1/28/2025
[Draft: not for quotation or distribution, comments welcome]
In the weeks after the November election in the U.S., I was not ready yet to start thinking in detail about why so many Americans could vote for the candidate they did, much less how to fix the situation. I mostly just sat with the feelings: the knot in my stomach, lying awake at night with the anxiety, connecting to friends and loved ones just to find comfort in knowing they are still there.
“Misinformation” really doesn’t begin to describe the problem for me. When Trump supporters called Harris’s speeches “word salad,” yes, they’re getting that take from the right wing mediasphere, but the evidence of Trump’s truly incoherent speeches is still right there in the open. Something more is going on than the mere distribution of falsehoods and distortions.
There are things one feels in the belly first, before they can be attached to arguments, ideas, facts. The knots in our stomach matter.
I’ve felt knots in my stomach like this one a few times over the course of my life. The first time I was fired. Then a divorce. But also political moments. When Ronald Reagan saber-rattled nuclear weapons in the mid-1980s, threatening the world with annihilation for the sake of tough guy posturing. The morning of 9/11 when the second plane hit the tower. In each case, there was that sinking feeling.
For me, what these moments share is a painful realization that I’d been living according to beliefs, in my gut if not my mind, that don’t fit the world as it is, according to ways of being that don’t add up. When I was fired, when my wife announced she was leaving me, that morning of 9/11/2001, and Nov. 6 2024: what those moments share is the feeling that came from being forced to acknowledge that the world was in some measure profoundly different than I had wanted it to be.
Intellectually, I should not have been surprised. I knew that Trump had a good shot at winning the first time, and an even better one this time around. I’m a skeptical guy.
But it’s my gut, that sickening feeling when the world is not as I thought, not as I imagined it to be that I’m trying to listen to right now. (I know, I know: there are so many less privileged than me who have lived most of their lives feeling the pains of existence in a hostile world. I’m working towards that.)
I expect many on the conservative right have had their own versions of this knot-in-the-stomach political moment. When Barack Obama first won the White House, Glenn Beck reported that he kept pacing back and forth, repeating to himself, “this can’t be happening.” For many conservative evangelicals, there likely was a time when, say, Gay Pride parades must have left them with a knot in the stomach.
In the best cases, faced with knot-in-the-stomach moments, often we are able to slowly, sometimes painfully, and almost always with effort, reconstruct our sense of the world in a way that fits realities. The spouse leaving eventually becomes, over the course of years, something that we can make sense of. It’s no longer an incomprehensible tear in the fabric of reality. For many non-Gay people who were initially surprised by the movement, Gay pride became not so bad, normal, and then for many, joyful. This can take effort: we have to remap our sense of self and of the world and how they fit together. It’s a common experience.
But a realistic readjustment does not always come. There are things that are true that, for some people in some contexts, are just too hard to adjust to. I remember, as the US invasion of Iraq turned into a quagmire, a radio interview with a mother who had lost her son to the war. “He can’t have died in vain!” she plaintively told the interviewer. The fact is, her son had died in vain – there were no weapons of mass destruction, they did not “greet us with flowers” – but if I had been with her in the room at the time, I couldn’t have said that to her. There’s nothing more soul-crushing than losing one’s child. I wouldn’t have wanted to make that pain even worse.
There are truths that, at least for a time, some of us can’t bear. And I think most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, have at times been that person. I think I’m still that person regarding Trump voters. I’m writing this to get started with finding my way out.
Some things just can’t be said because, in the moment, they would ask too much of the way we imagine ourselves in the world, of the way we connect our gut to the rest of humanity. It’s true I think that no American soldier has died defending freedom since 1945, but I have family members I wouldn’t say that to – it would just pour salt on wounds, create distance when there’s already too much – and I wouldn’t recommend to any candidate for a major political office in the US that they say it that out loud, not if they actually want to get elected. It’s not just the mothers of fallen soldiers, but large swathes of the population that are too attached to the belief in American goodness to fully grasp the murderous realities of US military history.
Connecting how I feel in my gut with the larger world turns out to be a life long process, beginning in childhood, and never complete. It necessarily involves imagination: part of being human is that we have to weave together a set of stories and associations, ways of imagining who we are in relation to others, ways to connect the dots in the scatter charts of our souls with narratives, maps of meaning. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz, writing in the 1970s, famously said that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” I thought this was a wonderful insight when I was in grad school, but the thing is, there’s no easy escaping this truth. It’s not as easy to live with as it may have seemed when first explained in a college classroom.
