Code switching and ideological misrecognition and the 2016 US presidential elections

It takes a while for a national trauma to sink in and register.

The novel "All Quiet on the Western Front" was published in 1929, eleven years after the end of WW1.

In 1924, six years after the close of that war, "Storm of Steel" was published in Germany, portraying war not as tragedy and a fraud but as a great, mysterious, elemental force to be experienced and survived.

In 1978, the movies "Coming Home" and "The Deer Hunter" came out, five years after the United States withdrew from Vietnam. In 1979, "Apocalypse Now" came out.

In 1982, "Rambo: First Blood" came out, a very different kind of Vietnam movie. 

In some respects, the first "Rambo" movie echoes a certain postwar sentiment that has always been marginalized in the media. While other Vietnam movies portrayed the horror of war, and later "Rambo" sequel glamorized combat, "First Blood" reflected an alienation with a corrupt civilian life that one finds in the American film noire of the post-WW2 period, into the 1950s. War was a hardship, but honorable, with genuine camaraderie, and promotion was based on talent and effort, not connections and inherited status. 

Speaking of nostalgia, here's an update on the classic Marxist concept of "ideological misrecognition". For Marx, people need to be enlightened about their exploitation so that they can cast off the false beliefs of the status quo and embrace revolution. Later "critical theorists" identified misrecognition as active propaganda and not just an effect of exploitation. More recently, misrecognition has been understood as nostalgia for a lost object which is actually fictitious (e.g., an idealized vision of a pre-colonial order in the Third World).

That sounds a lot like "First Blood". 

But it also sounds a lot like Donald Trump talking about making American "great again."

There is the question of the exact psychological dynamic of how misrecognition works, as well as the question of whether there is ever any real liberation from misrecognition, or if all cognition is misrecognition.

There is an anthropological and psychological mystery of why American Indians, when they watch movies about the "wild west", tend to root for the cowboys and not the Indians.

Basically, the brain interprets events into an internal language. So when American Indians watch a western, they perceive the characters in the movie in term of the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys, not in terms of settlers versus aboriginals. The brain does not absorb the literal truth of the movie, but rather conforms to the narrative elements of the story.

The same thing is true with Donald Trump supporters. Seven years ago there was a total meltdown in the real-estate and financial sectors, which was basically due to arrogance, corruption, and ignorance that pervaded the political and economic realms. At an unconscious level, this disturbs Trump supporters. But because of their authoritarian tendencies, they cannot consciously rebel against the elite who make the (corrupt) policies and rules. So they blame foreigners and rule breakers for America's problems. The one group of foreign rule-breakers that they are familiar with in daily life is migrant workers from Mexico. So in their minds, this group becomes America's greatest problem (and a perfect metaphor for globalization).

Bernie Sanders followers, who are more educated and less authoritarian, are vastly more clear-eyed about the flaws in the American political and economic system. But they have their own distortion of economic reality. They claim to be concerned about growing income inequality in the United States.

But is income inequality really growing? Bill Gates is the wealthiest man in the world today, with a worth of $80 billion; he was born into wealth and went to the best schools. One century ago, John D. Rockefeller was worth $340 billion and Andrew Carnegie $310 billion; they were both born into modest circumstances (in fact, into poverty, by today's standards). By historical standards, income inequality has been shrinking, but upward mobility has been stifled. And historically, income inequality (Equality of Condition) never really bothered Americans, American life was always about upward mobility (Equality of Opportunity).

But the followers of Sanders don't use the less rhetorically appealing battle cry that "It is becoming more difficult to move up in the world." Rather, they use the stark language of "inequality" from the civil rights movement -- even though the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was really limited to equality before the laws (Equality of Opportunity), not income equality. Sanders supporters want to move up in the world, but they cannot admit it, not publicly, and not even to themselves.