Blessing America First: David Buckley’s take on the first Trump State Department transition

 Trump, Populism, Psychoanalysis, Religion, Foreign Policy, Psychology

Our local Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt) was thinking about the year’s program of events – and we hit on the theme of passages, especially given that it is a BIG election year.  A member of the board from Louisville knew David Buckley, a political science faculty member at the University of Louisville, who has just published a book detailing his experience as a one-year academic fellow at the State Department from 2016 through 2017.  Because his particular area of expertise is the intersection of religion and foreign policy, he was assigned to work with (and observe) the State Department Office of Religion and Global Affairs.  This afforded him a front seat to watch the impact of the Trump Administration on the functioning of the State department.  His book is an academic/scientific report on what he observed.

When Apt decided to start the passages group of presentations, we thought that something about the election would be good.  We put together a panel with the psychoanalyst from Louisville, Bill Nunley, myself, and David Buckley to describe populism and how it works.  In preparation for the event, I spent a month and a half reviewing other analysts’ take on populism and reading David’s text: Blessing America First: Religion, Populism, and Foreign Policy in the Trump Administration.  I actually finished the book the morning of the presentation.

As the election drew closer and I became convinced that Trump would not be elected, I was framing my remarks in the context of populism as a historical phenomenon that has recurred throughout history, is spearheaded by Trump now, but I was concerned about who might take over his mantle after his defeat.  The panel was presented the Friday after the election, and I had to pivot towards thinking about populism in the present tense rather than preparing for some distant moment as the results on Wednesday made it clear that he had been re-elected.

I actually had to pivot a bit before that.  Apt is a separate organization from our local institute, but it is sponsored by the institute.  When I sent the materials to advertise the event to the institute director to distribute them to the institute’s mailing list – which is routine for our organization – the request was held up and then denied.  Because the title included Trump, the institute did not want to be associated with the presentation.  I was so confused when this news was delivered to me that I couldn’t quite figure out why they objected.  Psychoanalysis (as my posts on a wide variety of topics attest to) is relevant to the entire spectrum of human functioning.  I’m not actually sure went into the decision, though I was told it had something to do with not wanting to alienate anyone in polarized times, but it still brought me up short.  Was this censorship?  Was it fear of reprisal?  I became paralyzed in the moment that the news was delivered.

Though I think this was a bad decision on the part of the institute, it was a helpful one to my thinking about how to frame the evening.  My job was to talk about what drew people to Trump – and I had been engaged in somewhat slippery and lazy thinking – wanting to attribute things that I think about Trump to those who voted for him, which I think is both unfair – and way too reductionistic.  The factors that go into any decision are manifold and, especially with decisions as complicated as choosing a leader, it does not make sense to isolate a single factor.  That said, I do think there were important factors at play that influenced this election – more on that later.  For now, the meeting did go ahead.  I was able to cobble together (with the institute's help) a mailing list and the usual sized group materialized - about 30 people - and we had a good conversation.

Blessing American First is a difficult read.  Dave is a careful and thorough thinker.  He has biases and, as a scientist doing qualitative field work in an area that he is passionate about, he wants to make sure that his positions are scientifically defensible.  This makes his writing tiresome, even tedious at times, as he cites sources to support his observations (it could be a lighter and much easier read if he chose to follow populist guidelines regarding truth and facts...). The book is also dense because it is based on a sister discipline that shares many ideas with psychology (my first scientific language), but it is not my discipline, so the terms and the methodology are similar, but just enough different that I have to keep on my toes, which uses a fair amount of energy. 

All that said, the book is enlightening.  The first and most important point of information that Dave defines populism.  This term is used to refer to Trump (and to Andrew Jackson) and I have had the vague sense that it is related to popularity – as in, this is a candidate who promises people what they want to hear and so he is popular and wins the election because of the popular vote (even though Trump did not win the popular vote the first time). 

Jonathan Lear, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, was using a definition like this to tie Trump's appeal to Plato’s Republic.  In the Republic, Socrates proposes that the next logical form of government after democracy is dictatorship.  I remember reading this in college and thinking that it made no sense because citizens in a democracy would never give up their power.  Lear pointed out that Socrates argument was that in a democracy, everyone improves financially – and once the citizens get a taste of wealth, their appetite for it increases and they are happy to install a dictator if he promises greater wealth.  We are willing, Socrates maintains, to sell our freedom for the promise of more earthly goods.  Hearing this argument again as an older man, I find it convincing.