My title is a riff on another theory from that era.[1] It acknowledges that our imaginations and our real conditions of existence are related but not the same. There’s a persistent distance. We have no choice but to spin webs of significance, to construct imaginings of the world and our place in it, but there are obdurate “real conditions of existence” that fit our imaginations imperfectly or not at all: for most Trump voters, a dangerously warming planet or deadly viruses or lost elections, for example, are things they’d rather not consider fully. And for me right now, the awkward obdurate reality is that so many of my fellow white Americans’ ways of imagining enable them to act in the world as if warming or viruses or structural racism are not a problem.
Whatever solutions we might seek to the political situation, I think they have to take into account the “necessary imaginings” and how they link us to each other and to the real conditions of existence. A key piece of it may simply be what Zeynep Tufekci pointed out involves a belief in the strongman who projects “a sense of control, even an ends-justify-the-means leadership style.” The magnetism of the beyond-democracy hero is hardly new: recall the Western’s beyond-the-law cowboy, Dirty Harry, Rambo, “crusading lawyers [who] often take matters into their own hands or break the rules in ways that we cheer.”[2] Over the decades, this imagining has been bipartisan, and probably has more than a little bit to do with why the US public embraced the cold war, the insanity of the nuclear arms race, the US invasion of Iraq and more. The domino theory, mutual assured destruction, WMDs: none of these thin justifications would have been all that persuasive without the appeal of the underlying follow-the-strong-leader narrative. I’ve lived with this stuff, these particular webs of significance and their bloody consequences, my entire lifetime, to various degrees we all have.
But I worry that I and people like me may have overcomplicated the broad outlines of the Trump voters’ necessary imaginings. What my gut suggests to me at this moment is that people like me would do well to forgo more overcaffeinated theorizing about others and turn the camera around to look at our own imaginings, and their distance from real conditions. To start: one imagining that organized my life, certainly as an academic, is a story in which truth is able to make the scales fall from people’s eyes, a story where researchers, writers, crusading journalists and their ilk reveal the truth to the public who then abandon their illusions. For most of my career I taught in a sociology department, and saw it as my duty to teach the realities of US structural racism and class inequality to undergraduates. I thought I was a success at doing it. But now I have to wonder.
My teaching was born of a narrative as much as it has been a set of practices. I was deeply impressed as a child by stories like To Kill a Mockingbird, in which a lawyer, father, and not coincidentally, white man in the Jim Crow south, heroically and – as far as the young reader is concerned, brilliantly – reveals the racism of his white neighbors by showing them the truth. (It’s one of the original white saviour narratives.) Of course, if I said out loud that I fantasized myself to be Atticus Finch, I’d feel silly and would instantly take it back. But somewhere in my gut, I think some version of that story has been there, helping to connect the dots between my sense of self and the world. There are many other versions of that story: from Einstein to Woodward and Bernstein to Antonio Gramsci, my side of the epistemological universe has been rather in love with stories of speaking truth to power, of wanting to be the hero who reveals the hard realities that ordinary folks don’t want to hear.[3] To be clear, I’m still firmly convinced that vaccines work, that Trump lost in 2020, that Vietnam and Iraq were crimes that the United States has yet to fully acknowledge. But I need to rethink how I live with those convictions.
At this point, as I try to crawl out from under the crushing reality of Nov. 6, all I know is that I, and others like me, would do well to reconsider how we imagine our own relations to everyone else. The truths of this moment are hard to bear, and there’s so much that needs to be done; of course we need to struggle on so many fronts, and join together as we do so. But I do think some of us need to do the hard work of reconnecting the dots in new ways, remapping our selves with realities. We need new stories to tell ourselves about ourselves, ones that can get us to a place where the challenges of this moment can be tackled.
[1] Survivors of the 1980s and ‘90s “Theory” moment in the humanities and social sciences will recognize this riff, and also that I am violating some of the rules of that time by translating it into the first person and by ignoring the psychoanalytic backstory to the “real conditions of existence.” Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes towards an Investigation,” in New Critical Writings in Political Sociology (Routledge, 2024), 299–340, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003572923-18/ideology-ideological-state-apparatuses-althusser.
[2] Zeynep Tufekci, “Opinion | A Strongman President? These Voters Crave It.,” The New York Times, January 14, 2024, sec. Opinion, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/14/opinion/trump-voters-iowa-caucus.html.
[3] I’m fully aware that readers of Geertz and Althusser would be quick to complicate or distance themselves from the naïve epistemologies of truth-to-power narratives. I would have been too, until now, when I look back and think, not about the fancy ideas I’ve spent a lifetime playing about in, but the gut-level imaginings that motivated so much of the playing.