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.”

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?

More: https://www.courthousenews.com/imaginary-revenge/