avatarBenjamin Cain

Summary

The article compares Donald Trump to the Pied Piper, suggesting his ability to charm and manipulate his followers is akin to a superpower, while critiquing the Democratic Party's inability to counteract his influence with a compelling narrative of their own.

Abstract

The author of the article draws a parallel between Donald Trump and the Pied Piper, a figure from European folklore known for using enchanting music to lead rats and children away. Trump's "siren song" is depicted as his unmatched skill in deception, which has captivated a significant portion of the American electorate. Despite his controversial presidency, Trump's hold on his supporters remains strong, illustrating a codependent relationship akin to a shared delusion or "folie à deux." The article posits that Trump's success lies in his shameless willingness to lie and manipulate, honed over a lifetime. In contrast, the Democratic Party is portrayed as lacking a mesmerizing counter-narrative, partly due to their commitment to Enlightenment values of reason and individual liberty, which may prevent them from engaging in the same level of myth-making and emotional appeal as Trump.

Opinions

  • Trump's political success is attributed to his exceptional talent for manipulation and deceit, likened to the magical allure of the Pied Piper.
  • The relationship between Trump and his supporters is seen as a codependent "folie à deux," where both parties reinforce each other's fantasies and grievances.
  • The article suggests that Trump's appeal to far-right groups and Evangelical Christians is a marriage of convenience, with both parties exploiting each other for their own ends.
  • The Democratic Party is criticized for its inability to craft a compelling mythos or vision to counteract Trump's influence, which is partly due to their adherence to rational discourse and the marketplace of ideas.
  • The author implies that the Democrats' technocratic approach to politics hinders their ability to engage in the kind of emotive storytelling that resonates with a broad segment of the population.
  • The article hints at a need for a Democratic counter-narrative that can break the spell of Trumpism, although it remains skeptical about the party's capacity to produce such a narrative given its current ideological commitments.

Trump’s Superpower and the Tragedy of the Pied Piper

And how Democrats have no opposing spell to compete with him

Photo by Gage Skidmore, on Flickr

Does Donald Trump ever remind you of the pied piper, of that famed rat catcher from European folklore?

The pied piper was a player of irresistible music, which he used to charm the rats that carried the Plague in Europe, leading them out of town. But when the town of Hamelin refused to pay for his service as promised, the piper punished the townsfolk by switching to luring their children with his song, and in some versions of the story he hypnotized and drowned them along with the rats. He was called the “pied” piper because his outfit was clownish and piebald.

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

America’s Pied Piper

Trump’s siren song is his unparalleled con artistry. Half of voting America fell under his spell in 2016, and his song’s hypnotic effect persisted despite four years of President Trump’s overt clownishness in office. What’s more is that the other half of the country that despises Trump demonstrates the intensity of its hatred by gobbling up the slightest news of this supervillain that it, too, is under his spell.

It’s an imperfect analogy since whereas the pied piper is a stickler for fair dealings, Trump is infamous for stiffing his business partners. But the pied piper story can be read as a warning about the danger of flagrant demagoguery.

The inexplicable catastrophe of the Plague made the people desperate for magical solutions, and while the state of twenty-first-century America is nowhere near as dire as that of the kingdoms that were afflicted with the Black Death, modern progress has raised expectations so that spoiled folks can feel miserable even about petty grievances. These “First World problems” can drive folks to seek the aid of snake oil salesmen, televangelists, and populist rabble-rousers.

Most tellingly, the metaphor of hypnotic music suggests a codependent relationship between the piper and his victims. We can imagine the pied piper dancing along with the children and enjoying the tune as he charms his victims to their doom, although the piper must be immune to its charms.

Image by bianca-stock-photos from Pixabay

The GOP’s folie à deux

Certainly, Trump and his cultists are codependent to the point of having forged a mass folie à deux. By trashing the country’s political norms and promising to sabotage its institutions from within, Trump enables his cultists’ fantasy of taking revenge against the “establishment,” the “deep state,” and the “liberal elites.” The cultists revere Trump as their God-given savior, as a miraculous vessel of divine wrath since Trump’s palpable mental disorders immunize him to further corruption by Washington. Trump’s already maximally corrupted so he can serve as an instrument of chaos, which is just what these aggrieved citizens think they want.

And the charming goes both ways since these supporters’ absolute loyalty fuels Trump’s narcissism. All his life Trump fostered a bogus image of himself, as he pretended to be a successful, self-made businessman even though his father backstopped all his ventures and funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into his accounts to avoid paying taxes. Moreover, Trump’s ill-gotten success was always at the mercy of the IRS and of the two-tiered judicial system, which prefers to give upper-class wrongdoers a pass rather than tangle with their army of lawyers.

Reportedly, Trump’s true genius was never in making real estate deals or in entertainment or politics. His gift that he deployed in those arenas was always his cunning, shameless con artistry, or what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt called “bullshitting.” That is, Trump’s “talent” was just the witch’s brew of his mental disorders, such as his narcissism which makes him ruthless and unscrupulous in all his social dealings. Specifically, Trump can lie on a permanent basis, both to himself and to everyone he encounters, and feel no remorse.

