Why Trump is winning

I am reading a lot of poetry these days. Call it escapism. Listening to the news makes me depressed and no one wants to feel low. So, I turned to poetry. A modest investment of about £8 gets you 'The Poetry Review' in your well ordered local bookstore and in a recent issue I found a poem by Mel Pryor called 'Cliff'. It's neat and has some nice turns of phrases such as when she talks about 'these daily unminuted miracles' (The Poetry Review, p.17).

I guess it's the poem's sense of ending that appeals to me. Recently, things in the political world have felt increasingly like we are standing at a precipice. But, and this is my point, this is a mistake and it can become a serious political error if progressives believe that everyone feels like that. Dread is not a political motivator. So let's look at the facts.

Trump's popularity with his base feeds on public outburst (and plenty of unacceptable ill-tempered language) about minorities, people he does not like (anymore), and railings against the establishment. The reaction of progressives is instructive. They dislike his foul verbiage, the damage to established institutions he does with his tweets and his exploitation of the presidency for his own gain. They dislike that he offers the American people some populist grub and that many of them take it.

But here is the crux. Progressives are indignated by Trump's actions and tweets, and as they become more and more outraged they start to believe that, if only Trump was gone (impeached or otherwise) they would win again and everything would go back to normal. They take the messenger for the message. There are already signs that Democrats tailor their mid-term campaign to the tune of Trump. In a sense, they take populism's bait and swallow it hook line and sinker.

Indignation is always a bad compass in politics. Whilst indignation is the way in which we police our norms of public behaviour, it is in essence a blunt tool. It only reaches as far as our gut feelings last and that's not very far indeed. Remember the little dead boy that was carried on to a Turkish beach by a police officer at the height at the Syrian refugee crisis? I bet you do! And what came of it? Exactly.

The reason Trump won (and this is what progressives don't want to hear) is that neither the Clinton campaign nor the Democratic Party actually made a positive offer to the American people in 2016. I vividly remember a moment in the primaries during Clinton's first bid for the candidacy of the Democratic Party (in 2006) when she started to tear up and declared that she had 'so many opportunities for this country'. What these were she showed us ten years later in 2016: a long list of things to do for ... transgender people, women, minorities, gays, and any other poor marginalised soul in America. But what she could never say is why any middle of the road, no nonsense American who didn't define himself by his or her sexual or racial identity should vote for her. She never told middle America why she should be in office.

Government jobs for everyone - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Source: Mark Lennihan/AP

I know some of these words hurt (it's indignation again, see). We all want to do our best for minorities and people on the margins of society. But what progressives often forget is that campaigning on issues that matter to only a handful of people is unlikely to succeed. And so we go again, come the mid-term elections. The latest candidate to make the headlines is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - somebody who says that the border force should be abolished and that everyone should be guaranteed a job by the government. Familiar stuff? Yes, we heard this before. If you are old enough, that is, and your memory reaches back to the 1970 and 1980s.

So, what's going wrong? The answer is simple. Whilst Trump dishes out populist messages, progressives are sidetracked by their indignation and veer to the extreme left, strengthening those parts of their electoral offer that made them lose the last election: identity politics. The people who may feel less and less represented are those in the centre, the moderates who do not think that transgender toilets are the most urgent thing to instal when there is an opiod crisis affecting communities up and down the country.

What may break it for Trump is not his ill-tempered language or his tweeting but the economy. At the moment, the American economy is overheating. He is urging the Fed to lower interest rates, which would be catastrophic for inflationary pressures. He may just turn out to steer the American economy into a serious crisis and middle America won't tolerate that.

The maths show that Democrats are likely to win back the House of Representatives in November, yet are unlikely to win the Senate. But if they think that this paves the way for a win in the presidential elections in 2020 (or indeed for impeachment) they are mistaken. Up till now, they have nothing to offer to those in the centre ground of politics. All they offer is their indignation and their desire to boot out Trump. That's not an electoral programme.

If they don't change course, then I guess there is more poetry for me.

What poetry can do

I always struggled with poetry. Somehow the metaphors never seemed to connect with me. I suppose I don't have that imaginative mind that is required to read and understand it.

Since this is a blog charting a personal journey, you can probably guess what's coming next. I had an epiphany... well, not quite. But something like it.

Recently, the German poet Jan Wagner was awarded the prestigious Georg-Buechner-Preis, one of the highest accolades for writers in Germany. In one of the reviews of his work, someone quoted a line from his poem 'Hamburg-Berlin' (Jan Wagner, Selbsportrait mit Bienenschwarm. Ausgewaehlte Gedichte. Hanser: Berlin 2017):

'... in der ferne nahmen zwei windraeder 
eine probebohrung im himmel vor:
gott hielt den atem an.' (p.20)

That's funny on the surface but also intensely moving once you visualise the scene. Well observed and mischieviously subversive, undermining our sense of reality and how the world is supposed to work.

Wagner's poems are radical in their metaphorical tranformative power. He is playful and his words reveal new vistas on the world; his poems have what a good poem needs to have: it forces us to re-think reality and to discover what is there but was hidden until we read it.

The power of the metaphor - it never is what it seems.  Flamish 17th cent painting

 

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Although I struggle to find the right words to appreciate his poetry I did also notice something fascinatingly limiting in his poetry. Wagner's poetry is strongly metaphorical, yet in its playfulness it lacks the human dimension. His poems are observational, almost resembling the still lifes of Dutch painters, such as a table with decaying fruits. There is beauty in them, but something is missing.

