She Made Him Do It Theory of Everything

"The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales, which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for understanding authoritarians in public and political life. Because no matter what abusers take from their victims, they don't want to take the blame. And one of the prerogatives of power is to be in charge of blame, and abusers routinely exercise that power to make their own acts someone else's fault.

Let me start with where we used to hear "she made him do it" all the time--in sexual assault and gender violence. The logic was that somehow women were very powerful, which is why they got raped and beat up--their power consisted in making men to do things, which men were powerful enough in the sense of brute force to do but powerless in the sense of moral agency or self-control to resist doing. The idea that all this was a result of men losing control was always undermined by the fact that a person who truly has no self-control will act heedlessly, recklessly, and these acts were usually carried out covertly, in an effort to escape hostile witnesses and consequences.

Trump himself almost routinely accuses his opponents of intentions and crimes of which he himself is guilty, including efforts to steal elections. It's a well-known psychological phenomenon: "the unconscious defense mechanism that Freud called projection: the attribution of one’s own forbidden – and typically malevolent – motives, impulses, or emotions to others. When people project, what is true about oneself instead becomes true of others." Trump is specifically the most prolific, shameless, and public practitioner of a version of projection that Dr. Jennifer Frey dubbed DARVO in 1997. That's an acronym for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender, a frequent technique of abusers to shift blame to victims. Among his many DARVO moves, Trump has accused his rivals of trying to steal an election and Zelensky of being a dictator. [Ted] Cruz was engaging in it too, when he was making out Democrats as troublemakers for not being nicer about a violent coup attempt.

In mainstream discourse, it's become standard to blame the excesses of the right on liberals, the left, feminists, Black Lives Matter, affirmative action, environmental protection, and BIPOC and LGBTQ people. It's a way that the right is granted masculine prerogatives and the left feminine responsibilities for the right's behavior. It's also routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."

Rebecca Solnit 

DARVO, a favorite technique of abusers to shift blame onto their victims; deny, attack, reverse victim and offender (DARVO). Now that's a realm (and social pathology) in which Grump is truly a King. What a fantastic textbook case; scholars will be unpacking this one for decades: The DARVO POTUS. 

And a brilliant feminist caricature of patriarchy: "The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages." 

IOW, blaming the Dem's "woke mind virus," their "excessive liberalism," for armed mobs and forced deportations and Neo-Nazis and demolition of government services and whatever other illiberal republican extremes. The radical "defund the police" communist Dems shouldn't have pissed off Grump and Leon, who are now just trying to deliver the democratic will of the people, according to our two-party dysfunctional marriage.  

Albert O. Hirschman in his book, The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991), cites the three pillars of reactionary rhetoric in the modern period: "perversity," "futility," and "jeopardy." In a way, Solnit's she-made-him-do-it theory traces back to all three pillars of reactionary thought: Helping victims of sexual abuse, perversely, will increase the claims of abuse, government help is futile when more government is the problem, and helping victims of abuse jeopardizes the authority of men in positions of power. 

Blaming women, the poor, and minorities for oppressive conservative extremes is a time honored, if a shamefully abusive, tradition. 

Our mistake was to think we live in a better country than we do

"Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. 

We knew what the problems were, and we wanted to fix them. The principal problems that got us to this bleakest moment in American history are intertwined. They are the crisis of masculinity, the failure of the mainstream news media and the rise of Silicon Valley, and in a way they are all the same problem.

The media might be the simplest to describe. A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed."

Rebecca Solnit @ The Guardian

More post-mortem on the election. Solnit's books, Wanderlust (2000), a sort of literary walking tour, and A Paradise Built In Hell (2009), about people coming together in crisis and "elite panic," are two of my favorite books all time. She's a boss. 

We can't afford to be climate doomers, by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian

If the scientists say we can overcome climate change then why are so many people doomy about it, asks the always very smart and hopeful-without-being-sappy Rebecca Solnit? 

(BTW, her book, A Paradise Built In Hell, is an excellent history and another, Wanderlust, a sort of literary history of walking, one of my favorite books ever.) 

Anyway, my hot take on why so many people might trend doomy on climate change: 

B/c, for one big reason, the forces against climate change reform are the richest and most powerful corporate interests in the world. Big Oil and Wall Street. And everyone or nearly everyone depends on their economy; for jobs, housing, food, savings, etc. 

Big Oil and the Billionaires, the people who run the economy, tell us environmental reforms threaten economic growth and security. And what threatens the Captains of Industry threatens Us, we naturally fear.

We don't want to cook the planet but we need jobs. Ack! 

Now I don't believe this Chamber of Commerce bs for a minute but I certainly recognize the fear in the question: is whatever X factor good or bad for the economy? It matters. Many live with a fear that they're a few paychecks away from homeless destitution or other untold hardships. What if big biz people take their toys (jobs!) and go home, go full-hoarder austerity and wait out the "mob anarchy" (people asking for living wages, basically) in their island fortress redoubts? Too Big To Fail, etc. 

It's scary. 

But my contention is that the historical evidence is mounting that strategic government regulation of the economy, higher taxes on wealth, more spending on community infrastructure, and Democratic administrations since Roosevelt are more pro-economic growth, pro-jobs, and pro-prosperity than the monopolizing free market corporate rule of the Repuglicans, and this is on top of the fact the latter are also horrible bigots and the last people on earth that ought to be telling anyone else how to live their lives. 

My point: With the Dems there is hope, even if it is being strained, in adapting to climate change while minimizing the humanitarian catastrophes coming and, really, already here. But there is no such hope-- all climate doomers or climate deniers, same diff-- w/ Trump and the MAGA Repugs. The problem isn't climate doomers so much as a climate dooming political party.  

Vote Blue No Matter Who! Please and thank you.