As the United States moves toward its four-year presidential election, routine social abuse of a vulnerable segment of the population has become an issue in the candidacy of one of the abusers, Republican candidate Donald Trump. A recent article by Michelle Goldberg calls him A Human Trigger. Mr. Trump uses the Big Lie technique; projects his bigotry onto his victims; leverages Conventional Wisdom's denial of the reality of gender marginalization; and often leaves his victims' disoriented and doubting the reality of their own experience:
Like many abusers, Trump is so shamelessly, fluently dishonest that listening to him can be disorienting. “One of the hallmarks of an abusive person is that they do not ever take responsibility for their behavior, ever,” [Kristen] Slesar says. “It is always the other person’s fault, or it never happened.” Abusers, she says, can crowd out their victims’ sense of reality: “In conversation and arguments with this person who is so able to change reality or deny reality and shift blame and responsibility, the victim ends up doubting [herself], getting really confused, feeling really unstable.
The Big Lie deserves its own examination, because the phrase originates with another authoritarian who understood that routine bigoted error of conventional social thought can be used to corrupt the political instincts of a large segment of the public. Wikipedia explained:
A big lie (German: große Lüge) is a propaganda technique. The expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf, about the use of a lie so "colossal" that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."
The following selection from Mein Kampf describes techniques familiar to those who have followed the rhetoric of the Republican candidate's campaign—appeal to emotion in defiance of evidence and reason; belief that no one could be so shameless as to perpetrate such fraudulent claims; and "sensible" recourse to the opinion that there must be "some other explanation":
All this was inspired by the principle—which is quite true within itself—that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.
What women experience in
the Trumpian abusive subculture parallels what the disabled experience —
particularly the denial — but nobody is quoting us. As the previous article in this series argued:
Ms. Goldberg continues:This is all too familiar to those of us who are disabled. We wonder why "funny things" keep happening to us. We feel vaguely guilty—that we must have done something wrong. Eventually, we reluctantly come to realize that it isn't us. The problem is "normal" social attitudes toward those who bear stigma. But when we attempt to talk this over with our "friends" and family, they pooh-pooh our concerns ... It is all in our heads. We are only imagining that we are the target of unjustified social disapproval. To think that way is to be disloyal to the community. Our attitude is antisocial—no wonder those around us disapprove of us (this is the stigma Catch-22).
Marie, a 30-year-old massage therapist in Virginia [says] "The truths that we experience as women are denied. It really brings out the victim mindset: These things keep happening, but nobody will actually say that they’re happening, nobody will acknowledge anything is happening ..."
Three years ago, in Internalized Discrimination: You're Not Supposed to SAY That, this was the situation:
We who write this remember that most of our lives we ourselves kept silent. And there is an internal struggle against convention every time we [feel we ought to speak out]. A struggle, ... against the tendency to feel guilty about having been honest about a situation which is widely covered up.
As the emergence of a 2005 tape revealed that a major political party's presidential candidate treats half the population as a group of people who may readily be subjugated, demeaned, degraded, and abused, what On Liberty calls "social tyranny" (approximately page 3) is still alive and well.
For women, and for the disabled.