In business, entertainment, politics, and cults, that’s a superpower.

There’s a meme that says you can master any subject if you spend 10,000 hours practicing it. Even if that’s a myth, it stands to reason that the more you practice some skill, the more you hone your ability. So, if you’re not restrained by conscience or by the liberal principle that you ought to protect your intellectual integrity, and if you’re therefore prepared to lie literally many hundreds of times every single day over a long lifetime, you’ll likely have mastered the art of lying to get what you want. That’s precisely how Donald Trump charmed his way into the White House.

As many have pointed out, Trump is transactional, not ideological. His narcissism prevents him from caring about ideas, logic, or the truth, and he acts solely to aggrandize himself. Thus, he makes “deals” with whomever is willing to flatter or serve him.

For example, the reason Trump defends the far right and insinuated that some of those torch-bearing white supremacists at Charlottesville are “very fine people” is just that the country’s more upstanding citizens are repulsed by him, so he has nowhere left to go for admirers. Just as most banks turn him down, knowing he’s ready to go bankrupt to avoid paying his debts, Trump has had to settle for adoring fans from sectors of the population that have nothing to lose or that want to exploit Trump’s disorders in turn.

That’s what the racists and Evangelical Christians are doing. They aim to exploit Trump, just as Trump exploits them to obtain the only thing he cares about: the aggrandizement of himself. They attend his rallies, cheer him on, and threaten the GOP establishment on his behalf, so Trump defends them.

And that’s one side of the GOP’s folie à deux, the other being that by exacerbating the country’s polarization, Trump’s leading the country to its downfall, wasting its time with hallucinatory discourses while autocracies like China, India, Iran, and Russia forge ahead.

Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay

What’s the opposing tune?

When the pied piper leaves the townsfolk bereft of their children, just as Trump has captivated those who are most vulnerable to siren songs, what are the remaining adults to do? Even if they should find their children alive, might they not face the obstacle of having to deprogram them?

Likewise, the liberal fantasy of being one day rid of Donald Trump as a figure of national interest runs up against the fact that Trump was never alone in this performance. He sang a tune, and tens of millions of voters danced to it. This is a folie à deux, a shared, codependent delusion.

Even with Trump gone, his millions of loyalists would still be under his spell. The idea of Trump, Trumpism, or the autocratic fantasy of “owning the libs,” matters more than the mere man. What matters is the havoc that some such trolling demagogue could wreak on the national stage for the aggrieved, spoiled people’s amusement, and even if no one could match Trump’s dark artistry, a free country is never short of conning demagogues to fulfill this sordid demand.

Those who were less affected by Trump’s superpower would face the task of crafting a counter-tune, a less self-destructive myth for enchanting the masses. And that’s just what Democrats couldn’t do even if their life depended on it.

Partly, that’s because liberals aren’t so cynical; on the contrary, they trust in the godlike powers of personhood, including everyone’s ability to reason their way out of problems. But that’s to say that liberals are beholden to the Enlightenment myth that charms us into thinking we deserve to enslave nature and that we know what we’re doing with our economic growth and technological advances.

Another reason for the one-sidedness of this wizardry is that liberals believe in the individual’s liberties, so they expect everyone to figure out life’s mysteries for themselves. In a liberal society, we’re free to go our separate ways and we let the best ideas win. Yet that trust in the salutary effects of an open marketplace of ideas was known, since the dawn of Western civilization in ancient Greece, to empower demagogic parasites who abuse those freedoms and exploit average folks’ cognitive weaknesses to sell their snake oil.

Finally, as I explain elsewhere, the problem is also that Democrats are hoisted by their petard: as enthusiastic guardians of “modern,” free-thinking, scientifically powered progress, these liberals uphold the prospect of social progress by treating politics like science or technology. Just as the latter can evidently progress, society at large is supposed to advance. Thus, Democrats must maintain their technocratic brand, so conjuring a mythic vision of what the country’s mission ought to be seems counterproductive to them.

Democrats may be adept at manipulating their constituents with the relatively cheap sophistries of “public relations.” They have no fear of appearing inauthentic as they adopt their stilted, market-researched talking points because they’re not trying to be messianic. (True, Barack Obama was something of a recent exception since his message of “change” focussed on the seeming miracle of electing a dark-skinned person as president of a country that used to enslave Africans. In any case, Obama was quick to govern as a “no-drama,” centrist technocrat, so his spell wore off.)

It may take a counter-messiah, though, to undo the Trumpian spell that was cast over the Republican Party’s base of supporters. Yet for the above reasons, it’s doubtful a genuine visionary could ascend to power in the Democratic Party.

I collect my Medium writings in paperback and eBook forms, and I put them up on Amazon. Check them out if you’d like to have them handy and to support my writing in that way. The newest one is Questing for Epiphanies in a Haunted House, and its 600 pages include 99 recent, wide-ranging articles of mine.

Donald Trump
Politics
America
Society
Conservatives
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