David is helpful with the definition of populism by first pointing out that there is no single definition.  People use it in a variety of ways and contest which definition makes the most sense.  Dave argues for two definitions of Trumpian populism: First that it rests on “thin” ideological grounds that distinguish “the people” from various undesirable outgroups.  I have heard fascism defined in a very similar fashion.  A second definition – or characteristic of Trumpian populism - is that there is a “personalistic strategic logic that rejects institutional constraint.”

Both of these definitions – or descriptions – proved useful to both Dave and to me in thinking about Trump.  Dave is very much an organizational person.  He praises the virtues of a bureaucracy.  From his perspective, a bureaucracy was something that founders built into the federal government by virtue of the checks and balances they created between the three branches of government.  Each branch is overseeing the other two, and this is because the founders, who had successfully overthrown a king whom they believed to be a self-interested ruler, recognized that anyone in power could become self-interested, so they designed a government to check that self interest.  They even mistrusted the people,  creating the electoral college so that the people would not be entrusted in a direct vote for the president, but that state representatives would actually do the electing.

From his perch at the USAID, David was able to see how the bureaucracy was able to create stable relationships with religious leaders in other countries so that they could help communicate, through the pulpit as it were, ideas that the State Department saw as important.  So, for instance, in Nigeria, where corruption was a major problem, contacts with religious leaders helped to communicate how those in power were being corrupted, helping the country's turn away from corruption (Of course, if another country were to exercise this type of influence in our country, we would call it election interference, but American Exceptionalism allows us to do things that we would not accept from others).

The effect of a bureaucracy is that getting anything down requires a great deal of time and effort.  This is a virtue from Dave and the founder’s perspective.  It means that the government will be stable and non-reactive.  But Trump has been able to paint that as a liability rather than a virtue.  The bureaucracy has become the dictator that we need to rebel against, and Trump’s personalism is the needed antidote.  He will not be constrained by the bureaucracy – in part because he will upend and or eliminate it.

Growing up, bureaucrats were referred to in my household as loafers who leached their incomes from the working people of the world who were accomplishing things.  The bureaucrats, for unknown reasons, seemed to be opposed to production, profit and self-determination, so eliminating them would be a good thing.

As an adult, watching my wife work in the federal government, I have come to have a very different view, but I still have sympathy for my family members’ views, including that the world is a simpler place on the local level – and that, when we know the character of our neighbors and their needs, we can provide for them more effectively that a distant nameless and faceless entity.  Certainly, my battles with insurance companies to meet the needs of my patients across the course of my career has not endeared me to all bureaucrats as an adult.  On the other hand, I am very aware of the ways that bias can be expressed unconsciously, to that our local well-intentioned help can have negative consequences.

Dave helped me recognize that what Trump effectively does is to mobilize fear – fear that some unknown person working for their own ends – or the mindless ends of a thick ideology, one that is freighted with all kinds of compromise and red tape, will not be as effective as directly meeting the needs of the people as he will be.  Which leads to the question of why the people who are drawn to the message are not stopped short by the character of the person.

One of my patients says that Trump comes across as trustworthy because what you see is what you get.  With politicians in general, there is a pause as they process information and think about what the import of what they are about to say will be on this population or that – how it will affect this country or that.  With Trump we do not get this.  He is quick to provide a response – and there is little evidence of conflict about what he asserts at any given moment – even if what he is saying is inconsistent with what he has said at another time, he believes what he says to be the case in the moment when he is taking that position.  He thus feels genuine and reliable in the way that the high school quarterback, now grown older and drinking in a bar, seems likable, and we cut them both a little slack if they exaggerate things a bit to make the story better.

More to the psychoanalytic point, we actually want someone who plays a bit fast and loose with the facts and who is suspicious of others when we are dealing with an enemy, and Trump consistently reminds us – as part of the in-group out-group aspect of  populism – that we are dealing with an enemy.  As the manager of the rhythm and blues band formed in the movie The Commitments maintained when he was questioned about hiring a savage as a drummer and bouncer, “He is a savage, but he is our savage.”

What I mean by that last statement is that when we go to war, we want someone who is ready to fight to lead us.  War is both a very real phenomenon, and a metaphor.  Psychoanalytically, we can arrange our defenses (a military term to describe how we handle interpersonal relationships and our own feeling states) from primitive through neurotic to “healthy”.  Our primitive defenses are used when we feel most constrained, disempowered, and unsafe – our healthy defenses are used when we are more trusting and open.  We measure the psychopathology of the patients that we work with based on their defensive structures.  So, those who use the most primitive defenses are psychotic, those who use more advanced defenses are neurotic, and those in between are referred to as engaging in borderline functioning.

