What did you do in the war against reality, Daddy?

George W. Bush in Texas with chainsaw. From Erynn's Pinterest.

I've been reading and digesting and rereading this essay, "Normalnost", in the current LA Review of Books, by Peter Pomerantsev and in conjunction with the marketing of his new book, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, which brings together the Russia theme and the Trump and Brexit themes across some unexpected parameters: not that Pomerantsev discounts the thing we've come to expect about "them" doing something horrible to "us", but that he sees the horrible thing that's happened to us as something that also happened to them, first, and something you could notice at first in the world of the arts, at the time of the breakup of the USSR, in the collapse of "a system of making sense of the world":

In History Becomes Form, the Russian art historian Boris Groys describes this process as the “Big Tsimtsum,” a term he borrows from the Jewish mystical tradition of the Kabbalah, an alternative version of creation where God first brings the word into being and then retreats from it. “[T]he withdrawal of Soviet power, or the Tsimtsum of Communism, created the infinite space of signs emptied of sense,” writes Groys. “Soviet ideology knew nothing of chance. […] It saw itself as the necessary product of historical development as understood by dialectical materialism. […] In the early 1990s this ideology was suddenly gone — and the world became devoid of meaning[, leaving Soviets] in a sea of empty signifiers.”

Which led to the Russian avant-garde of conceptualists and performance artists becoming increasingly fixated on the panic of meaninglessness, depicting meaning as disposable or abandoning language altogether or contrariwise trying to rebuild meaning as a kind of group-therapy activity, when

Pavel Pepperstein toyed with the idea of rebuilding sense inside tiny bubbles. “[H]e invest[ed] his energy and ambition above all in the creation of microsocial groups that are bound together by a common ideology,” writes Groys. Pepperstein described the end of the Soviet Union as a period where “the sky opened up,” akin to a psychedelic experience, “when a rupture between systems brings anxiety as well as the promise of renewal.” He and his collaborators created what they termed “Medical Hermeneutics.” “The texts and images of Medical Hermeneutics always refer to other texts and images […] [and] repeatedly reveal empty spaces, seemingly chance constellations of words and images […] that [are filled] with meaning,” writes Groys. In Pepperstein’s own words it meant “investigating social consciousness and also applying gentle therapeutic measures to calm it down.”

The really spooky thing being that some of these artists ended up in political consulting work, in the management of the presidential campaigns of Boris Yeltsin in 1996 and Vladimir Putin in 2000, which began by largely discarding all the traditional categories of political attachment, the raft of "ideologies" on a left-to-right axis of communists and social democrats and liberals and monarchists, and the Marx-inspired class labels of workers and intelligentsiya.

Pavlovsky experimented with a different approach to assembling a winning electorate. Instead of focusing on one ideological argument, he took quite different, often conflicting, social groups and began to collect them like the parts of a Russian doll. It didn’t matter what their opinions were, he just needed to gather enough of them: “You collect them for a short period, literally for a moment, but so that they all vote together for one person. To do this, you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them.”

That “fairy tale” couldn’t be a political ideology: the great ideas which had powered collective notions of progress were dead. The disparate groups needed to be unified around a central emotion, a feeling powerful enough to unite all of them yet vague enough to mean something to everyone. The “fairy tale” that Pavlovsky wrote for the Yeltsin campaign played on the fear that the country might collapse into civil war if Yeltsin didn’t win. Pavlovsky cultivated the image of Yeltsin as someone so reckless and dangerous he would be prepared to plunge the country into war if he lost. Survival was the story. The fear of losing everything [was] the feeling.

Which is really crazy, when you think about it, in that particular instance. "Vote for Boris Nikolayevich or he'll get us all killed!" Though you can also imagine it being used in Trump's campaign next year—I already do, to tell the truth, in Trump's increasing delight in talking about wanting to serve more than two terms or his different kinds of presentation of paramilitaries, from the Bikers for Trump and Proud Boys and the like through the unpredictable ICE, and his renewed threats that the elections will be rigged by fake voters, illegal immigrants, and all the polls are lying, even Fox News. Who among us isn't seeing the possibility of his refusing to step down when he loses the election and trying to use force to stay in office? Why wouldn't this be aimed at frightening both those of us who will never vote for him and those who might, convincing the latter that as disappointed as they might be with his performance, it's just not safe to abandon him?

