The human Rorschach blot
In the 1987 movie “Broadcast News,” Aaron, a TV news reporter played by Albert Brooks, explains to Jane, a producer played by Holly Hunter, why the handsome anchorman Tom, played by William Hurt, is actually the Devil.
When the Devil walks among us, Aaron avers, he will not have horns and a pointy tail. He’ll be popular.
“He’ll never do an evil thing! He’ll never deliberately hurt a living thing ... he will just, bit by little bit, lower our standards where they are important. Just a tiny little bit. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit. And he’ll talk about all of us really being salesmen,” Aaron says.
Another thing that happened in 1987 — and this is a total coincidence — was the publication of “The Art of the Deal,” arguably the first indication that the general public could be snakecharmed into believing Trump’s phony mythology.
Trump’s ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, writing as Trump, gave us this: “I play to people’s fantasies … People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”
Schwartz would later damn himself for … well, for helping to lower our standards, just a little tiny bit. Truthful hyperbole, he admitted, was just deceit in a red necktie.
The political arc that stretches from 2015 to the present moment is beribboned with lower standards. On the excellent podcast “The Run-Up,” host Astead W. Herndon schmoozed with Nikki Haley supporters in New Hampshire. One guy who jumped out at me was Pete Brown from Amherst, N.H. (Home of Baboosic Lake and the Ponemah Bog Wildlife Sanctuary.)
Brown, a “very much Republican-leaning independent,” said he was ashamed to admit he voted for Trump in 2016. Brown was turned off by Trump’s 2020 campaign and called Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the election disgraceful.
Brown said he voted for Trump in 2016 because he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Hillary Clinton. He voted for Biden in 2020 because he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Trump. He could bring himself to vote for Haley or Chris Christie and wished aloud that they could somehow merge their bases, maybe through a deal to make Christie into Haley’s running mate. (Not happening, Pete.)
Brown is a of one. He’s also an of many. There’s something civically tragic about voting over and over for the lesser of two evils or the evil of two lessers. More than one Haley supporter told Herndon that their main goal is to avoid a Biden v. Trump rematch. They see Haley as the person — from either party — most likely to avert that.
Which brings me to the work of Donald Winnicott, a British psychoanalyst who introduced (among other things) the idea of the “good enough parent.” Winnicott believed the perfect really is the enemy of the good. The would-be perfect parent doesn’t really give the child much operating room when the child begins to realize how many things in life kind of — not Winnicott’s term — suck.
Haley is the good enough presidential candidate. There’s nothing messianic about her. In fact, she’s made it clear that she’s slightly untrustworthy by flipping more often in the last 10 years than any other American not named Simone Biles. What she flips about most often is Trump himself. He is always, to her, either thoroughly unacceptable or our last best hope.
This week, she was asked at a public forum about the cause of the Civil War. Haley’s body language said a lot. She pivoted so that her back was to the questioner and took several steps away from him, exhaled, smiled, turned back and said, “Well, don’t come with an easy question or anything!”
And then she said, “I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run — the freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do.”
Mmmm. I suppose you could argue that, yes, freedoms and what people could and couldn’t do were top-of-mind issues for enslaved persons.
She asked the questioner what thought the cause was. He said he wasn’t running for president.
Haley then went on at some length about her view that the Civil War was caused by federal overreach. You know, government getting up in people’s business.
Question Guy said he was struck by the fact that, in 2023, Haley could answer that question without mentioning slavery.
“Well, what do you want me to say about slavery?” Haley responded, almost as if it was news to her this had anything at all to do with the Civil War.
Haley’s previous jobs included governor of South Carolina, where the first shots of the war were fired. This isn’t one of those tough geography questions on “Jeopardy!”
But during the Trump era, hard right positions on race have come back into fashion. You may recall that, last summer, one of Haley’s rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, actively defended a
Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press new state public school curriculum that included language about how slaves “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
You wouldn’t think that in 2023, the moral repugnance of slavery would be a tricky minefield, but the GOP is so beholden to its Crazytown Caucus that closed books are now open. Maybe actual minefields are next. The woke mob is trying to make you forget all the good they do.
Winnicott argued that the successful parent — by being merely good enough as opposed to comprehensively comforting — prepares the child for disillusionment.
Haley is doing a great job of that.
The next day — Thursday — she announced that, of course, slavery was a cause of the Civil War. The previous day she had seemed baffled by the idea that there was any connection.
She looks good compared to the guy who’s shopping the idea that being a dictator might have an upside and maybe even compared to the guy who seems like he really ought to be spending more time with his great-great-great grandchildren.
But she’s doing it by being a human Rorschach blot. What do you see? A Spartanburg reactionary or a hip Turtle Bay UN global pragmatist? What do you to see? And what do you want her to say about … anything?