Trump, Wokeism, and the Shared Threat of Postmodernism
Are Strange Bedfellows the Future of Politics?
The far-left may as well vote for Trump in 2024, as the far-left and the far-right are no longer strange bedfellows.
America and the West are facing two existential threats as I see it: Trump on the right and wokeism from the left. What do both of these phenomena share in common? Postmodernism.
Trump was the first postmodern president, Cynical Theories author, James Lindsay has espoused. Lindsay asserts that Trump, the current 2024 Republican front-runner presidential candidate, traffics in pseudo-reality, a hallmark of postmodernism.
Lindsay opposed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and announced his support for the former president in 2020, attributing his flip to an aversion to the left’s illiberal wokeness. One could infer that Lindsay, no fan of postmodernism, has wrestled with which is the lesser of two evils, Trump or wokeism.
The far-left and I would argue the left in general has become a hotbed of illiberalism including organizational neo-Marxist-style struggle sessions, which are about a half step away from full-throated cancel culture, if not a feature. Much is said about Trump’s authoritarian leanings, of which I would agree, though public sentiment has not caught up in tandem with the left as being illiberal and thus, authoritarian.
It was a shock to the system for Americans to digest that a contingent of far-left Bernie Sanders supporters in 2016 (Bernie Bros) ended up voting for Trump or more recently, the far-left’s embracing of genocidal authoritarian psychopaths, Hamas over complaints of Israel's colonization.
Authoritarian Donald J. Trump, calls for retribution against those who have aggrieved him in his brand of grievance politics. In a more recent rally, Trump exclaimed, “I am your retribution!” communicating his delusion that he is our collective retribution personified. Dangerously echoing Adolf Hitler who referred to Jews as vermin, Trump on Veterans Day, Saturday, November 11, pledged to “root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” That Trump used the word “vermin” suggests that heretofore media coverage of Trump’s having read Hitler's speeches is almost certainly true, a more fundamental and pressing question being can Trump read? The far-left has gone so far off the rails that a statement such as his, revealing that he is gunning for them, would hardly dissuade a sizable contingent from voting for Trump, that's how out of reality some of these woke voters are. Nothing is steady with Trump, hence his allure. If he can blow up the system, he's their guy. Besides, Biden is too Steady Eddie, too old, too white, too male, and supports the "genocide" of the Palestinians.
The far-left also shares in common with the far-right, grievance and victimhood, most recently marked by a significant cultural and political inflection point over who is the victim, Israel or Palestine? It's the age of identity politics, particularly on both extremes of the political spectrum. The more extreme the politics, the more entrenched grievance, victimhood, and identity politics become; these virulent combinations en masse create the conditions for civilizational compromise up to and including genocide.
In terms of postmodernism, both Trump and wokeism are post-truth. During Trump’s administration, Kellyanne Conway typified this cultural age with her infamous assertion of “alternative facts.” Wokeism, based in part on postmodernism, eschews any notion of reality and objective truth, instead, positing that any assertion of so-called reality is biased and embedded with power dynamics, a central figure and spearhead of postmodernism, being French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-84).
Postmodernism and its derivatives have been a disastrous and fractured line of gobbledygook “thinking” that has splintered into a myriad of other travesties from the dusty pages of old books into not just pseudo-realities adjacent to reality, but contaminating reality itself. Postmodernism, the woodchipper of the Enlightenment/Modernism, has yielded splinters of critical theories such as CRT and DEI, both being plywood pillars of wokeism. The structure is an edifice, a Potemkin village. Puff and you may just blow the whole house down.
The critical race theorists never talk about taking over a car factory or running a great industrial enterprise. They know that they’re not equipped to do it, and they have no desire to do it. They no longer want to seize the means of physical and industrial production; they want to seize the means of cultural and knowledge production. This is a big shift. They believe that if they can change the language we speak, and the symbols we use in public life, they can change the country. Christopher F. Rufo
In terms of narcissism, the equivalent of the postmodern term pseudo-reality would be a shared fantasy, also called a shared psychosis. Fantasy, or being in a fantastic state, involves being out of reality and so does psychosis. Both are delusional pseudo-realities. In this respect, postmodernism and narcissism go hand in hand, perpetuating wokeism.
Both administrations under Biden and Trump have demonstrated support for Israel. Trump supported Israel with the Abraham Accords and relocated the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in a move to recognize the capital of Israel as being Jerusalem.
Trump, being a narcissist, is a blank screen upon which the populace can project their flights of fancy and arbitrary whims. Given his deep-seated psychopathology— nobody's home, there is no central command and control center or moral compass—and considering, for instance, his ever-shifting pendulum swings on abortion over the years, his ideological infidelity spins like a toy top in the wind.
