Lords of the Earth

Earlier this week, Politico ran a piece pooling the thoughts of various thinkers and commentators on the American scene, collectively responding to the question of what Donald Trump's presidency says about us as a group—that is, the people of this country. While a multitude of explanations were offered for the Trump phenomenon, my mom—when she read the article—thought that there was an even more fundamental factor at work to which no one had given due credit: she argued that Trump's raging, vengeance-fueled base—seemingly so unaccountable in light of the fact that they are not actually among the worst off, that they enjoy many relative advantages in American society—is motivated most of all by a sense of disappointed expectations. 

The generation that makes up the hardest kernel of the Trump movement, my mom observed, is neither the oldest nor the youngest of those still among us. They are the great middle—those born too late to inherit the memory of the Great Depression and the sense of relief in its aftermath; and born too early to understand the pervading sense of impending crisis that many people in their thirties, twenties and younger take for granted. Instead, they were raised on the expectations set off by an unprecedented and perhaps unrepeatable epoch of economic growth and transformative social change: the American mid-twentieth century. 

And my mom's point was that expectations in themselves are powerful things. Far more powerful, in their own way, than actual deprivation or reversal. Even if people's lives have improved over time; if they didn't improve fast enough, didn't meet their expectations, a crisis can still result. Then Trump comes along, and says exactly what they feel: things were supposed to be better than this—for them, at least. And he promises to "make America great again." As simple as that. Perhaps in looking for explanations, therefore, we need go no deeper than Trump's own blaring campaign slogan.

I was only half-sold on this analysis, when she presented it to me. In my own reading of the Politico piece, I felt most at home in the company of Francis Fukuyama, who just frankly confesses that the Trump phenomenon baffles him, and that he cannot as yet explain it. While there are many sources of potential resentment in our society, he observes, and many quite justified grievances, these factors are not enough to tell us why the crisis is coming now; why it has reached such an intensity of vitriol at this moment; nor why upset people would look toward Trump as a savior, when he is such a deeply flawed character (to understate matters rather considerably).

What particularly defies explanation, Fukuyama notes, is the elaborately fictitious and conspiratorial tone this whole school of far-right resentment has adopted. "There is a qualitative change in the nature of partisanship that conventional explanations fail to capture," Fukuyama writes, "reflected in poll data showing that a majority of Republican voters believe some version of QAnon theories about Democrats drinking children’s blood." This shift toward extremism seems almost impossible to account for on the basis of mere run-of-the-mill socio-cultural resentment. After all, why would they be more resentful now, when their party is in power? Thus I was prepared to side with Fukuyama in simply confessing my inability to understand it all. 

But it so happened, with the eerie sort of aptness that happens to me more and more often in my reading life these days (perhaps because I am primed to hunt up such analogies, for purposes of this blog—or perhaps because I've become better at selecting reading material that subtly fits the mood of the times), that I've been reading Saul Bellow's The Victim this weekend, and the book seemed to speak out forcefully in favor of my mom's hypothesis. 

Bellow's short novel—his second to be published—depicts an encounter between a modestly-successful Jewish publishing-house employee, Asa Leventhal, and a disgruntled WASP acquaintance, Kirby Allbee, who has fallen from grace. Though Leventhal has not seen the man in years and barely remembers him, he is horrified to discover that Allbee has constructed a version of events in which Leventhal was the reason for his problems. Years before, Allbee had introduced Leventhal to his employer. When the former made a bad impression and lost his temper during the meeting, Allbee was blamed and fired for it. From this event, he traced his troubles with alcoholism, unemployment, and his eventual separation from his wife. As a result, he begins hounding Leventhal, seeking to work upon his sense of guilt. 

The novel is primarily therefore a study of harassment, stalking, and emotional manipulation—of the way in which Allbee is able to insinuate himself into the life of an innocent man, and eventually to convince him that he bears responsibility for events over which he had no control. Leventhal is vulnerable to these tactics because he is plagued by his own sense of having succeeded without merit: of having "gotten away with" his own past mistakes. When he confronts Allbee, therefore, he cannot help but think, "there but for the grace of god...." And because he is half-ashamed of his own success, he allows himself to be persuaded he owes something to Allbee: something of his own happiness. Thus, as the novel goes on, he allows Allbee to presume ever more boldly upon his hospitality and good-nature. 

