Jake Greear — Suicidal Tendencies: Trump and the Rise of the “F#*k it All” Republicans

Jake Greear
Johns Hopkins University

Before the current political cycle no one could have predicted the rise of Donald Trump the candidate. Not with any certainty. But now, with the primary endgame looming, no one can deny its importance. What accounts for his surprising success? We hear that he is tapping into the frustrations and fears of the working class in economic decline. But it isn’t as if Trump is the first candidate to try to speak to a falling lower middle class.

The current narrative attributes his success to his status as an “outsider” who “tells it like it is.” American political institutions are suffering from a great crisis of public confidence. Insiders are out, and the financial independence of Trump’s campaign plays into the “outsider” narrative. Most candidates are dependent upon donors, and therefore upon allies. Trump’s obscene wealth means he needs no donors. He needs none of his peers on his side. Good thing for him, because he has few. Trumps Id-driven rhetoric plays well with spectators, but not with friends. And as famous people often attest, at the end of the day fans are no substitute for friends. Bullies frequently act from a place of friendlessness, not just because meanness arises from an emptiness of the heart, but also because of the simple calculus of having little to lose by playing the ass. So, there is some explanatory power in the “Trump the outsider” storyline. 

An additional explanation is that Trump is tapping into the repressed “dark underbelly” of the republican mind--i.e. white racism. This is true, and of course it is enabled by his outsider status, for the reasons just mentioned. Given his bald-faced bigotry and unapologetic fascistic tendencies, it is painful to see Trump given even the dignity of a Sunday talk show, much less a podium on a national debate stage. However, while this is a particularly foreboding aspect of Trumpism, it too is only a partial explanation.

Trump’s rise has something to say about the politics of wealth, media, and demagoguery. It also has something important to say about just how far we have not come since segregation. But what these story-lines miss is the suicidal nihilism that sits alongside xenophobia at the heart of the Trump movement. 

The nation is experiencing a certain kind of economic decline, but most of the voters supporting Trump are not starving and homeless. They are not even altogether jobless. They are more likely to be trapped in low-income jobs or chronically underemployed. They’ve seen a long, slow decline in real wages, quality of life, job security, and meaningful career opportunities. The truly destitute might demand answers, ideologies. But Trump supporters require no such things. They are done with all of that. Over the last two decades the GOP has taken them there and back again to no effect. They’ve tried the purest strains of imperialism, libertarianism, Christian fundamentalism, Constitutionalism. But the slow motion deflation of the American dream continues apace, and it seems ideological fervor has now given way to suicidal tendencies. 

A kind of suicide, I believe, is what is on the minds of a significant contingent of Trump fans. Many express no loftier motivation than to simply watch it all burn. This is a new brand of Republicanism, born of the pessimism of majoritarians. A post-conservative non-ideology that has been festering on mouldering couches in basement apartments. The Trump movement is harboring the overfed manchild of the Republican party, and the prospect of a Trump Presidency is his idle fantasy of going out in a blaze of glory. Burn the Republican party. Wreck the establishment. To hell with the Constitution. To hell with the republic itself. What we are seeing is the rise of fuck-it-all Republicanism. We should not underestimate its appeal. And we should be little surprised if we find some crossover Democrats among its ranks. 

The Democratic nominee will be tempted to attack trump for his bigotry, his bullying, his fabrications, his disastrous half-baked policy suggestions, or his debasement of what little dignity is left in public service. Democrats should advance on these fronts if only to defend decency in the public sphere. But shaming Trump will not work as a campaign strategy. The most effective strategy will be to saddle Trump with the cowardice and pessimism that actually undergirds the destructive nihilism he is feeding upon. In some cases suicidal individuals experience a period of relative elation after they finally decide upon death. A similar phenomenon seems to hold for the collective, spectacular suicide of a republic. But suicide here is a cowards way out, as those bent on it surely know. We should not mistake the death-driven glee of Trump’s timid nihilists for true joyfulness. 

True joi-de-vivre is the only antidote to this strain of sadness. “Hope” will not be enough. And Hillary’s johnny-come-lately “make America whole” (again?) tagline is too remedial, too backward looking. I worry about a possible Trump candidacy not because the numbers are on his side. They’re not, yet. I worry because I am not sure the Democratic candidate will be able to conjure up the vigorous, courageous, outgoing, future-oriented optimism that is needed to counter Trump. Without it we may be surprised again by Trump’s effectiveness.

Hydrofracking and Home Rule

Jake Greear

Johns Hopkins University

With world leaders failing to make headway toward curbing carbon emissions at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, and quietly throwing up their hands at this summer’s Rio +20 Summit, it may be time for environmentalists to focus energies on the dispersed global sites of fossil fuel extraction.  To that extent, the political battles now playing out in the Northeastern U.S. over the natural gas extraction process called hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a. “fracking,” merit attention. 

As energy companies run up against the political and natural limits of petroleum and coal exploitation they are turning to increasingly outlandish means to tap alternative fossil fuel deposits like tar-sands--where extraction means scraping the living surface off vast swaths of Canada--and the natural gas held in the Marcellus Shale under the northern Appalachian Mountains--where extraction means shattering billion-year-old rock formations that undergird the North American continent.  

