Homemade End Times and Our Charismatic Trance
DECEMBER 31, 2020
BY PAUL GILK
There’s a mystery buried inside an analysis. We might start this exploration by saying the Left doesn’t have a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity on its propaganda squad. (And propaganda may be less about taking over one’s thought process—slogans endlessly repeated can achieve that end—than it is the fine tuning of emotional tensions.)
Or, to perhaps make the analysis a bit more lucid, we have a mass political circumstance where the Right has charismatic personalities who constantly agitate its electoral base, while the Left has relatively obscure intellectuals—Noam Chomsky, Herbert Marcuse, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Ralph Nader, Naomi Klein, Howard Zinn, Paul Goodman, William Barber, Norman O. Brown—who only a scant intellectual Left knows of or cares about. The vast bulk of the “Left” treads water in a mental milieu of congressional leaders and other politicians. Plus the media. Some talking heads who rarely are given adequate time to deeply explore topics or circumstances. NPR. MSNBC. Maybe a little Democracy Now for the really daring.
The Left doesn’t have charismatic personalities with mass appeal who explain the state of the world and arouse a consistent political stance. If the Right is Daddy Party—and Donald J. Trump has put the good housekeeping seal of approval on that designation—then the NPRs of this world, with their discernible increase of female voices, constitute Mommy. Assertive female voices. Confident female voices. Here to stay female voices. But “Mommy” doesn’t cut it. This is not your 1950s Mommy. This is the Party of the Daughter.
To call the Right’s political personalities charismatic is not to bestow a blessing. There may be something primal about charisma, something upwelling from a powerful and essentially wholesome source; but that primal upwelling (there are philosophers of human nature who call it will) can also be channeled by reactionary fear with an amazing capacity to radiate alarm in the broadcast of its charisma. Rush Limbaugh may agitate fear—and, to some extent, he creates fear with constant contagious agitation—but Donald Trump radiates fear. It’s the source of his political magnetism. Male will encased in fear. Under siege. Under threat. Endless intrigue. Constant vigilance. Relentless pushback.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/31/homemade-end-times-and-our-charismatic-trance/
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