The book is about something else too, however: the psychology of scapegoating, particularly in its antisemitic form. Allbee, after all, not only blames and despises Leventhal: he also cannot tear himself away from him. In the relationship between the two men, there develops a twisted form of dependence and even affection, which—it is eventually disclosed—stems from Allbee's underlying antisemitic hobbyhorse. He becomes convinced, that is, not only that Leventhal has been the cause of all his troubles; but that Leventhal therefore is the only one capable of getting him out. He projects onto Leventhal both his fears and his hopes; mirroring the mixed repudiation and envy that nearly always characterizes the dialectical psyche of the antisemite. 

In the course of Bellow's novel, this implicit theme of their relationship eventually comes out into the open. We discover that Allbee sees Leventhal's past actions not only as a personal act of sabotage, but as a kind of racial conspiracy. Leventhal sought to get him fired in order to avenge his honor against a gentile, in Allbee's warped conception. And thus, when Allbee decides to try to turn over a new leaf, his obsession leads him to think that the same conspiracy is the only thing that can offer him a way out. He asks Leventhal to find him an interview with a Jewish film producer of his acquaintance, hinting none-too-subtly that Leventhal must has connections and sway with such a person. (Leventhal, of course, does not.)

Allbee's resentment in all this—Bellow makes clear—stems not only from his sense of failure. It is fueled even more by his belief that he was destined for greater things—by reason of birth. He was taught that the country was made for people of his family and "background," and he is haunted by the sense that others are now getting ahead in the same places where he is slipping. "When I was born, when I was a boy, everything was different," he laments, in his usual histrionic mode. "We thought it would be daylight forever." Or, as he says later in the novel, "When I was younger I had my whole life laid out in my mind. I planned what it was going to be like on the assumption that I came out of the lords of the earth."

This child of light was assured he had waiting for him a place in the sun. But when he discovers that these expectations are not enough to save him from the specter of failure, he becomes consumed with the idea that he is being "replaced" (as the current white nationalist/Neo-Nazi slogan puts it). "The world's changed hands," cries Allbee in a later scene. "I'm like the Indian who sees a train running over the prairie where the buffalo used to roam. Well, now that the buffalo have disappeared, I want to get off the pony and be a conductor." His idea of linking up with the "train" is then to ask Leventhal to put him in touch with the film director. The implication is clear. In the novel's closing scene, Leventhal asks him, "Wait a minute, what's your idea of who runs things?" But by this point, the reader and Leventhal both know the answer. 

Here is where we start to see the connection to our present political troubles. It is not at all difficult to imagine such a person as Allbee, who believes he was destined to inherit the earth, but that something misfired in execution, being drawn to the siren call of "Make America great again." Nor is it hard to see that he would respond readily to Trump's brand of scapegoating—of immigrants, of Muslims, and, implicitly, of Jews. This antisemitic cast of the Trump movement—and its resonances with Allbee's pet fixations—is perhaps most visible in the QAnon conspiracy theories that Trump has used his social media platforms to promote, and which he publicly praised and refused to disavow during the notorious town-hall session on the campaign trail.

These conspiracy theories, like Allbee's misguided notions, also play upon people's resentments and sense of disappointed expectations by positing they are the work of a hidden cabal—a secretive group that is actually driving the train. And when we pose Leventhal's question ("Who do you think is running things?") to the QAnon people, we know to expect the same answer. The promulgators of these theories may have politely substituted the word "Democrats" in a few key places; but as soon as they start talking about George Soros they come closer to giving the game away. The structure of their elaborate conspiracy theory has been familiar for a long time—as charted by historian Michael Barkun and others—and the original template for it was of course the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the antisemtic hoax that birthed far-right conspiracism in its modern form. 

And as for Democrats drinking children's blood—the example of dangerous QAnon lunacy that Fukuyama gave above—or Hillary Clinton eating a baby, we know whence this trope originated as well: the medieval antisemitic "blood libel." "Democrats" is as much of a code word here as "lizard" is in David Icke's conspiracy theories; just as in the alt-right chant "You will not replace us"—so eerily reminiscent of Allbee's conception of history—there is no serious doubt as to who this "You" is supposed to be addressing. 

