Gods and Goddesses in the 2024 Presidential Election

Our Leaders Live Inside Us

In 2016, I added a post-script to a chapter entitled “Donald Trump and the American Collective Psyche” that I had contributed to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.   I wrote:

“One of the most disturbing thoughts to me about the looming Trump presidency is that he is going to take up residency not just in the White House but in the psyches of each and every one of us for the next several years. We are going to have to live with him rattling around inside us, all of us at the mercy of his impulsive and bullying whims, shooting from the hip at whatever gets under his skin in the moment with uninformed, but cleverly calculated inflammatory shots. The way a President lives inside each of us can feel like a very personal and intimate affair. Those who identify with Trump and love the way he needles the ‘elites’ may relish having him live inside all of us as a reliable tormentor of those they hate, fear, and envy. Trump is very good at brutally toying with his enemies which include women, professionals, the media, the educated classes, and minorities—to mention just a few.

         What most frightens me about Trump is his masterful skill at invading and groping the national psyche. His capacity to dwell in and stink up our collective inner space is like the proverbial houseguests who overstay their welcome. And many of us never invited Trump into our psychic houses in the first place.  That is perhaps why the image that has stayed with me the most from the national disgrace that was our election process in 2016 is that of the woman who came forward to tell her alleged story of being sexually harassed by Trump. Some years ago she was given an upgrade to first class on a plane and found herself sitting next to ‘The Donald’. In no time at all, he was literally groping her all over—breasts and below. She describes the physicality of the assault by him as like being entangled by the tentacles of an octopus from whom she was barely able to free herself and retreat to economy class. It now feels as though we have all been groped by the tentacles of Trump’s octopus-like psyche that has invaded our psyches for the last year and that threatens to tighten its squeeze on our collective psyche for at least the next four years. To be as vulgar as Trump himself, Trump has grabbed the American psyche by the ‘pussy’.”

Isolation and Despair

At the time I wrote that (2016), I didn’t know how long Trump’s occupancy in our inner psychic houses would last—but it has been far too long. In the agonizing weeks before July 21, 2024 when Joe Biden stepped down from running for President, Trump’s stranglehold on our individual and collective psyches seemed to be tightening into a death grip as his ascendancy to a second term was beginning to seem inevitable. Biden and the Democrats were moribund. Trump was leading in all significant polls, survived an assassination attempt as a hero blessed by God, and was soaring at the Republican convention, basking in the adulation of being a resurrected Christian savior. I found myself becoming increasingly despairing and feeling more and more isolated as I began to think about what a Trump second term might be like: rounding up 10 million immigrants for deportation, gutting many government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, The Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, severely curtailing women’s rights to make choices about their own bodies and enthroning himself as an untouchable ruler of a Christian nation. It felt certain that our most cherished values of fairness, equality, decency, and justice would vanish at the hands of an ignorant, but clever autocrat whose nastiness, vulgarity, brutality, selfishness, and truly diabolical nature knows no bounds. (I could well be diagnosed by one of the few Trumpian psychiatrists as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.)

At one point prior to Biden’s stepping down, I wrote to a friend:

“I feel sick about Biden. I feel sick about Trump. I feel sick about my country. The sickness is a mixture of deep weariness and physical nausea. I fear that something in me has gone dead with all this--it seems like a huge melodrama in which nothing is what it seems, a great big play signifying nothing. I am wondering if whatever faith and passion I have placed in our ‘democracy’ may be deserting me now. I am wondering if it is time for me to let it all go. It all feels like a giant charade, even though I know so many of the issues are real and important. Trump is going to come out as a world peace candidate and it is going to get even more surreal as these two old goats, old white men as many of us might say, fuck around with all of us. Perhaps it is just the dystopian mood that has taken hold of me, but I am wondering if it is time to retreat from the affairs of the world. I am thinking that I am going to have to adopt a new attitude for what remains of my life and find a way to disengage from the suffering of the world. It is hard not to take personally the way Trump lives inside me. We may have to live with this pseudo patriot and reality TV star playing the role of hero for an America that has lost its moorings......

Signed,

Old man Tom”

My good friend responded:

“Tom, re-consider. You’re beginning to sound like Macbeth! 

‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.’   

-Macbeth

Yeats’ speaker had a different take:

‘An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.’

Keep singing, Tom!”

The Difference Between Individual Isolation/Despair and Collective Belonging/Hope:  The Birth of Gods and Goddesses.

Kamala Harris is the one whose soul began to clap its hands and sing for all of us. She has lifted my soul and my spirits as I feel myself joining so many others who were also in isolating despair. And here is the two part song I am now singing along with Kamala and the millions of others who have found the kindling of hope just as it looked as if everything was going to hell.

