On the trauma of our time

Mary Trump, in addition to having the misfortune of being Donald Trump's niece, is a psychologist. I did not read her first book, a best-selling memoir of growing up in unhappy proximity to her avaricious uncle. But her interviews, of which I heard plenty on podcasts, always seemed smart and insightful. So when I heard that she'd written The Reckoning, on the theme of the combined trauma of COVID and Donald's effort to overthrow U.S. democracy, I thought she might offer something from which I could learn.

The book turned out to be something different than I'd expected. Nearly half is devoted to an exposition of our country's original sin, what she calls "A Short History of American Failure: 1865–2020." White supremacy justified extermination of native peoples and the enslaving and exploitation of captive Africans. All of us are warped by this heritage, including white beneficiaries of privilege.

Mary Trump doesn't break any new historical ground here -- there are numerous other sources for the same insights. (I would start with W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction but your mileage may vary.) But her account is wonderfully clear and succinct, pitched at a good level for oblivious Americans. Anti-racism educators might do well to adopt it.

And for Trump herself, the meaning of that history is our enduring national trauma.

Ours is an ugly history full of depraved, barbaric, and inhumane behavior carried out by everyday people and encouraged or at least condoned by leaders at the highest levels of government. A denial of that history is a denial of our trauma.

... At almost every step of the way in our history, there were opportunities to make this country more democratic, more open, and more equitable. Instead, the North became more segregated and the South continued to be a closed fascist state.

Trump views our national failure to marginalize her sociopathic uncle and the political party he has gorged himself on as a consequence of our failure to make peace with and offer reparations for the inhuman crimes of our past and present.

Racism is something we white people inflict on our children as it was inflicted on us. It is a violence we commit against them — and as they grow up, they benefit from the same entrenched system that benefits us, because our racist, white supremacist society allows us to benefit from it. We become complacent and selfish and, in the end, just as guilty as the people, and the people before them , who did this to us. The cycle continues. Our ability to be decent and kind is stunted, our desire to belong to a broader community without fear is curtailed. It is a passive experience, until it’s not. The more we exercise our privilege, the easier it gets to cross that line between doing so unconsciously and doing so because we feel entitled to it. It is so easy to get used to the luxury of forgetting and the luxury of never having to know.

Trump the clinical psychologist insists that facing the truth is the only escape from our national trauma.

But if we want to heal, it’s important to resist calls to look to the future, not the past. The past is what shaped us. Trauma is enervating and it is entirely natural to want to move beyond it. But trauma changes us at the cellular level. We carry it with us in our bodies, and there is no moving on without facing what we want to run from, because to dismiss your own pain is to postpone your freedom from it.

... The impact of unacknowledged trauma can be catastrophic — at both the personal and the societal levels — and by failing to invest in the infrastructure necessary to prevent or at least mitigate these kinds of disasters in the future, we leave ourselves open to long-term damage that could be irreparable. One of the most striking developments of the last five years has been the trend toward cruelty, the cultivation of a callousness toward anybody who believes differently or thinks differently. The mantra of “Fuck your feelings” at Donald’s rallies reverberated and reminded us that, even though it goes underground from time to time, the impulse toward cruelty never completely goes away.

... Until the playing field is leveled, America is not a democracy. Until everybody eligible is allowed to vote unimpeded, America is not a democracy. As long as a majority of the majority doesn’t have a problem with the deliberate economic plunder and disenfranchisement of large swaths of the population, and as long as the rest of us ignore it — because to pay attention would be to challenge our privilege — nothing will change.

Sympathetic as I am to Mary Trump's account of our traumatized condition, I am also left wanting something more. There is an alternative to despair, even justified despair. 

We can still struggle for a better democracy, a better society. By razor thin margins, in places where choices were stark, in the recent election majorities of us said no to cruelty, no to lies, no to crushing the life out of the weak.

Trauma can be mitigated and exorcised by action. This may not be the only way, but I find it is my way. The work of the recent campaign, even beyond its relative success, was cleansing for me and I think for many. We can go on -- differently.

As my comrades in UniteHERE insist, "when we fight, we win!" The struggle for justice is the best remedy I know to the traumatized condition of which Mary Trump's uncle is such a national symptom.