Donald Trump vs The Cathedral

A Neo-Reichian View

The thing that I love about Donald Trump has nothing to do with who he is as a person, or as a politician. What I love about him is that his very presence shines a powerful light into the heart of modern-day America. Trump evokes strong reactions - either pro or anti - and in so doing shows us the hidden workings of society.

It was somewhere midway through Trump’s presidency when I first became aware of the term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” (TDS). Right-leaning academics in the US coined this pseudo-psychiatric term to describe the visceral sense of reactive hatred that Trump conjured up in their left-leaning counterparts who, within academia, were in a clear majority. Even living in Istanbul, I have met people with TDS. I have met people who literally twitch when you mention the word “Trump” to them.

As a Brit, to me Trump is essentially just a big, brash American. He talks loud. He swaggers. He makes sexist comments. He shoots his mouth off. Brought up on a diet of Top Cat, the Dukes of Hazzard and The A Team, to me, rightly or wrongly, this seems like just normal American behaviour. So I was intrigued that there could be such bizarrely visceral reactions to him amongst his fellow Americans.

I’m not going to bang on about the “Deep State” here. Though the sheer intensity and sheer level of organisation of the attacks mounted on Trump do seem to point to a degree of background co-ordination way beyond the normal shoving and elbowing of the US political scene. Trump most certainly does appear to threaten the continued existence of a significant chunk of the permanent infastructure of state. For why else would they need to behave in such a co-ordinated fashion to try and get rid of him? If you attack an animal that survives by diffusing its presence, it will have to show itself to defend itself.

But this is not about the “Deep State.” Rather I want to look at “the cathedral.”

The cathedral is the term coined by underground philosopher Curtis Yarvin to describe the ruling academic elite of a nation, its most looked-up-to academics and journalists. In the US, that means Harvard, Yale, the New York Times and the Washington Post. These bodies act as the vanguard of the intellectual establishment of America. They set the tone for everyone in the States who considers themselves to be a “thinking person.” In fact, if you wish to even be considered a “thinking person” in America, you will have to be at least reasonably aligned with their stance.

Although, over time, these four institutions might make vast shifts in political leanings, in one aspect they will remain true - coherence. Through thick and thin, in both left-leaning times and right-leaning times, they will remain in broad lockstep with one another. There will be a degree of difference of opinion amongst them, commensurate with a modern democracy. But, fundamentally, they are singing from the same hymnsheet.

With regard to the vast and ever-shifting amount of social and political issues that any country and its people constantly face, these four institutions basically tell the thinking classes what they should think. And, importantly, these positions and often the issues themselves reflect what the cathedral, and the nation it serves, need in order to remain in power. In the great, Darwinian marketplace of ideas and strategies, those which serve to allow the old older to remain at the helm get to be selected. For this is actually natural and pretty much how any hierarchical power structure functions over time. It serves its own need to continue first.

So this is the situation. The vast majority of the 100 million or so members of the American middle-classes take their cues on the kinds of things that they should think about the world around them from these four august bodies. Not in the way that a “politburo” simply tells you your opinion, allowing no other option. But rather by immersing you in an information landscape that seems diverse but that is, on key issues, remarkably consistent. And if you want to continue to be considered a “thinking person,” with the attendant sense of intellectual prestige that this offers, you need to be reasonably aligned.

And along comes Donald Trump. And he threatens all that. The orange-haired populist does not sing from the same hymnsheet. He has taken a large stick and is bashing at the walls of the cathedral, causing its foundations to start to shake.

And because of his continued presence in the US political scene, the whole semi-submerged apparatus of state, academia and journalism has to gird its loins and mount a co-ordinated attack on this threat to its very existence.

And it is not just the cathedral itself that is threatened. It is also all those tens of millions of middle-class Americans who rely on the cathedral’s way of seeing the world to hold their self-esteem up and keep self-doubt at bay. Hence TDS. Hence the twitching.

Personally, I would love Trump to continue. I think that the tsunami that he is creating in the US political and academic establishment needs to happen if America is to return to a position of global cultural dominance. The cathedral is hopelessly antiquated. It’s become like something out of Mervyn Peake. There are just too many vested interests and vested positions. Academia has to be shaken to its core on a regular basis, less the cultural landscape that results from it become stale and rigid.

The fear that we have of being shaken to our core is exactly our fear of mind-body integration. And to keep this fear at bay, us humans create institutions. Institutions that can hold our mental perceptions of the world rigidly in place, allowing slight change but never allowing our foundations to be shaken in the way that they actually need to be shaken.

Trump persists because, in my opinion, some deep force that flows through the human unconscious is pushing for this shaking to start now. It’s been put off for too long. We have avoided it for too long. And now it’s time.