1.     The first song, a kind of collective “blues”, is about the isolating effects of dystopia

2.    The second song is a more celebratory spiritual about the birth of goddesses and gods in Ancient Greece and the modern world . (I have edited a series of books on Ancient Greece/Modern Psyche)

1.     Why do I spend so much time writing about my own desperation before Biden stepped down and Kamala came to re-energize so many of us? Because I learned something in those despairing moments about the isolating effects of a dystopian mood (something that Black people, women, and so many other oppressed minorities have known about for a long, long time). When we get caught in a dystopian mood, we begin to retreat inside ourselves and feel more and more isolated.  We begin to believe that we carry the weight of the world on our shoulders alone, and that it is too much to bear. When Biden stepped down, my feeling of isolation and carrying the weight of the world vanished (Hopefully Biden will come to feel this way, too?) I became more emotionally aware that I was not isolated in the way I thought I was, that literally millions may have felt isolated in exactly the same way I did—alone, hopeless, and carrying an unimaginable weight on our individual shoulders. The effect of Kamala’s “taking the torch” was almost instantaneous as millions emerged from the shadows of their growing dystopian nightmare to embrace hope for a future that may not be terrible. The spontaneous emergence of so many people from the paralysis and disengagement that goes along with feeling alone and isolated was miraculous. 

Quite surprisingly, another thought accompanied this reawakening of hope. I wondered if those who have joined Trump’s cult may not have, at least somewhere deep down in the core of their beings, also felt isolated in whatever burden they carried alone until Trump came along and provided a target for their frustrated rage and offered hope of a new world. For a moment, I actually found genuine empathy for those who flocked to MAGA world. Trump must have succeeded in speaking to their isolated despair and brought renewed hope to them by messianically seducing them into joining together with a community of fellow believers. In that sense, both Trump and Harris promise a kind of redemption to their true believers that brings the isolated, despairing individual into a reawakened feeling of energized community. 

2.   This leads to my second “song”, my final leap in this chain of associated thoughts in response to the collective emotional roller coaster of the last several weeks. Jane Harrison, a legendary Greek mythologist, was among the first in the early days of the 20^th century  who uncovered a layer of the early ancient Greek psyche that was matriarchal rather than patriarchal. Before Zeus and the other gods of Olympus were born and installed on Mt. Olympus, there was a powerful level of the early Greek psyche that placed its faith in the Mother Goddess. In addition to exploring the matriarchal foundations of early Greek culture, what made Harrison’s work so interesting is that she followed the lead of the founder of sociology, Emile Durkheim, and made the revolutionary statement that our gods and goddesses are born out of the personification of collective emotion. What does this mean?  It means that when groups of people get together and share potent emotions around particularly meaningful events—such as the agricultural miracle for the ancients of new life getting born in the Spring or the modern miracle of Trump surviving an assassination attempt—they tend to personify this event into a god or goddess. They give the annual rebirth of Spring a name, such as Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, who arises from the grips of Hades, the god of the underground. The celebration of the renewal of the earth in Spring is greeted with deep emotion and this collective emotion takes on the identity of a god or goddess. And what does this have to do with Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? It is not a stretch of the imagination to say that we witnessed the birth of a god and goddess within a week. 

First Donald Trump, who has always behaved and thought of himself as a divinity, was reborn in the minds of those who believe in him when he survived an assassination attempt.  In the collective emotion and imagination of his followers, he became a mixture of Christ as reborn savior and hero warrior patriot in the mode of the Iwo Jima marines, as if rising from the dead to proclaim: “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Trump finally won his “red badge of courage” which had eluded him in the Vietnam war because of “bone spurs” in his feet.  But, perhaps even more miraculously, when another old Titan, Joe Biden, realized that his time was up and “passed the torch” to Kamala Harris, she was instantaneously reborn as a warrior goddess, ready to take on Trump who would simultaneously be making his claim to be the resurrected god.

Durga:  Indian Goddess of Power, Strength, and Protection. 18th-century painting of Durga slaying the buffalo demon Mahishasura, depicted in Hindu literature as a deceitful demon who pursued his evil ways by shape-shifting.

Listen to Kamala Harris speaking as if she might be an incarnation of the Indian goddess Durga who, through her power and strength, will protect her people by slicing through to what is direct and essential about a matter:

 “I prosecuted predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

And later when Trump challenged the legitimacy of Kamala’s racial identity, Kamala again cut through to the core of her adversary when she said, “The same old show of divisiveness and disrespect.”

I am not just speaking metaphorically when I talk about collective emotion fueling god-like projections. Obviously, Trump and Harris are not gods; they are human beings. But, the collective emotion pouring onto them makes them seem much larger than life as if they have drunk the elixir of immortality. According to Jane Harrison, this is how the earliest Greek gods and goddesses found their way into being in the human imagination. As we are witnessing right now, the energy released in these projections of collective emotion is astounding because it has all the numinous power of a religious experience dressed up in political garb. We shouldn’t fool ourselves. These are the emotions that fuel religious passions and contribute to the creation of gods and goddesses in the minds of human beings. This election will not be determined so much by specific policies (not to underestimate the emotions about abortion on both sides of the debate), but more on the emotions swirling around these two quite different humans who can easily seem like gods/goddesses. This notion of collective emotion fueling the genesis of gods and goddesses is certainly not the only idea about where divinity originates, but in this situation it seems particularly applicable. We now have a would be Christian national savior pitted against a multicultural Black Indian Goddess Warrior and it promises to be a fully engaged battle led by two very different kinds of people with quite different notions of politics, of government, and of what spirit will prevail in our land.