Trump and social change in the USA

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III. Social Change and its Tribulations.

Any social change in any part of the world would affect the rest of the world, depending on circumstances and other factors that are outside the limits of this post. Some changes are easy to talk about because of their clarity and undeniable agreement on their impact, while other changes are not, like the current changes in Africa and their expected impact on the geopolitics of the world in the future.  

After WWII Europe took less than three decades to recover, reorganize, unite, and move toward stable democracies, resulting in unification. Because of the nature of the link between Europe and the US that major change had an immediate and strong impact on the US, but so on Europe too. The US had to adjust to relating to  equals, who continued to change to the better. The eighties' century witnessed  very ‘surprising’ changes.  Soviet Union and China, the two big communist countries (one party system) changed direction. The Russian party under the leadership of Gorbachev and the Chinese party under Deng Chawping reached an internal conclusion that communism has done its work (taking the country out of backwardness to modernism) and was the time to work on allowing the dormant potentials in the country to be activated freely. Gorbachev declared Glasnost and Perestroika, dissolved the Soviet Union, and ended the domination of the Russian Communist party over the communist parties in the Soviets. In China Chawping took a different tact to declare the end of old communism. He maintained the unity of the party as the organization that could manage diversities and control possible forces of disintegration. 
 In Marxism, communism is a stage in socio-historical evolution. It comes when a country is stagnant and not changing. This is why it always came in the form of revolutions because the ruling class always resists change. It is the  responsibility of the ideologues of the communist parties to anticipate and prepare for the next stage after communism. That is what shocked the world when it happened, because those decisions were made by the leaders of the communist parties themselves. All that time, communism was considered an imposition on people, when it originally freed people from the system of servitude that was imposed on them by the Tsars of Russia and the Mandarins of china. However, no one -either from the socialist or the capitalist camps -came up -till now- with what the next stage is going to be (Globalization is not a socio-historical phase).

The US problem with Europe’s change started with R. Reagan. Reagan, in terms of politics and world knowledge was not much better than Trump. But his sunny and charming personality, the optemistic smile on his face helped people to forgo several inappropriate situations. At the time of his presidency the republican party had distinguished minds and Reagan showed willingness to leave serious matters to the experts. He gave the US a pleasant period of governance. Unfortunately, instead of noting and thinking of what was happening in Europe and China a wave self-deception swathed the political scene. Reagan, was very ill-informed about what was happening outside the US. He did not realize that Gorbachev was taking Russia to a new phase in its history, and china was preparing for a new place under the sun. Naively, he thought that asking Gorbachev to bring the Berlin wall down was like God’s promise to Joshua to bring Jericho’s wall down.  He also thought that the evil empire (Lenin inherited the Tsars empire and divided it into 15 sovereign Soviets) disintegrated on his demand, when the fact was that the communist party had decided, few years before, to chnage. Self-deception by considering the world changes a result of the US victory in the cold war had serious negative results. One of those results is the US getting in unwise involvement in the politics of the middle east (Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Pakistan, etc) and becoming a target for Islamic phantasm.

After Reagan the US had two reasonably informed president, Bush senior, and Clinton (excluding certain personal attributes). It also had Obama who is politically on the same level of the best politicians in Europe. Since Reagan, the wave of self-deception and pompous grandiosity kept ebbing and lurking in the background till the election of Trump. Self-deception in terms of pomposity and grandiosity got reversed. 
Instead of saying “we are the greatest and the best” it is now we want to go back to being the best and the greatest.

This is a political riddle, but psychoanalytic thinking could be of much help in solving this riddle.

Psychoanalysts working with social phenomena use one of the three metapsychologies: topographic, economic, and the dynamic. Most, prefer the dynamic metapsychology because it allows them to mix it with the structural point of view (Ego, Id, Super ego). Thus, they could utilize the known psychodynamics of the individual in explaining social phenomena in the same way. This is not right because there is are collective social agencies like group ego or social id; individual agencies are products of individual experiences. However, using the topographic metapsychology, with a fundamental change could be closer to correctness. The fundamental change is reversing the link between the conscious and the unconscious in social phenomena: What is conscious in the individual is unconscious in the society, and visa-versa (most sexual problems in an individual are unconscious, but they are conscious social issues).  I made that observation and could support by evidence, but I am not sure of my explanation of it. 
The individual is born with mental function that needs and is disposed to mature. It starts with the dominance of primary process in it workings but gradually  the secondary process prevails without the elimination of the primary process. The subject is born with ‘an’ unconscious that is allows the emergence of  consciousness. The society is formed of the consciousness of its individuals but engenders unconscious strata of its consciousness. An Islamic society is conscious of its ideology but is unconscious of its illogical sense of entitlement.

Back to the USA of Trump. Firstly, there is Trump’s base on one side and the rest of the US. Trump’s base is consciously admitting that the US is not great and they have to go back to be great again. Unconsciously, they do not see hope in change and advancing to a different future. This view is supported and evidenced by their hanging on to the economic boom of the present and refusing to look at its roots in the near past and the dangers around its future. Trump’s base is unconsciously pessimistic and incapable of facing a reality that could be very different from their phantasies.  The rest of the US is conscious of critical situation and unconsciously realizes that their country has to go through radical change not just cosmetic retouching. But, this large section of the US people faces three preconscious real difficulties. The first is that a loud call for change could put them in conflict with the so-called American Values (not the place for dealing with that topic here). The second is a long history of distorted meanings of conceptions, interpretations, terminology, and superficial understanding of some of the items of the Bill of Rights. The third is the two-party system. The recent political events in the US exposed the danger to democracy under a two-party system, and fragility of the checks and balances as a guarantee for the rule of law.

Conclusion.

History is progress in a dialectical motion: event-its antithesis- a synthesis that becomes the thesis of the next step.  Obama’s presidency looked like a synthesis of Clinton’s and Bush’s (junior) presidencies.  It was not, it was a unique presidency because it declared a radical change in the American society- electing a black president and having a strong- effective- federal government. Then comes Trump to spoil all expectations and defies ‘all mighty history’. Are American people going to restore history’s dignity and make the needed radical changes to its sytem? Or are we (Canadians and the people of the Americas) going endure the brunt of continued political Trump hurricanes?