What Robert Reich gets wrong about Trump, Elon, and Narcissism.

Narcissism is nothing new, it's a fifty year old cultural phenomenon.

This is almost right, but it misses something critical: that narcissism as a central characteristic of American culture did not emerge in the early 21st century, it emerged in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. What Trump and Elon represent is not the emergence of disruptive narcissism. What Trump and Elon represent is what billionaires from a generation of narcissists look like…

To be clear, narcissism even in the 70s and 80s was not an unknown phenomenon. In fact, in the 70s it was the primary sickness of the age that social critics had latched onto. To the narcissist, the world appears like a mirror. Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (1979) was the most high profile inditement, and was a NY Times bestseller.

Lasch described the growing “generation of Americans…as greedy, selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed, individuals obsessed with pleasure seeking and mindless material consumption.” He described “less pathological forms of narcissism…as dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence.”

In 1979, Jimmy Carter invited Lasch to the White House and then wrote his famous “Malaise Speech” which was remarkably oriented not to foreign affairs, or to the economy, but to the impending energy crisis and the vanishing of the American spirit and community—to the slow but sure post-War rise of narcissism:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Narcissism proliferated in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but by the 90s things began to shift. As David Foster Wallace points out, a culture of narcissism shifted to a culture of irony.

For the generation that came of age during Vietnam, irony was the response to a growing distrust toward anything and everything…Irony was becoming a protective carapace, as Wallace pointed out, a defense mechanism against the possibility of seeming naïve.

To be naive in a world filled with narcissists is to be sentimental, romantic, attached to anything that is not the accumulation of personal wealth and power. On one had then, how irony functions in a narcissistic culture is radical: irony is something shared in an atomized world. It’s a wink and a nod to a friend. It’s drinking Four Loko ironically, listening to Justin Bieber ironically, it’s an elementary form of community in a dead culture.

Something that rarely people are willing to say about Trump rallies or MAGA aesthetics is the irony of it all. You can tell it’s sort of a joke, that even the most diehard MAGA heads know that he’s not serious, but also that they’ve been lost in the irony and that that irony has become reality and that at some point it got out of control. And this kind of solidarity can only go so far.

Because the other thing about irony, as the life story of David Foster Wallace shows clearly, is that it only lasts so long as the primary source of social material. It’s depressing. It’s shuns sincerity. It’s like drinking beer for hydration—it might be helpful if times are really hard, but as the days wear on it will ruin you. Trump is perfect for his role, because he’s not in on the joke, he thinks he’s water but is beer.

Trump is a purely narcissistic billionaire, and Elon is an ironically narcissistic billionaire. Both are damaged people.

Let’s consider Elon’s recent Twitter poll asking if Trump should be reinstated. He posted it, about 51% of people said yes, and then the next day realDonaldTrump was back. How should we read this? What Elon is doing here is ironic narcissism. He is using democracy as an ironic way of pointing out that he has authoritarian power over the platform.

Donald Trump is older. He’s a sincere narcissist. Trump is sincerely “greedy, selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed,” which in a world of irony is almost naively cute. The world really does appear to him like a mirror. Elon’s world is a funhouse mirror.

What Robert Reich misses is that these two are not disruptive narcissists, they are just narcissistic billionaires who have, as a result of 30 years of neoliberal American economic policy, found themselves with enough money to turn the world into what they see in the mirror and what they dream about at night. What Trump sees in the mirror is a greedy, selfish, shallow person obsessed with pleasure seeking and material wealth who is dependent on the affirmation of others for self-worth and who believes himself to be accountable to nobody, and he’s right.

But the important thing is that he’s also right about his generation. That’s why there’s a market for him as a public figure. He’s their avatar of pure narcissism. The same is true for Elon. He’s their (my?) avatar of ironic narcissism.

The problem right now is that sincerity is not cool. It’s the reason Elizabeth Warren isn’t president, but instead a Senator from a place called Massachusetts with the highest Human Development Index (HDI) in history. That’s what sincerity gets you.

The thing about populism and democracy is that politics emerge from culture. When the culture is good, so are politics. But when culture is narcissistic, so are politics. This is the wicked problem: How do we put people with a sincere commitment to freedom, equality, and dignity in positions of governmental and corporative power, despite a culture of narcissism?

Despite the latent desires of many of my environmental friends, the answer cannot be benevolent authoritarianism. And thus the only answer is a cultural change. Young people must become less personally narcissistic, which means first and foremost I need to become less narcissistic.

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