There are deep implications to a psychology such as this. Given the West’s public sentiments’ wind is currently blowing at Palestinians’ back, if Trump were to reclaim the White House and colonize it with his infestation and particular brand of noxious narcissism, America and the West may be thrown into a greater turmoil whereby suddenly, America's allied position on Israel does a 180°, and America throws all of its energy and efforts towards supporting Palestine. This about-face would be so that Trump could lay claim to solidifying a partnership with Russia, China and Iran, aka the new Axis of Evil. The chess piece would be Israel as a pawn in international relations and geopolitics. A cynical take could be—and granted this scenario would be giving Trump the benefit of the doubt in terms of long-term and strategic planning, not the forte of a narcissist, though perhaps, his staff— that Trump anticipated a flare-up of Hamas calling for the beginning of a new intifada against Israel in the aftermath of Trump’s 2018 initiative to relocate the U.S. embassy to the new capital Jerusalem, thereby putting the wheels in motion for a strategic partnership in the burgeoning Axis of Evil while on the face of it looking sympathetic to Israel. This way he could play both sides, Israel temporarily and Palestine as the long game, for the lure of Arab oil money and the effect of maximum chaos, chaos being ego-syntonic or comfortable for Trump and therefore in his mind for all of us, as we, the people, are mere extensions of him according to his narcissistic delusions.
Should this frightening scenario as outlined above have substance or there-there, the Orwellian “liberal,” i.e., illiberal world order—a fantastic paracosm, a post-truth/postmodern reality of pseudo-reality, a Potemkin village of artifice, a shared fantasy/psychosis—all of these concepts and more would be fully underway, having commenced with the onslaught of pernicious ideology infiltrating America and the West’s psyche through the far-left’s embrace of woke ideology, most crucially structured on the pillars of postmodernism and neo-Marxism, making us, Americans amenable to the ethos of China and Russia, being communist and authoritarian countries, respectively.
Americans have been ideologically primed for this type of massive geopolitical upset. Israel may just be the pin in the hand grenade for the ultimate “deconstruction of the administrative state,” “draining the swamp,” and generally dismantling the Western world order, much to the glee and nihilistic satisfaction of both Trump’s MAGA and woke ideological extremists. Trump has had a long-standing affinity for authoritarian dictators world over; need we revisit his love letter with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un?
In my YouTube interview with narcissism expert, Professor Sam Vaknin, he obliquely refers to the Orange Man, Trump, as a cult leader on October 3, 2023:
Coy: Can you talk about the overlap between narcissistic abuse and totalitarianism? Obviously, a common denominator is control.
Vaknin: The narcissist is a cult leader and creates a cult, whether the cult is a two-member cult or a 20-member cult, or a 40 million-member cult, alluding to someone who is orange, it's still a cult. Totalitarian regimes are cults, writ large, and gone awry. They're cults. There's a we vs. they mentality.
There is a hermeneutic space of thinking so that critical thinking is discouraged, analysis is discouraged, and so on and so forth. There are repressive and oppressive measures, punitive codes, and so forth. Totalitarian regimes, therefore, are narcissistic. All totalitarian regimes are narcissistic, and therefore, whatever they do is by definition narcissistic abuse; it involves the falsification of reality and its replacement with a fantasy, whatever the fantasy may be, oppression and repression including via violent means, control which borders on micromanagement, distrust, pervasive distrust between the authorities and the population and vice versa, exploitation transfer of resources in an asymmetrical way. I'll go into it in some other, some other interview, maybe.
If you look at a microcosm, which is a narcissist and his wife, you're likely to learn everything you need to learn about Nazi Germany and communist Russia and Cuba and what have you, everything is identical. That renders narcissistic abuse a political issue. It's not necessarily only an individual issue because ultimately the polity, the body politic is comprised of individuals and households, and the more prevalent an incident of narcissism is, the more of these cells would be narcissistic.
So if you have a body where 40% of the cells are infected and narcissistic, that body would become narcissistic. If 40% of the population of the United States qualifies as subclinical narcissists, the United States will end up as a totalitarian country, because this is the political manifestation of narcissism.
So it starts, it starts at the bottom. Narcissism is a grassroots movement, and narcissists, of course, consider themselves victims. Ask any narcissist. There's no exception. All narcissists are victims. They always present themselves as victims. They're underappreciated at work, or the wife took all the property, or I don't know what. They're always a victim. So there's a confluence between narcissism and victimhood, and infection of the body politic, from the grassroots level.
In conclusion, postmodernism with its offspring of moral and cultural relativism and lack of shared reality, is a narcissistic throughline of extreme politics from both the left and the right. Fundamentally, it seems to me that the only eradication and decolonization that needs to happen anywhere is the grasp of pathological narcissism from the clutches of our collective minds.
This chart, tracking the cultural shifts from modernism to postmodernism as it relates to Cluster B’s narcissism and psychopathy, is inspired by Xi Van Fleet's new book Mao's America: A Survivor’s Warning.
