Donald Trump is a pusher: one who traffics in make-believe to support his own dependence. In this, he's genuine — a true slave to moonshine. Since his first term, his rare cabinet meetings have been ceremonies of ingratiation in which the participants take turns giving thanks for the blessing of so heroic a leader, not to say savior. This ritual, like the other gaudy trappings of Trump's egosphere, has gained in extravagance with his return to office.
All of us must dislike receiving flattery insofar as we recognize it for what it is. After all, flattery implies a low estimation of the recipient's intelligence. It's true that an intelligent tyrant might compel flattery in order to demonstrate the helplessness of those who must perform it, but that clearly is not the root of the matter with Donald Trump. The levels of his intelligence and his hunger for praise are too well established to leave any doubt about it. Flattery is his precious make-believe praise. He can sit and listen to it without distaste, and he can show that scene to the world without feeling that he's making a fool of himself. In the eyes of his most faithful supporters, he may be right; or at least in their mouths. However, it also may be that he's getting carried away — away, over the brink of the abyss — in this and his other aberrations combined.
Flattery holds danger for the one who swallows it. It contains no nutrients, only a false stimulant and an addictive flavor. Donald Trump is by no means the only addict.
A very long time ago, when I was just old enough to find myself moderating a panel discussion on a small radio station, I in fact did so. The panelists were university people, intellectuals of some local stature (maybe more; it was not a university to be sneezed at). I can't recall the subject of discussion. I remember only that it was some politicized question on which they all agreed, all picked up each other's cues and took turns developing a common theme. It drove me crazy. Eventually I heard my own voice talking back, offending sweet reason with impertinent skepticism verging on rudeness. I felt an irrepressible urge to open things up, even though the result would be a frigid void. So it was. When the broadcast ended, I witnessed an actual case of people leaving in what writers call a huff. Nevertheless, the incident passed without repercussions, and one slightly senior young man who had listened in vouchsafed me a verbal pat on the back tinged with awe. That was it. Such was the size of our audience.
The things said during that panel discussion didn't strike me as patently wrong. The offense was not wrongness, but complacency. The panelists, having recognized each other as kindred spirits, formed a little eddy whose rotating current of confirmation lifted all boats; or, rather, gave them all the appearance of going somewhere. This was generations ago, as the crow flies. It was an early vision of today's enclosed left-liberal habitat. Yet to come was the reactive, mocking revival of the already-mocked Stalinist phrase politically correct. Closer at hand was the dissidence of New Deal liberals repelled by the emerging leftist orthodoxy, who would go on to be scorned as neoconservatives by their old peers. Between then and now, the running improvisation of an orthodox path through history has engendered individual fear of straying, but also collective guidance by means of call-and-response between opinion leaders and followers combined with mutual confirmation within the vanguard. The most striking example of this is the way feminism was wrenched out of its own path.
Until the mid-2010s, feminism demanded respect for womanhood, for a life grounded in certain biological factors and formative experiences. This was its essence. For a while, it strategically minimized differences between the sexes to an extreme. It sometimes seemed to be the domain of confirmed bachelorettes. But it always presupposed a fully-formed female identity. Then the political terrain underwent an upheaval. The US Supreme Court affirmed the right to same-sex marriage, and the generously funded organizations that had campaigned for that outcome found themselves without a cause. They could thank their donors and fold their tents, or they could take up a new cause and continue in operation. They took up the cause of advocacy for people who had undergone a medical change of sex. (The idea of simply declaring a change had not dawned yet.) This new thing took the social-justice Left by storm. Specifically, "trans women" were to be recognized as women in every particular. After a brief period of confusion, women in the feminist vanguard saw how the land lay and capitulated as though they wouldn't have had it any other way. Individual feminists who disagreed were ostracized, and before long they became targets of positive abuse wherever the new sex-and-gender coalition could exert its influence. All unconforming opinion would thenceforth be slurred as transphobia, and everything on the trans-activist agenda would be dubbed trans rights. In the subsequent whirl of improvisation and confirmation among leading-edge progressives, gender became fluid. Sex ceased to be binary. And so, in political circles where heightened recognition of women had recently been a core tenet, the very word woman became problematic. Female identity was then dissected into a Frankensteinian vocabulary of body parts and functions that might or might not, at the end of the day, signify a woman. Progressives had stormed the patriarchal tower where Woman was held captive — and dragged her out by the hair.
Within the progressive biosphere, flattery is sustenance. The novel claims of some enterprising organism will be flattered as the essence of progress and made to flourish for a time, while other organisms donate their lifeblood to the cause. Charismatic young New York socialists will be flattered as harbingers of an America to come and celebrated as though they had already cast a spell over the future. Yes, that again. Within some biospheres, there is no evolution.
It can seem that the future belongs to progressives by definition. But take away the assumed name progressive, and the illusion of historical advantage disappears. The compass spins. There is, after all, no determinate future in which "progressives" as we know them are awaited by a brass band. What there is, is a present in which all political actors either face reality or court disaster. The case of Trumpworld is paramount. By comprehensively denying reality, it courts comprehensive disaster: the ruin of us all. The case of Leftworld is subordinate. It courts disaster for itself and, by extension, for the Democratic Party. That brings us back to Trumpworld.