The problem with this system is that we all use defenses all across the board.  Chris Perry, a researcher in Canada, has rated the use of defensive functioning in ordinary conversations between psychologically healthy individuals and has noted that about 20% of the defenses being used are from the psychotic end of the spectrum - we dip into primitive processing on a regular basis.  Under pressure – when we are scared, or disempowered, this percentage will necessarily increase.  When Trump tells us there is an enemy that we need to fight against, we become, momentarily, more primitive in our thinking.  In this regressed state, we engage in thinking that is more circumscribed and simplistic – we think in black and white terms.

Lest we get too excited about the impact this effect this has on others, we should check the impact that it has on ourselves.  How narrowly do we begin to think when we are riled up – whether because we agree with Trump or because we agree with the other person?  (How quickly did I devolve into primitive thinking when my request to send the invitation to the panel through the institute's listserve was thwarted?)  The answer is – quite a bit.  In fact, the best ways to influence an election are two: Get out the vote and talk dirt about the opponent.  Negative campaigning works.  It just does.  We are herd animals who are trusting by nature, but this means that, to protect ourselves, we have to be overly sensitive to negative information – we weight negative information about four times more heavily than positive information – and that negative information leads us to regress and look around for a bully – or a strong man – who will take care of things for us.

Hannah Gadsby decided to quit doing stand up comedy because she realized that she was making people laugh by helping them reduce the tension that they were feeling – but that, in order to reduce that tension, she had to make them tense to begin with.  She thought this was sadistic – and so she went on tour to apologize to her fans and to promise to quite harming them and, because the tour was a smashing success, she decided to rethink her retirement and has been working as a comic ever since.

Trump’s approach is much the same.  He gets us anxious, and then he promises that he will be the cure.  And that is how he functions in office.  What Dave was able to document are the ways in which Trump bypassed the structures of the State Department, and the ways in which people began to be able to function based on the relationships they either had previously had with Trump - and they were put in positions of power in the State Department because of them – or because of the ways they were able to establish relationships with Trump – or with the people within his orbit.

Bureaucracy, for all of its’ inefficiencies, tolerates and even thrives on dissent.  When Trump would propose something, like the Muslim ban, that the career staffers at the State Department objected to, they would sign off on statements indicating their disagreement and thought they were doing their bureaucratic duty and helping Trump see an alternative perspective.  Trump’s response, through Sean Spicer, was to tell those who disagreed to pack their bags.  This language has been mirrored by those Trump would appoint to cabinet positions in his second term.  The message is clear – your opinion doesn’t matter, what matters is whether you align with the leader or not.

Of course, this does lead to concerns about a second term.  Where there were some adults in the room in the first term, those have been driven out and said they don’t want anything to do with Trump indicates they will not be in power in the second term.  Trump is apparently stocking a war chest funded by his allies in the business world to campaign against Senators who disagree with him.  We will see if this Senate takes any more seriously their need to advise and dissent than the previous one did.

Ultimately, I found the investment in reading this book worthwhile.  It helped me get my bearings for this disorienting passage back into the Trumpian state.  Seeing, in detail, how Trump operated before helped me make sense of the concerns that people across the political spectrum were voicing.  Once he has power – and, in a normal world, this would be his last administration, but I don’t think we can count on that with him – he can exercise it in ways that suit him and those he turns toward.  The populist, according to Dave, is most interested in maintaining power – so he does – to go back to my naïve understanding – what is popular.  Of course, the question at this point is, who is his constituency?  Who will help him retain power?

Long ago I opined that Trump could be a nuclear terrorist.  I think he has assumed office in part by terrorizing us (again) and he has therefore assumed control of the nuclear arsenal and the military apparatus (again).  I am not opposed to reducing waste or limiting the size of the bureaucracy – but the necessity of many governmental services is not something that Trump seems tuned into.  I think he imagines, like the kid born on third base who thinks he hit a triple, the country as simply been waiting for him to fix it rather than building itself into the beacon of freedom and power that has made it the world power that it has been for the last 75 or 100 years.  We survived Trump's term of office last time.  We will have to see what is on his mind this time.

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