Paul Thomas Anderson’s film There Will be Blood poignantly dramatized the violence inherent in fossil fuel extraction.  However, the sites of large scale hydrocarbon extraction are often either sparsely populated or inhabited by communities with few means of resisting the insults and injuries that are the usual local byproducts of extractive industries.  Most consumers of fossil fuels live a world away from their strip mines and oil fields.  

The Alberta tar sands are an example.  The construction of pipelines needed to carry tar sands oil to markets has been stalled for now, but the oil companies are not really worried.  They will get the oil out one way or the other.  The fortunate thing, from the industry’s perspective, is that not many people live in northern Alberta, so there is relatively little opposition in defense of the forests and rivers that are being destroyed there.  

The Marcellus Shale formation, by contrast, runs under densely populated parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York.  The directional striations of the shale dictate the topological terms of methane extraction.  The industry sees the entire area divided into a staggered checkerboard of 1/2 x 2 mile quadrants oriented north-northwest, with a gas well in each one.  But to achieve this ideal energy companies must contend intensively with innumerable landowners and residents.

For many people living on the Marcellus Shale the revenues from gas extraction offer a way to ride out tough times on family farms that are obsolete by agribusiness standards.  But the opposition movement that has grown throughout the region voices serious concerns about quality of life, environmental health, and safety.  And in the ensuing political discussion bigger-picture issues like energy security, economic sustainability, and global warming have also become part of the conversation.  

In New York state particularly, fracking has come to the forefront of local politics in many municipalities.  Corporations long ago began haggling with willing landowners for drilling leases.  However, they have not yet been cleared at the state level to frack New York, and while they wait for the state’s go-ahead several townships have moved to protect the neighbors who stand to be fracked against their will, adopting ordinances ban fracking locally.  Although these efforts have met legal challenge, local anti-fracking ordinances have so far been upheld. 

The opacity inherent in the fracking process has served to stoke an already heated controversy.  First there is the fracking fluid injected underground in massive quantities.  It is known to be toxic, but the contents are protected as trade secrets.  Then there is the opacity of the earth itself.  Seismic imaging, lab tests, and trial and error tell us something about what is happening in the fracking process, but there is a limit to what we can know about the deep earth. No one has ever been down in a fracking well--they are six inches across and miles deep.  Like many other amazing technological feats, fracking remains an art even though it is served by science.  And because it is an art there cannot be any guarantees of ecological safety.  As with deep water oil drilling, no number of government inspectors will eliminate the extra-ordinary risks to lives, places, and ecosystems that an undertaking of this scale and technological complexity poses.

What we do know is that the earth is a big, complex thing full of surprises.  Paleo-ecology tells us that our particular world is characterized by both resilience and fragility--prone to tipping points, feedback mechanisms, and emergent phenomena that are not predictable.  Fracking is an amazing and ingenious technology that can do big things, like releasing a planetary amount of methane from the earth’s crust.  But the problem with doing big amazing things is that other amazing earth-scale events can be unintentionally triggered.

So far the unintended consequences appear to be relatively localized--methane gueyser eruptions, man-made earthquakes, poisoned waterways, and a few polluted aquifers.  Of course, few of these phenomena can be linked with certainty to fracking--once again, due to the opacity and complexity of the process.  Corporate representatives use this opacity to industry advantage as “merchants of doubt” painting themselves as practical and reasonable--“just show us the proof?!”--while slick TV ads promise “clean burning natural gas” is the “transition fuel” that will usher in a green-energy economy... any decade now!  The lie by omission is that the methane that necessarily escapes during the extraction process is many times more potent than other greenhouse gasses.

The fragile bulwark that some New York townships have erected against this well-lobbied industry draws upon the strong political tradition of “home rule” in the Northeastern states.  Home rule is the decentralizing political principal within a federal system, giving local municipalities the right to institute any statutes not prohibited or superseded by higher levels of government.  

There are voices on both sides who oppose New York’s adventures in ecological home rule.  Some claim this issue is too complex and important to be left up to town councils.  And of course whenever fracking is ruled on locally--either to permit or to ban--there will be a minority who feel strongly that their rights have been trampled upon.  Moreover, some fracking opponents even worry that while each local anti-fracking ordinance seems like a grassroots victory for the cause, deference to home rule may give Governor Cuomo just the political cover he needs to give fracking a foothold in those townships that approve it.  And yet, at a time when corporate money is bathing the machinery of the republic like never before, technocratic centralization is itself a suspect principle for environmental politics.  

So whither ecological home rule?  History tells us local direct democracy is no political panacea.  Democracy can eat itself at any level.  However, the fact that townships in the Northeastern states are taking a hard look at fracking is promising, whatever comes of it, if only because it has brought some of the complex political and ethical issues inherent in fossil fuel extraction home to many U.S. citizens as citizens.  An active citizenry with a taste for the complexity of ecological politics is what we need most if the worlds leading carbon economy is to become an ecologically responsible representative democracy.