Racism and bigotry of course take many forms, and are erected on a variety of bogus foundations. It is interesting to see, however, how often antisemitism takes on these specific tropes: the conspiracy, the scapegoating. Time and again, Jews are made to bear the blame for everything that goes wrong in a gentile's life; for all the ills of Western civilization. 

It is this burden of unmerited guilt and accusation that Bellow is subtly analyzing in his novel; and which turns up time and again in our society. The poet Philip Levine, for instance, describes a scene from his childhood, in which a Christian friend accuses him of being a "Christ-killer." While we might expect Levine's younger self to be indignant at his friend's bigotry, he actually responds with a touching child-like internalization: sure that once more I was going to be blamed for what I had not done, Levine writes, or what I’d done but done without meaning to do[.]

This is Leventhal's plight, in the face of Allbee's misdirected blame—the outward projections of the disappointed WASP's self-loathing. Leventhal is forced to shoulder blame for things he never did, for events entirely out of his hands—the essence of scapegoating.

I am reminded of a scene in the 1985 documentary God's Country, directed by Louis Malle, in which the French filmmaker visits a depressed agricultural town in the American mid-West. He speaks to a farmer twice, at two ends of a years-long period during which the town entered a steep economic decline. And therefore, when he speaks to the man the second time around, the farmer has some legitimate concerns. He starts off with a run-down of very real and serious problems he and the other farmers are facing—overproduction and the resulting collapse of prices, for instance. 

Then, without the slightest change of expression or tone, the man veers off into antisemitic conspiracy. "I happen to agree that the Jewish people control much of our markets," he says. He proceeds to distance himself, however, from people whom he considers to be taking this concern a step too far—those who are "listening," as he puts it, "to this right-wing faction—and they're taking up arms." The farmer is as dead-pan in delivering this speech as he was in discussing prices. It is plain that to his mind one is as true and unremarkable as the other.

It would seem that not much has changed between 1985 and today. They had antisemitic QAnon-esque conspiracy theories back then, just as we have them now. There is, however, one crucial difference. In America in 2020, the conspiracy theories are being promoted by the White House, and it is the sitting U.S. president who is giving voice to the "right-wing faction" this man describes. 

The rhetorical and emotive appeal of conspiracy theories and scapegoating is easy enough to understand. It reduces complex and multi-causal social problems to a readily-identified and undivided source. It relieves us, as Kirby Allbee discovers in Bellow's book—of any haunting feeling of personal responsibility. And finally, it gives people a sense that there is meaning and purpose behind the way things shake out, as opposed to mere Heraclitean flux. At the end of Bellow's book, Leventhal decides that life was "a shuffle, all, all accidental and haphazard." Kirby, however, must persuade himself it is a plot that has been rigged against him; and which—by the same token—can therefore be manipulated to his advantage, which he seeks to do through the person of Leventhal. 

Leventhal correctly diagnoses in this the same misconception my mother spotted in Trump's supporters. The sense that they were implicitly promised something that the nation failed to deliver; and if they can't get at it, it must be because someone is withholding it from them. It must be because someone else—immigrants, Muslims, Jews, people of color—is taking their place. Leventhal's word on Allbee's mentality could therefore well stand as a summation of the entire Trump era—an account, to my mom's point, of the very thing Fukuyama felt he could not hope to explain:

"[T]he error," says Leventhal, "rose out of something very mysterious, namely, a conviction or illusion that at the start of life, and perhaps even before, a promise had been made [....] a ticket, a theater ticket. And with this ticket, a man [...] entitled to the best seat in the house, might cry out in rage to the usher who led him to the third balcony. And how many more disconsolately in the rain and snow, in the long line of those who could only expect to be turned away?" 

This is why it is no good telling the Trump supporter that in scapegoating minority groups, they are hurting people who were given even less of a chance than they were: who are even further back in the line. It is not about fairness. It is not about whether the whole structure of our society's "line" might be reformed in a more decent and equitable direction.  

It is about the fact that they were told from birth that they had a ticket for the best seats—that they, in Allbee's phrase—were to be lords of the earth. And here they are, having to settle for being merely more prosperous than others.