But at a more general level, this is like a model of what Republican consultants have been doing from Lee Atwater through Karl Rove to Stephen Bannon, dumping the traditional categories (except for the plutocrats they know how to placate with offers of tax cuts and deregulation) in favor of purely emotional motives.

For the Putin election, the guiding principle was to appeal to “the Left Behind.” Pavlovsky identified all the groups who had lost out from the Yeltsin years. These were completely disparate segments of society who in Soviet times would have been on different sides of the barricades: teachers and secret-service types, academics and soldiers. Putin himself was cast as a sort of political extension of Actionism [performance artists who abandoned language, like Oleg Kulik, who showed up as a dog on all fours growling at gallery visitors]. When he arrived on the scene, he offered photo ops of derring-do instead of ideological coherence — the emotional highs of “Make Russia Great Again.” Over time his slogans became sublime in their emptiness: “Putin’s Plan is Russia’s Victory” ran one. To the question of what “Russia’s Victory” was, one could only really answer “Putin’s Plan.”

Bush's strangled inarticulateness and penchant for broad-shouldered costumes went part of the way to that, and Trump completes the distance. It doesn't matter whether you're a Christianist terrified that lavender mobs are going to turn your children or you yourself gay, or a monolingual frightened of being abandoned in a sea of Spanish or Chinese speakers, or somebody who used to have a union job and believes the Spanish or Chinese speakers elsewhere stole it from you, all you needed to know in 2016 was that he was the best at making deals, as everybody knew from watching him doing it on partially scripted TV, and moreover your enemies were his enemies, or at least some of his enemies, because he had a lot.

Consider Thomas Borwick, the clever and chatty chief technology officer of the victorious Vote Leave campaign, who explained to me how the Brexit vote was won, reveling in the nerdy detail of his craft. Borwick comes from a family of Tory grandees (his mother a former MP for Kensington, his father a baron), and he approaches his work like a precocious schoolboy solving a puzzle or playing Risk.

His job as a campaigner is to gather as much data as he can about voters, calculate which groups are most likely to vote for his side, and then work out the one thing that will motivate those different groups to vote. Is it animal rights or potholes? Gay marriage or the environment? A country of 20 million, he estimates, needs 70 to 80 types of these targeted messages. Social media allows him to target messages with an accuracy a Pavlovsky could only have dreamed of in the 1990s. Borwick’s job is then to connect individual causes to his campaign, even if those connections might feel somewhat tenuous at first.

We have begun, in the Anglosphere and evidently in various parts of Central Europe from Poland to Italy, to see the same kinds of techniques deployed in the same kinds of Putinesque projects. It doesn't really matter if Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica was getting instructions from Julian Assange or Russia, from the theoretical point of view. From the legal point of view I guess it would matter a lot, and I'd certainly like to have some clear accounts of this and a big concordance of how it maps against the Trump campaign and its close targeting of individuals in the three states that gave Trump his improbable electoral victory, if it does at all (our current understanding that the data Paul Manafort transmitted to Russia during the campaign was very granular stuff about this precise area makes the question more enticing).

It does absolutely matter that we might be witnessing the same kind of collapse of faith in all our previous understanding—which would be maybe another reason to like Elizabeth Warren in the current confusion: while Biden and Sanders continue to be loyal to the categories of thought they've been expressing unvaryingly for 40 years, pining for what Pomerantsev calls "normalnost",  Warren is sensitive to the way people are feeling right now, and always proposes a rational (but emotionally intelligent) response to those often irrational preoccupations: she knows normal is over.

Because the political question is, in the age of separation between what Rove called the "reality-based community" and his own reality-inventing community, how we can come to compete without abandoning that very fundamental commitment, more important in my view than any left-versus-right division, to reality itself.

Pomerantsev, in the grip of his insight, offers no comfort on that point, but I hope everybody will read the essay all the same, because it's really good, and then come back to the question whether we can do anything about it.