Picture Reality
When fantasy is a political weapon, reality is resistance
I am going to say a bit below about the White House’s response to the brutal and unprofessional—yes, exceptionally unprofessional—killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE officers.
But first.
I knew a man once who lived in the rural south. He had managed, over time, to become rather well off.
Still, he lived a relatively simple life as an older man. No showy cars, just a truck. Lots of stuff, yes, but the sort of stuff that you would see gathered in sheds and barns in many farmsteads across the country. There was little, if anything, about this man that I know of that would make him a target of people wishing to take what is his or do him harm.
Nevertheless, he lived with a persistent fear of strangers coming to do him harm. These strangers took two forms in his mind, neither of which had any concrete representation in his rural community: the federal government and blacks from the city.
Because of these fears, his farmstead was well-stocked for self-sufficiency, and he had plenty of guns. It is true, he was not nearly as well-armed as some of his peers. He did not go to many gun shows. No military-grade machinery that I know of. Just pistols, rifles, and shotguns.
As long as I knew this man, I often wondered about his fears. Over time, they came to seem to me more fantasies than fears. That is, I am not sure how much he really feared the feds showing up (why would they?) or bands of urban blacks trekking long distances to find his farm in unfamiliar terrain.
It seemed to me, that is, that his fears served for him a kind of ego-function—they were there to prop up a sense of self that was at once embattled and valiant, under existential threat and yet strong, vulnerable yet prepared.
In one sense, it was always very hard for me to understand where this fantasy came from. Nothing in his biography seemed to justify it. Yet, in another sense, it was clear where it came from. It is common to the rural southern white male psyche, even among those men who are, like this man, quite well off.
Part of what I had to reckon with is the way this fantasy did not grow entirely out of a mirage. It was rooted, at least in part, in the southern experience of Reconstruction, when federal troops did indeed roam the South, sometimes terrorizing its residents, and when blacks for a moment—but just for a moment—felt at liberty to roam in what had been a white-only world.
How was it, I wondered, that this man who came to maturity a full century after Reconstruction came to imbibe its fantasies and fears as if they were present realities? Whatever historical reality they echoed, they were not mere echoes but present realities in his life.
I have been thinking about this recently in light of what’s happening to so many communities in the disunited states of America.
Why is the Trump administration bent on beating upper-midwest big cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, and now the smaller cities of Maine, into some sort of submission? There are far more people without legal citizenship living in Texas and Florida than in these places. If this operation were about sheer numbers, the focus would be elsewhere. But it is far more nebulous. It is about political payback, yes, but also about psyches and fantasies. We are dealing with a regime that is centered on reorganizing reality (actual reality) first and foremost by engaging the fears and fantasies of the population.
After the brutal killing of Alex Pretti, Stephen Miller posted on social media, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” It is tempting—and I’ve heard this many times—to characterize this as but a partisan effort to shape the narrative around Pretti’s death. But I think “partisanship” does not account very well for what we are witnessing in responses like these.
What Miller offered is a fantasy interpretation of real events: “In Minneapolis, radical left-wing terrorists are on the prowl, targeting federal law enforcement. Vigilance and violence are called for.”
The Trump administration is constructed around such fantasies. You know them. You’ve heard them, over and over. But it is tempting to therefore dismiss their accounts as “partisanship,” “ludicrous,” or something equivalent.
It is tempting, that is, to minimize the power of fantasy.
I think instead that the success of Trump and his groypers is further testament to the power of fantasy in grown people’s lives. Like the man I knew.
Today, fantasy has ready technological means of dissemination and inculcation. It is what happens in video games, in chat rooms, and on porn sites. It also is what happens through “news” channels and now even the official social media accounts of the U.S. government.
It used to be that fantasies—for example, of white southern male vigilance—needed social ties and particular cultural contexts to spread. Now, social media can draw a young man in Montana or Maine, even Mexico or Montenegro, into this psyche. Fantasies are everywhere.
I think Miller and Trump each, and each in their own way, understand what they are trying to do in terms of an attempt to shape reality through fantasy.
There are myths—shared collective stories that bolster a sense of the “we.” But then there are fantasies—alluring dreamworlds detached from reality that draw us in to bolster the sense of the “I,” the ego. We are living under a regime of fantasies.
This does not mean we are on the verge of totalitarianism. Totalitarianism rested on an appeal to the masses, a possibility that today is functionally exceptionally difficult due to the fragmentation of social media. But I think Trump and Miller, for different reasons, each understand their job as one that aims to dismantle and destroy democratic and Constitutional norms by changing a sufficient number of people’s perceptions of reality by feeding fantasies. And this was, in fact, a tactic used by the Nazis.
Hannah Arendt writes of this in The Origins of Totalitarianism. The Nazis understood “that democratic government had rested as much on the silent approbation and tolerance of the indifferent and inarticulate sections of the people as on the articulate and visible institutions and organizations of the country.” As such, rather than try to first directly challenge the constitution, the Nazis targeted people’s fantasies: you are a victim, life is a violent struggle, strong men are needed, race and blood are real markers of dignity, Jews are a disease, you can rise again, etc.
This certainly was not “partisanship.” This was a form of psychological warfare applied to a country’s own citizens, fantasies turned into weapons of ideology. It rested on a conviction that the capture of psyches, not engaging in genuine politics, is the surest way to hold and wield power.
Resistance to this, therefore, has a mental quality and must be approached something like a spiritual discipline.
I am reminded of the Jesuit founder, Ignatius of Loyola, who in fending off what he saw as Protestant fantasies (“enthusiasm” was the word), asked his priestly foot soldiers to focus on the work of the mind—not by imbibing a Catholic set of teachings and doctrines, as if one doctrinal platform could dismantle another doctrinal platform, but rather by meditating deliberately on the life of Christ. Example and internal experience, not the chapter and verse of the law, was the key to Ignatian spirituality.
I would not hold the Constitution or democracy up as the equivalent of Christ, but I do think that citizenship these days in the United States, where fantasy has become a chief means of wielding power, calls for something equivalent to an Ignatian discipline of spiritual meditation on what is true, real, just, and good. Today, when even Constitutional rights seem so feeble, exemplars and experiences matter.
There are many ways to do this. Walk in a public park and observe your neighbors. Listen to a history book. Read Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Get the Economist. Listen to others’ stories. Read philosophy or Scripture. Or some combination of such things.
But the point is that citizenship today calls for forms of mental and spiritual exercises that turn our attention toward the truth and reality of the better things. This does not mean a retreat from the news of the day, but rather a refusal to let it define the entirety of our reality. We may find ourselves confused, sad, or frustrated, but the key is to continue to stare at reality in the light of truth and goodness, which are also real, rather than to retreat into fantasies of one kind or another.
The southern man I knew died anxious. In one sense, the fantasies he harbored served him by giving him a sense of self, but in a more profound sense, he became their prisoner, disconnected from reality and, even more sadly, from other people. A life of fantasies will do that. He would have been so much better served by reality.