America’s Viagra Moment: Donald Trump
Morgantown. Despite finding him odious and alarming, I watched all of Donald Trump’s speech in Charleston the other night and, when it ended, felt I finally understood the source of Trump’s amazing rise to power and political potency (pun intended): Donald Trump– braggadocio, puffed up rhetoric, beautiful young wife and all– is our moment’s Viagra, the darkly incarnated satire of our longing for our country’s past dominance and youth.
Trump speaks to everything which we, and the world, once were and, regrettably or not, no longer are. He speaks to, and exploits, an unwillingness to accept both the passage of time and the changing balance of power in a rapidly changing world. Like eighty-something Hugh Heffner in silk pajamas surrounded by a coterie of brainless 20-year-olds, Trump would have us believe that he can „make America great again,“ a cryptic shorthand for returning to a lost, and irretrievable, era of American world dominance and international irresponsibility. If we can only take safe and tasteless the little pill he offers, or so he insists, we too (individually and as a nation) can be Donald Trumps– a nation of bold, reckless, hubris-infested winners who have little or no regard for the world around them aside from an incessant desire to dominate and exploit it.
It is no accident that, in a country where so many men (Trump’s major constituency) are in denial of aging, the electorate should suddenly be affirming the candidacy of someone who would replace reasoned argument with a shot of testosterone, humility with arrogance, and a sense of reality with a relentless commercial for pumped up and artificially inflated power and domination. Just as Viagra seeks to allow us a temporary denial of the realities of aging, along with its accompanying lessened desire and potency, so Trump suggests that we deny the reality of multi-polar world containing numerous centers of military and industrial power for the resurrected dream of an Eisenhower-era America as the only truly global power, with its ability to dictate conditions to much of the rest of the industrialized and non-industrialized world.
But, just as with the temporary reprieve from reality offered by Viagra and Cialis, what Trump offers is a dream-life of illusion and turning back the clock on the inevitable calendars of aging and transition. He would have us, to paraphrase the psychosexual stages suggested by the psychologist Erik Erikson, remain at the level of industry and competence appropriate to children aged 5 to 12 years and deny the stage of generativity (appropriate to middle adulthood, ages 40 to 65) during which we develop a sense of being a part of the bigger picture.
All this makes for very effective, and very temporarily pleasing, denial, but it makes for lousy politics, lousy reality testing, and a lousy– and dangerous– vision of the future. It suggests that the only pleasures in life are to be had via dominance, aggression, power, hubris and a manic male sexuality expanded into the realm of politics and international relations. It embodies a longing for a long-gone past, rather than an acceptance of, and coming to terms with, an equally promising, albeit different, future.
It would be wise for those now circling hungrily around the Trump candidacy to heed the warning in the Viagra and Cialis commercials themselves: Should their temporary sense of potency, tumescence and empowerment continue to be felt after more than four hours, it might be time to call the doctor– or, if not the doctor, at least someone named Hillary, or Bernie.