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A big part of what makes that @Axios interview so good is that Jonathan Swan understands the role of a very principled irrationalism at the heart of the reactionary ideology driving Trump & many of his handlers & backers. Notice: very first question is about "positive thinking."
The rest of the interview is a meticulous deconstruction of this ideological orientation.
"Positive thinking" is not just a generic phrase. It refers specifically in this context to an ideology developed by noted self-help huckster, Norman Vincent Peale. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/24/894967922/norman-vincent-peale-was-a-conservative-hero-known-well-beyond-his-era
"Positive thinking" is not just a generic phrase. It refers specifically in this context to an ideology developed by noted self-help huckster, Norman Vincent Peale. https://www.npr.org/2020/07/24/894967922/norman-vincent-peale-was-a-conservative-hero-known-well-beyond-his-era
(The Axios interview in question: https://www.axios.com/full-axios-hbo-interview-donald-trump-cd5a67e1-6ba1-46c8-bb3d-8717ab9f3cc5.html )
Peale was a minister and self-styled self-help guru who penned, "The Power of Positive Thinking." Trump grew up attending services at Peale's church. He credits him as one of his greatest influences.
https://www.cnbc.com/.../how-self-help-author-norman...
https://www.cnbc.com/.../how-self-help-author-norman...
The teachings are rooted in advice about how to get ahead in business dealings & come out on top in negotiations. It's basically a whole way of life developed out of best practices on being a confidence man. (Nxivm is one extreme example of "business advice"-turned-violent cult.)
If you are upbeat, energetic, and confident, you will be better able to close the deal and come out ahead. The advice, like a lot of cult-type self-help techniques, actually works pretty well for a lot of the situations it's applied to.
If you're trying to convince someone to purchase from you, you are absolutely much more likely to be effective if you, yourself, believe in the product you are selling and are able to quiet any of your own inner qualms and doubts about its quality, or the ethics of selling it.
For another example of this, look at multi-level marketing schemes. "Be upbeat and think positive, and you will make more sales." This advice turns out to be pretty effective.
People apply it, it works; for them that confirms the ideology: they can overcome anything and solve *all* of their problems, if only they just think "positively" in all aspects of their life. "Focus on positive possibilities, don't think too hard about negative realities."
Of course not every area of life is a deal to be struck through individual cunning. But by the time people apply these ideas to areas beyond being a huckster, they're so committed that as the techniques stop working, they become convinced it's they themselves that are the problem
And if it's you who are in trouble, at the end of your rope, having a hard time—well, it's you who just isn't thinking positively enough.
And if it's a whole country that's struggling with pandemic, joblessness, poverty... well, you get the idea.
And if it's a whole country that's struggling with pandemic, joblessness, poverty... well, you get the idea.
If you have this analysis in mind in watching that interview, it clarifies one key reason why Swan is able to be focused and relentless, and devastating, in a manner that many interviewers haven't been when dealing with Trump.
It also makes sense of Trump's weird, desperate punting of every attempt to penetrate his delusional bubble w/ a dose of reality & of why Trump is clearly convinced that the most important thing he can do right now is to keep doubling down harder and harder on his rosy unreality.
This is politics--indeed, it is life--as deal, as confidence trick, all taken to a horrifying extreme. Writing him off as simply one demented man doesn't allow us to get at the much deeper and generational bourgeois thought-pathology he represents.
(I say "bourgeois" because of Positive Thinking's essential relationship to & origins within marketing & business techniques, & because of Peale's popularity among ruling class elites including several U.S. Presidents. Reagan awarded Peale the Presidential Medal of Freedom)
We also hear echoes of Bush admin's infamous distinction between despised "reality-based community" and so-called "faith-based community" (of which they proudly counted themselves a part, in principled opposition to basing thought in reason and reality). https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html
I've especially had Peale and "positive thinking" on the mind lately because I watched Mary Trump's interview with Stephanopoulos. I went in skeptical, presuming it would be mere tabloid sensationalism, but it's not that.
Mary T.'s central thesis that the story of the Trump family is a case study in subordinating every other human value to the worship of money, seems to me quite apt.
But I've also long been interested in the creepy nexus of cults, MLMs, and "self-help." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/10/how-self-help-author-norman-vincent-peale-influenced-donald-trump.html
But I've also long been interested in the creepy nexus of cults, MLMs, and "self-help." https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/10/how-self-help-author-norman-vincent-peale-influenced-donald-trump.html
