self righteousness and both siderism and cram em up your arse.
timber84
(2,876 posts)While Sullivan can always be counted on to load the drama in his pieces, he is 100% correct.
handmade34
(22,758 posts)some questionable passages towards the end of the essay but that is good writing...
cvoogt
(949 posts)he wants to go back when he could promote conservatism without consequence. Well, consequences happened and he should look in the mirror. He espouses moderation and toleration and that's good, but then why on earth does he still associate with the extremists?
fmdaddio
(192 posts)Oh! And how Andrew worshiped Reagan.
He still cannot see that Ronnie's racism and distain for a strong social safety net is no different than Trump's.
The only difference was Ronnie's was packaged so as to hide the ugly.
Charlie Pierce got it right, this all started with Reagan.
Though I agree with much of what Sullivan has written here it is infuriating how willfully blind he is
this.
Maybe the weed helps him sleep. Could use some myself but as a liberal living in Trumpville a.k.a. southwest Florida
my nearest contact is 800 miles away.
What is it that Sullivan thinks is so repulsive and about Clinton or other Democratic contenders he is intends to vote for?
Has he ever expanded on that?
First Speaker
(4,858 posts)...in the nightmare we find ourselves in. No, I hardly agree with every word in this essay. But he is exactly the sort of intelligent conservative that I've always wanted the GOP to be. If we had a sane polity, he'd be the respected Leader of the Opposition. His now-defunct blog was one of the most interesting spots on the web, and I miss it...