Politics and the thought-terminating cliche

Michelle Goldberg (gift link) makes an obvious but all the more important point, given the denial that continues to obscure it among not just right wingers, but plenty of centrists, including people like Hakeem Jefferies, Maintainer of Congressional Decorum.

Goldberg’s point is a variation on something I said yesterday, about the fugue state that the Republican party has now entered, in which the fact that it has become a classic political cult requires all good party men to treat each of Trump’s daily reversals and swerves from the previous day’s policies as just today’s masterstroke of genius by the omniscient and infallible Leader.

The right invented the term Trump Derangement Syndrome to dismiss analysis of Trump’s autocratic tendencies, compulsive lying and generally detestable character as liberal hysteria. For conservatives who don’t want to engage with substantive criticism of their leader, it functions as a thought-terminating cliché, a term often used by people who study cults to describe ideological formulations that short-circuit critical thinking. Trump Derangement Syndrome implies that if someone tells you something about Trump that you don’t want to hear, that person must be crazy.

But the real derangement lies in either the refusal or the inability to see Trump clearly. A few months ago, if people had predicted that Trump would cut off intelligence-sharing with Ukraine, destroy U.S.A.I.D., free all the Jan. 6 convicts, put his lackey Kash Patel in charge of the F.B.I. and turn us into a despised enemy of Canada, they’d have been accused of unhinged political hatred. As Nick Catoggio wrote in The Dispatch, Trump’s second term is “shaping up to be what doomsayers thought his first term would be.” . . .

In some ways, it’s understandable that Republicans would impute secret virtues to Trump given both his historic political successes and his rapidly increasing wealth. Trump’s opponents have repeatedly underestimated his connection with a large segment of the American electorate, and his improbable victories have made him seem, at least to his allies, like an almost mystical figure. And if you truly believe that America’s capitalist system rewards merit rather than audacity and grift, the riches Trump has extracted from his office imply a measure of genius. He keeps winning. Surely he must know what he’s doing?

It should be obvious, however, that extraordinary skill as a demagogue does not necessarily translate to wisdom as a ruler. If Trump’s lickspittles refuse to see that, it could be because facing up to reality — that they are party to the deconstruction of a once-great superpower — is at once shameful and frightening. Far easier to invent a Trump who isn’t there, a canny savant whose policy lurches are driven by some unseen strategic logic.

Speaking at The New York Times’ DealBook summit in December, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said Trump had grown over the past eight years. “What I’ve seen so far is he is calmer than he was the first time — more confident, more settled,” Bezos said. Sounds like Trump Derangement Syndrome to me.

Goldberg links to a recent Guardian essay about the concept of the “thought-terminating cliche,” a term coined by Robert Jay Lifton in 1961. This kind of thinking, or more properly non-thinking, is central to the kind of warped cognition at the center of cults, but it’s much more prevalent than that. It’s deployed regularly by conservative politicians in various contexts to shut down any critical inquiry (Plenty of thought-terminating cliches are used by leftists as well, but the crucial difference here is that, on the left at least, only in the most extreme totalitarian circumstances is cutting off critical inquiry consciously celebrated as a good thing. By contrast, the purported social virtues of stupidity are central to conservative thought almost by definition.)

Thought-terminating cliches exist, of course, in every language. In China, some government officials are known to exploit the phrase “Mei banfa”, meaning “No solution”, or “There’s nothing to be done” to justify inaction. The saying “Shouganai”, a linguistic shrug of resignation similar to “It is what it is”, is similarly weaponised in Japan. The Polish idiom “Co wolno wojewodzie, to nie tobie, smrodzie” roughly means “People in positions of power can get away with anything” (hence, don’t bother putting up a fight). According to Walter Scheirer, author of A History of Fake Things on the Internet, thought-terminating cliches commonly carry a defeatist flavour. It’s hard work, involving psychological friction, to figure out the best way to think about complex subjects such as climate policy or geopolitics. Any licence to give up the struggle is going to be appealing.

Tobia Spampatti, a decision scientist at the University of Geneva, argues that such phrases become especially problematic when wielded by politicians with decision-making power. In 2023, Australian conservatives used the rhyming slogan “If you don’t know, vote no” to discourage citizens from supporting a constitutional amendment that would have afforded Indigenous people representation in parliament. Spampatti, who studies the relationship between information processing and beliefs about climate change, says disinformation tends to spike around major events, like elections and climate deals. That’s when thought-terminating cliches do their wiliest work. Examples used to squash environmental efforts range from “Climate change is a hoax” and “Scientists have a political agenda” to “Climate change is natural” (or the related “The climate has always changed”), “Humans will adapt” and “It’s too late to do anything now”

I noted yesterday that at its far too prevalent worst the Internet basically functions like some sort of pervasive thought-terminating cliche, when I argued that we need to resist the nihilism and irony poisoning which is the spirit of our age, and the Internet’s most dangerous and addictive drug. 

This mental tendency is much on my mind on the moment, because I just taught Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Hannah Arendt argues that Eichmann’s most crucial personality flaw was not some sort of sadism or sociopathy — the numerous psychiatrists who examined him all declared him to be psychologically normal — but “an inability to think.” By this Arendt means that Eichmann’s mind was a tissue of thought-terminating cliches, although she doesn’t use that exact term (She doesn’t reference Lifton, who had just published the idea, but I would be surprised if she wasn’t aware of it, given her intellectual interests and voracious erudition).

MAGA is at its core a crypto-fascist ideology precisely because it so enthusiastically embraces and celebrates an inability or unwillingness to think. In this way it is merely an extreme form of classic conservative thought. The gap between Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution is not nearly as large as superficial appearances would make it. The most radical revolutionary is always a disappointed reactionary.