Organized by the Third Space Network, the next Raw of Humanity Rising online public dialogue: Real vs Fake takes place Wednesday September 2, 6-7:30pm. Register and access the event. The panel addresses the political impact of the conflation between fact and fiction on Covid-19 during the run-up to the 2020 presidential election: with Tina La Porta, Douglas Rushkoff, John Sipher, moderated by Randall Packer. Co-hosted by the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center.
In the era of TRUMPology, it turn out that the essential substance of the phenomenon isn’t populism or ideology or even authoritarianism, it is the suspension of disbelief (and beyond), through performance, illusion, simulation, smoke & mirrors. TRUMPology is a state of mind, a spell cast over the land of The Deplorables, a place we call, in its total detachment from reason and logic: the post reality.
TRUMPology has demonstrated that you can assert an iron hold on a political coalition through a constructed reality, even when chaos, destruction and death indicates otherwise. You can issue seemingly sweeping executive orders and proclamations that have no basis in the real; you can take credit for actual policy that came from past Administrations and pretend they are yours; you can ignite culture wars over fabricated issues while real catastrophes are killing people left and right; and in the post reality, you can propagate conspiracy theories and other made-up stuff that support the false narratives you are perpetuating across the land.
TRUMPology is particularly seductive to Republicans who have been so marginalized that the only possible win they can attain is by a President who, in the post reality, always wins, where everything in the Republican world is Great, and where everything outside of the marginalized bubble of right-wing infotainment is demonized. In the post reality, TRUMP has replaced the Affordable Care Act, he has saved millions of manufacturing jobs, he has remade our trade relationship with China, he has rooted out corruption, drained the swamp, deconstructed the deep state, and removed pedophiles from the upper reaches of the federal bureaucracy. He has exposed the fake liberal media, the enemy of the people, and used the office of the Presidency to once and for all challenge the arrogant elites who propagate false scientific theories about climate change and Covid-19.
The lesson we can take from the era of TRUMPology, is that, in the post reality, so long as you believe, so long as you don’t question, so long as you don’t critique unfolding apocalyptic conditions crashing all around, you will win, win, win. On a promise to be remolded in the vision of TRUMPology, you will be freed from the false promises of democracy and fairness, you can trumpet victories greater than Reagan, Lincoln, or even George Washington, and you can exist in a dream-like fantasy state of suspended simulation, a place that is far, far, far beyond the suspension of disbelief: the post reality.
(This essay was in part an appropriation and remix of Win or Lose, TRUMP Will Hold Power Over the G.O.P. by NY Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat)
Organized by the Third Space Network, the next Raw of Humanity Rising online public dialogue: Real vs Fake takes place Wednesday September 2, 6-7:30pm. Register and access the event. The panel addresses the political impact of the conflation between fact and fiction on Covid-19 during the run-up to the 2020 presidential election: with Tina La Porta, Douglas Rushkoff, John Sipher, moderated by Randall Packer. Co-hosted by the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center.