Many books on the Twilight Zone-esque 2016 presidential election campaign have been published and many more certainly are going to be written. So far, a majority have chronicled the (purported) lurid details of daily life in the White House, stuff of political theater and scandal (and even comedy). Unhinged, anyone? Others have examined the history of right-wing movements or the rise of certain economic forces like globalization in order to contextualize the Trump phenomenon. Author and former attorney Ben Fountain, in his 2018 entry Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution, continues in this tradition, with a heap of psychological examination of the American psyche on top of the usual historical chronicling.
In his account of 2016, Fountain begins each chapter (one per each month of the 2016 campaign) with an immersionary litany of monthly news, rapid-fire summations of the big stories internationally, before zooming in domestically to the dizzying array of forces active in the American political scene that he believes could precipitate a potential civil war or proportionate cataclysmic event of national crisis. A kind of window on the world to the threats brewing abroad to freedom and a contrasting of them with the dangerous political squabblings of 2016 that threaten to undermine from within instead. (A bit of irony there.) Perhaps the claim yet another existential crisis after the Civil War and Great Depression is a bit of a stretch in current conditions, but it definitely is a jolt for readers, a call to heed the social, economic and political forces that are converging and giving rise to not just Trump, but to demagogues like him across the world. Fountain is not shy about shining light on these forces he believes to be at the root of current American woes: a system predicated on white supremacy that has put people (often white) into positions of power to institute a plutocratic system of racial, economic, and gender-based discrimination. A common refrain throughout the book is Fountain's core assertion of a base systemic logic at work in our daily lives of "profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation" (Fountain, 2018, p. 4).
Democrat or Republican, no one is spared from blistering (and honest) critique in Fountain's analysis. While he notes that conservative philosophies have had a closer alignment to privileged politicians and tycoons at the expense of the working class they purport to liberate from a bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy, mainstream Democrats have also moved closer to this new centrist political position starting in the late 1990s, with more business friendly party planks alongside those pertaining to traditional social justice and environmental protection ones. Oh, and there were many appeals to the near-universal (and universally overused, in my opinion) "middle class values" of hard work and less government dependence (Fountain, 2018, p. 258). In an attempt to gain a broader coalition and re-brand, Democrats may have inadvertently shafted their traditional minority and union constituencies in a time of rising income inequality, uneven globalization, immigration crises, the rise of social media and politics as reality TV, emerging philosophies of subjective reality, and increasing far-right sympathies. Meanwhile, the conservative strategy of "campaign on a platform decrying government as dysfunctional and ineffective, and once you're in power do everything you can to make government dysfunctional and ineffective" does nothing to improve the situation (Fountain, 2018, p. 383). In turn, this leads to corresponding (mostly justified) reactionary responses from both left (the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter) and right-wing (the Tea Party) populists.
Instead, both parties have been guilty of pandering more to the One Percent than the majority, complicit in maintaining the former's preferred method of control in the "fantasy industrial complex," or "FIC," defined as the "saturation" of our personal and national scene with an "onslaught of media and messaging that...dims our capacity for understanding the world as it actually is" and instead promotes a relentless barrage of fantasy and the simple and lurid (Fountain, 2018, p. 312). In other words, as the chaos of 2016 unfolded, the American psyche was already coping with the trauma wrought by the FIC, designed to enrage and confuse the response to serious problems like income inequality, racial and gender discrimination, and climate change. What a double whammy. It becomes easier to understand why Trump's warped and racially-charged perception of the American Dream epitomized in his campaign slogan of "Make America Great Again" so easily found its mark, bringing to power a man that has so far raised a middle finger to his working class base with a relentless campaign of deregulation and tax breaks that gutted the New Deal-promoted (relative) stability we enjoy today.
The question left at the conclusion of Beautiful Country Burn Again is whether America can manage the collective will to solve the problems it faces rather than retreating into an alternative reality in reaching a new New Deal, a reworking of the social contract to better align our system of government with serving all and not a few of its citizens. Here, like other authors of the books so far attempting to contextualize 2016, Fountain has difficulty in prescribing a specific treatment for America's ills, rather urging the latter updates of our social contract and calling for Americans to re-realize our common humanity in order to keep democratic governance above the rising tide of globalization and capitalism and other planetary problems like climate change. Perhaps that is unfair, considering the complexity of the project that needs to be undertaken to solve the complex, borderless issues of our era. If anything, Fountain's message of the need to reconnect with our common humanity in order to govern better is enough, a first step in a long journey of national healing.
Works Cited:
Fountain, Ben. (2018). Beautiful Country Burn Again: Democracy, Rebellion, and Revolution. New York: HarperCollins.
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