Imaginary Revenge

Fintan O’Toole, a columnist for The Irish Times, wrote the best analysis of today’s U.S. politics I have seen, in the June 10 issue of the New York Review of Books. Paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche’s “On the Genealogy of Morals,” O’Toole said that powerful people “can take literal revenge on their enemies: an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”

But people with little or no power, O’Toole wrote, quoting Nietzsche directly, “when ‘denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge.’ They have to create ‘a truly grand politics of revenge, a far-sighted subterranean revenge.’”

This helps explain the undrained, festering swamp of Trumpism, and its debilitating effect on our quasi-democracy. In imagining themselves the “victims” of a grand conspiracy that never happened, Trump and the carnivorous sheep who follow him are pursuing imaginary revenge, and because the revenge is imaginary, these weak people may pursue it forever.

Trump rode to power in great part by persuading millions of people that a vaguely defined “elite” class had cheated them of … something: that people who were better off than they had achieved this by taking something away from the herd. This, of course, is the opposite of what free-market Republicans pretend to believe.

Resentment is the defining characteristic of people who nurse imaginary revenge — addictive personalities, no matter what they are addicted to: sex, fame, adulation, resentment itself.

But what did Trump actually do for his herd while in office, aside from nursing their resentments? He did not protect their health or wealth or protect them from Russia. The only ones he actually boosted were a sector of the economic elite: jillionaires and selected corporations.

In short: Trumpies live in an imaginary world, nursing real resentments against imaginary enemies: “socialist” Democrats who are “coming for your guns.”

Condemned to powerlessness — except within his own sniveling party — Trump and his minions nurse the idea of imaginary victimhood (“white people are the prime victims of discrimination”) and plot real revenge.

This is reflected in their imaginary “culture wars,” whose enemies do not include the Covid-19 virus, or Vladimir Putin, or ignorance, or racial and religious prejudice — no, it’s Dr. Suess, voting rights, homosexuality, medical care, science itself, teaching Black history in public schools, and even art and music.

Because these “enemies” are imaginary, they can never be defeated. And because they are imaginary, the enemies can be swapped out at will. If not Jews, why not Muslims? If not Mexicans, why not Chinese? If not “the liberal media,” why not public schools?

The language of today’s right-wing Republicans — which includes most of them in Congress — mirrors in so many ways the language of Soviet and Putin communism: glorification of itself and totalizing excoriation of others, no matter how close they hew to the Party line; humorless claims, untethered to reality, to be leading the world toward some sort of dark light; and above all, unceasing resentment.

“(I)maginary revenge can never be satisfied and is therefore boundless,” O’Toole wrote. “(F)or Trump, this ceaseless turmoil is a good thing. It keeps his project alive, even after his own defeat.”

In other words: Your enemies are everywhere. Maybe next door. Maybe in your own house.

O’Toole mentions Trump repeatedly in his essay, but the bulk of it is devoted to Boris Johnson, whose situation is different from Trump’s. Trump, for the moment, is out of there, save for his still-dominant position in the Republican Party. But Johnson still in office, must deal on a day-to-day basis with what he hath wrought.

Johnson’s political campaigns, like Trump’s, were built on lies: that leaving the European Union would send 350 million British pounds a week (nearly $500 million) to the National Health Service; that Covid-19 was nothing to worry about (until he got it); that leaving the EU would “simplify” British trade relations, though it has immensely complicated them.

Citing the report of a parliamentary committee — dominated by Johnson’s Conservatives — O’Toole wrote that after Brexit, “71 pieces of paper [are needed to export] one lorry of fish.”

These Export Health Certificates, O’Toole reports, must be printed by the exporter and stamped on every page by an inspector, “in multiple languages”: one in English, one in the language of the receiving port (usually French or Dutch), and one in the language of the country of destination (often German or Italian).

Johnson, still in power, must deal with the results of his lies — chiefly by trying to wriggle out of them, shucking and jiving in his White Minstrel Show.

But Trump and his toadies in Congress need not deal, yet, with the consequences of their lies — they need only try to keep them alive until the midterm elections. Yet because this entire effort is imaginary, it can never be defeated, win or lose in 2022, 2024 ... and on.

So we see Republican dragon-slayers passing voter-suppression legislation in state after state, to foist their imaginary revenge upon us all: stomping their imaginary boots upon real human faces — as Orwell told us — forever.

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