Enter a poem by an American writer who lived in Britain in the 1960s.

The Hanging Man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. 
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket. 

A vulturous boredom pinned me to this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did. 

This poem is equally densely packed with metaphors that evoke feelings and have tranformative power. But at every line, the words also force us to take position to the story, the story of Christ and Christianity. It is full of mockery as well as respect, it is literal at times yet also figuratively untrue. Yet most of all, it is about us as human beings. It does not shrink from plunging head on into human affairs. The poem was written by Sylvia Plath (from Sylvia Plath:Ariel. Faber and Faber: London 2015 [1968].)

I may have misunderstood her words, I may miscontrue the meaning of the poem, but I do clearly recognise the differences between Wagner's and Plath's poetic thrust. Wagner's is observational and subversive in a gentle way, reordering our relationship with nature and the things around us. Plath however places herself squarely within the human domain, metaphorically interfering with the social and historical encounters that we have every day. And Plath is nothing short of radical, forcing us to take position on, what she thinks, is a constantly shifting ground.

The strange prose of Fernando Pessoa

Robert Musil once wrote that ‘if something is not a phenomenon worth talking about but merely beautiful, [people] choke. Thus emerge those Oohs! and Ahs!, painful syllables of suffocation!’ (Robert Musil, ‘It’s lovely here!’)

As a writer Musil was painfully aware of the difficulty to express certain things in language, especially if the object in question was beauty itself. His solution was to revert to narratives, telling stories that evoked the sense of beauty in us without trying to directly express the essence of it in words. I am sure literary theorists have a term for the inability of language to directly reflect the emotional inner-life of our minds. We can speak about how impressed we are by something, how happy we are, but feelings of awe and beauty escape our wordy grasp. In a way, our world of emotions represents the outer boundary of writing, something were words and prose prove futile and redundant. 

Prose writers learn this lesson early on. As Musil said, you try to express your sentiments once or twice but quickly realise that you can say ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ah’ only so often. The legitimate domain of prose is hence the narrative, while poetry can experiment with flights of linguistic fantasy. 

One poet I greatly admire is Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), the Portuguese writer who has achieved posthumous fame in his home country and beyond. Pessoa lived and died in Lisbon and this fascinating city was his main subject matter. His poetry is remarkable in that it captures the sound of a city which is equally vibrant and dormant, the latter mainly as a consequence of the choking lethargy that descended on the country during Salazar’s reign. 

So I was hopeful when I bought a copy of Pessoa’s ‘Book of Disquiet’, a collection of observations and notes that he had written over a long period and which had been found and published only after his death. Edited as a ‘stream’ of notes with little narrative or chronological rationale, the texts are a mixture of real life observations and ruminations about inner mental life. And I regret to say that they are of mixed quality. 

Pessoa seems to have disregarded the fundamental rule of prose that Musil formulated when he spoke about the ‘Ohs’ and ‘Ahs’: Do not try to describe the indescribable. Prose lives and dies with narratives, and emotions and feelings are evoked not by talking about emotions but by re-describing the situations in which individuals find themselves. What moves us to tears is not the phrase ‘she was moved to tears’ but a description of the tragic positions in which people find themselves. 

In a sense, Pessoa’s ‘Book of Disquiet’ at times reads like poetry and he is strongest when his writing approximates poetic wanderings of the mind. Some of his similes are powerful and evocative. He is weakest (and very weak indeed) however when he wants to tell us ‘how he feels in himself’ by endless introspective ruminations. There are flashes of ingenuity as  Pessoa writes about life in Lisbon or the inertia of ordinary life, yet his prose quickly regains a nauseating flatness as he reverts to continuously telling us ‘how tedious his life is’. In fact, I think the first 50 pages feature the word ‘tedium’ and ‘banality’ a thousand times, and after having read them just as often, the prose itself adopts this very quality. An indication of the impotence of language is when writers resort to acclamations of essentialism: ‘My life was tedium itself’. Pessoa’s prose is littered with these redundant phrases. 

His endless introspection is equally difficult to stomach often leading to a linguistic solipsism that turns back on itself. In a way his prose is an attempt to describe the relationship between mind and reality from a radically existentialist perspective. Heidegger tried something similar and thought he failed. Yet, in contrast to prose writers, philosophers employ a highly disciplined linguistic framework, pulled tight by numerous definitions and terminological strictures. Pessoa’s language remains loose around the edges, acknowledging the prosaic character of his writing. Yet, if prose has nothing of the rigidity of philosophical discourse, it must fail to effectively explore the boundaries between mind and reality. Hence Pessoa’s writings neither illuminate the existential realm of the mind nor do they tell us much about why we must fail to capture the essence of the soul in language. 

Sartre of course tried to approach this problem in prose as well. His novel ‘Nausea’ champions a similarly introspective perspective. Yet Sartre was aware that existential introspection substantiated in words betrays a monotony that is hard to stomach for readers. So he framed it with a narrative that, at times, relieves the existential heaviness. 

Pessoa seems to have thought that his introspective reflections are the most captivating, given that the ‘Book of Disquiet’ returns again and again to this theme. Yet the reader longs for moments of rare clarity where Pessoa tells us something about the life in his office (Pessoa worked as an accountant), a trip to the country side or the death of an errand boy. The fact is that for all the stasis of Portuguese society in the 1930s, the world was in fact turning upside down and the contrast between Portugal and the rest of Europe could have provided plenty of material for exciting prose. Pessoa, in the middle of this world spinning ever more quickly, only looked inside and missed the life around him.