In the handbooks of clinical psychiatry, the condition of “Mythomania” is defined as the “pathological habit to manipulate the truth in order to obtain psychological self-aggrandizement, through the habitual, prolonged and repeated utterance of lies“.
If you were to read this definition in the context of contemporary American politics, the mental association with Donald Trump would be immediate.
While the tendency to lie and distort reality to one’s own advantage is a universal trait of all politicians in every part of the world, in Donald Trump this propensity gets to a whole different, turbocharged level to the point that it has become a topic of study at some universities.
With Trump, the difference is not only quantitative, based on the number of falsehoods that he manages to generate at any time and on any occasion. It is also and above all, a qualitative difference.
Paradoxically Trump’s narcissistic megalomania gives him a power of persuasion that has not been adequately considered in the many analyses of the latest presidential election results.
The effectiveness of a lie depends largely on how persuasive is the liar, and, in this sense, Donald Trump can count on a super-power that no other contemporary politicians has: the ability to believe the falsehoods he, himself spews.
During his interviews, in his campaign rallies and in televised debates with other presidential candidates, Donald Trump manages to say the most ridiculous idiocies in front of millions of people without any inhibition or embarrassment, and to deny the most blatant evidence of his misconduct, thanks to a shamelessness that seems to be linked precisely to his ability to convince himself of the bullshit he comes up with.
This gift of self-deception, combined with his complete lack of ethical and moral scruples, allows him to publicly state the most grotesque distortions of reality with a self-confidence that, paradoxically, creates a perception of authenticity in that segment of the electorate that is less educated, less equipped to decode the complexity of reality and that, lacking these intellectual tools, relies on an emotional, “gut feeling” method to judge a person and his behavior.
In addition to such issues as immigration or inflation, the fact that the Democratic Party managed to be defeated for the second time by a snake oil salesman like Trump is, therefore, also a rhetorical problem.
It is no coincidence that in the progressive camp, the only figure capable of inspiring the same feeling of genuine candor in the electorate is Bernie Sanders, a politician whose populist credentials, unlike those of Trump’s, are rooted in an authentic and consolidated ideological consistency.
Despite this, during the 2016 primaries, the Vermont senator’s candidacy was sabotaged by the Democratic Party’s leadership that considered his positions too radically left-wing.
And this is precisely the core of the crisis that is affecting progressive parties in America and all over the western world.
The effectiveness of a media message doesn’t consist only in its literal meaning; in the specific content of the words spoken but also in its rhetorical intensity.
An intensity that the American Democratic Party is no longer able to express having ceded its traditional “progressive” guise to the Republican rivals.
A progressivism not intended in an ideological sense but as a dynamism aimed at bringing about change; as an “insurrectionist spirit” that was traditionally associated with the left.
An insurgent spirit capable-of and willing-to shake up a status-quo with which the Democrats instead, have been identified by an electorate desperately in need of change.
Social inequalities in America have reached such vast proportions that any possible remedy implies a radical subversion of the socio-political order. A deep transformation that the gerontocratic leadership of the Democratic Party and its affluent benefactors are unable to express with the necessary passion because, unlike Bernie Sanders, they are not truly willing to pursue it to its ultimate consequences.
During his four years in the White House, Joe Biden has implemented important legislative initiatives in favor of the working class: from the American Rescue Plan to the cap on the cost of insulin, to the expansion of the Affordable Care Act, to the multiple attempts to forgive student loans.
But all this enlightened lawmaking is useless when the electorate is no longer able to associate it with the concrete effects it has on their lives; to distinguish between those who serve their interests and those who don’t.
Last November, millions of men and women working in law enforcement, belonging to minority groups and to the working-class, enthusiastically voted for a political party that has always fought tooth and nail against populist issues such as federal minimum wage increases, union membership, expanded health care. Similarly, they voted for a presidential candidate who has never hidden his contempt for any minority.
A candidate convicted (by a jury of laypeople, not by Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer) of sexual abuse and accused of fomenting a coup attempt that cost the lives of police officers. A presidential candidate whose voice was recorded while trying to convince the Georgia Secretary of State to commit voter fraud or explaining in explicit terms to his amused interlocutor the liberties he was able to take with the young women who entered his beauty pageants.
The disconnect between this blatant dishonesty and people’s inability or unwillingness to perceive it as such, represents the true crisis of democracy.
To reverse this trend, the American Democratic Party has the dual task of finding among its ranks a candidate capable of inflaming the electorate not just with the force of ideas but also with that rhetorical intensity that only those who believe deeply and completely in what they say can project.
And to achieve this result, it’s the party itself that must make a radical change of direction, reclaim its progressive spirit and show the growing mass of America’s dispossessed that it really has their interests at heart.
