Author: Streeter, Thomas

[Draft: not for quotation or sharing publicly; comments, suggestions, and criticisms welcome][1]

As I wonder about why so many Americans voted for Trump, my mind often goes to the story of my mother’s family. They fled Germany in the late 1930s. My grandfather was Jewish, married to a gentile, trying to assimilate; he tried to keep his Jewish background quiet, even from some of his own children.

One of those who didn’t know was my uncle, who, according to family lore, wanted to join the local Hitlerjugend. He  was a teenager. Had my grandfather not had the foresight to move the family to the US before the war, things would not have gone well.

It’s not hard to imagine why a teenager would have been attracted to the Hitler Youth: outdoor activities, friends, a sense of being part of the latest thing, of cheering for one’s team. It likely seemed alluring, thrilling. One can’t expect a thirteen year old to sort through the political implications of such things.

The case of my mother, my uncle’s older sister, is a bit more complicated. She did know about her father’s ethnicity. In the 1970s, when I was a teenager myself on a hitchhiking tour through Germany, I remember visiting one of my mother’s childhood friends. She showed me a black and white photo of very cute teenage German girls marching in uniforms through a quaint rural village with thatch-roofed cottages, on a camping trip. At the front of the group was a girl in pigtails carrying a large banner with a swastika. It was my mother. My mother’s childhood friend looked at the photo over my shoulder, flashed a hint of a smile and said, “Damals war es noch nicht so schlecht.“ (Back then it wasn’t yet so bad.)

Apparently, my mother had been part of what I now understand was a Nazi-adjacent youth group, I think called Volksbund für das Deutschtum im Ausland. It was rare that she talked about it, but when she did it seemed her memories were detailed, that there was more there than she spoke of.

I think I understand why folks on social media express fury at Trump voters or call them stupid, but that response is not available to me. My family’s story makes it impossible to think in binary terms, in terms of bad people vs. good people. For me, the question of why so many people would fall for a Trump or a Putin or an Orban doesn’t start with racism or hatred or ignorance or blind allegiance. It starts with the question of what path people follow to get there, of the allures or fears that allow them to end up thinking, perhaps fleetingly, “it’s not so bad.” It’s not so bad, say, to vote for racists.

Immigrating to the US, and the full reality of the Nazi regime and the unimaginable death and suffering it caused, ensured that my mother and her siblings moved away from whatever teenage enthusiasms they might have had. My uncle as far as I know grew into a New Yorker-reading, fairly liberal American without much taste for politics, and my mother became a Quaker, participating in the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam war movements before either was fashionable. I was raised to believe that the arc of history bent towards justice, and as recently as the Obama administration I still had faith that was the case.

Yet here we are. A new edition of Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism has come out, and The Authoritarian Personality is selling briskly. Whatever you want to call it, it’s back and it’s armed with nuclear weapons.

I don’t have an answer about what to do. But I think whatever solutions we try need to be mindful of how popular and alluring authoritarianism has always been, even to the educated and the comfortable. What makes me despair about people like Elon Musk, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio is not just the evil of their current actions but how easily they drifted, over the course of a few years, from being serious critics of Trump to fully embracing his movement. What’s scary about them is not how unique but how typical they are. They are such ordinarily malleable men.

People’s malleability is a problem for most theories of democracy. If there are ever going to be elections again in the US, winning them will involve figuring out how to appeal to people who voted for Trump. We can’t assume they’ll grow out of it, or that when faced with realities like collapsing stock markets or imprisoned innocents they’ll wake up en masse and see the errors of their ways. Truth, facts, and science are essential but not enough. Whatever democracy is, in any of its actually existing forms, it is not a state that, once achieved, is self-sustaining.

The rapid transformation over the past decade of what is considered legitimate in the U.S. is a stark reminder that people don’t do what they do simply because of pre-existing attitudes or interests: they develop attitudes and interests in interaction with their social worlds, weaving meanings for themselves out of the swirl of narratives around them.

There are  teenagers throughout the US right now who are in various ways in positions similar to my mother and her brother in 1930s small town Germany. Young people who want to belong, searching for friends and meaning, uncertain about their place in the world. Young people who don’t fully know who they are and are seeking answers. Whatever else we do, we need to provide them a better way forward.

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[1] Most of this is filtered through memories of past conversations with people who are no longer with us. I am trying to do what I can to verify these stories and welcome thoughts from family members who have different or similar memories. But the likelihood is that everything here will always be plausible, but not provable.

Before long a member of the US Armed Forces will be ordered by this administration to do something violent that to many would seem a clear cut violation of the US Constitution. How do we prepare? Shouting “It’s unconstitutional!” at the top of our lungs is not much of a strategy. Yes, all members of the armed forces take an oath to defend the Constitution, but for enlisted soldiers that same oath commits them to obeying orders from their superiors and the President. (Thanks to Laurel CR who pointed out that officers’ oaths do not mention obeying the President.) The Constitution itself has never been all that clear about how to balance the role of Commander in Chief against other claims to authority, and the Republican Party and more than half of the Supreme Court have been enthusiastically working to shift the scales towards the former. The best we can hope for is that some officers in key positions come to believe that the Constitution comes first, at least in a particular case.

The Constitution is a living document always subject to interpretation according to context, if for no other reason than that originalist and contextualist ways of interpreting the Constitution are impossible. In spite of various claims to the contrary, the words on the page just can’t operate like lines of code, mechanically executing commands. (FWIW, the conservatives on the Court have in practice largely abandoned any sense of originalism anyway.)

So perhaps we should be doing what we can to cultivate a vivid sense of ways of thinking about constitutionality as a commitment to fairness, to a world where no one is above the law, where some decisions are necessarily made with the long term health of democratic society as a whole in mind. The principle of follow-the-leader-because-he-says-so, against the interests of democracy over the long term, needs to be understood as unconstitutional. We need to be telling stories to bring that understanding to life, particularly for folks who might feel themselves squeezed between conflicting forces. Some of them might be Generals.

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.

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[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.

Some recent thoughts and worries (i.e., I’m blogging again)