Last week, I gave you a rollercoaster metaphor to depict the way 2024 is likely to feel. I’m going to work with that metaphor, and others about “rides,” for this entire year. Today, I’m going to take the metaphor a step further and focus on the part that involves “barfing.” For our purposes, I shall define “barfing” as experiencing intense anxiety and disorientation and basically falling over sideways from it. To help us as we go, I have created “The Barf Scale.” As we go through this year, this handy tool will help us gauge our risk of landing in a place so turbulent that we won’t know how to cope. In this scenario, our behavior may tend toward running in circles and screaming or begging to be driven to a bar.
As I write this newsletter, we’re waiting to see how the DC Circuit Court of Appeals will rule in the case of Donald Trump and his attempt to acquire absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for crimes related to January 6. No matter how that ruling goes, it will feel earth-shaking. Its function will either affirm the rule of law or end the rule of law. Ultimately, the case is certain to be appealed to the Supreme Court. That will happen pretty soon. After they rule, however they rule, rows and rows of dominoes will start to fall. We will either continue our democratic experiment or we will collapse with it. When the Supreme Court rules, they send a signal and a hint about which direction we’re headed.
We are about to put our Supreme Court in a classic double bind. This constitutes a pretty big plunge on our rollercoaster and heightens our risk of barfing. The Supreme Court might even start barfing.
The double bind theory is a concept in communication and psychology that describes a situation in which someone receives two or more messages containing conflicting directives. Everyone’s been there and knows how it feels. You are damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Here’s how it works. Let’s say someone tells you to “be spontaneous.” There is literally no way to obey this directive without disobeying this directive. If you comply and do something random, you will disobey the directive, since you’re not being spontaneous. If you refuse to do something spontaneous, you will be defying the command by being not spontaneous. It is impossible to avoid being wrong.
Here’s another example a lot of us can relate to. Imagine that you are the schlubby partner of an exacting spouse who is nagging you to get in better shape. Then the spouse says, “But don’t do it because I asked you; do it for yourself!” If you’re the schlubby partner in this story, you are now in a double bind. There is literally nothing you can do to comply with this directive. If you follow one message and go to the gym, you will be de facto doing what your partner told you not to do (i.e., “doing it for me”). If you follow the other message and do not go to the gym because you’d be doing it to please your partner, you will also be de facto doing what your partner told you not to do (i.e., do nothing and continue to be schlubby).
The double bind ahead
We are hurtling toward the time when something definitive will happen. The Supreme Court either will or will not allow Trump to appear on ballots as a candidate for President. Democracy will feel threatened either way they go.
Is there any possible way the Court can avoid challenging the United States Constitution? If Donald Trump is ruled immune from prosecution, the Constitution will be invalidated because “the rule of law” will not, in fact, apply to everyone equally. Which throws the entire document into question. Crisis will ensue.
If the Court upholds the Colorado ruling, Donald Trump will be officially regarded a seditionist. According to the Fourteenth Amendment, he will be ineligible to hold public office and, let me tell you, I will sleep better at night on account of it. Yet millions of my fellow citizens will say, accurately, that the government prevents them from choosing their own leader. Which is what our Constitution and democracy are all about. Crisis will ensue.
This is why you’re getting an entire newsletter on the subject of barfing.
Our current risk level
My guess is, we’re at a Level Four, which means barfing is not inevitable, but it’s pretty darn likely. On the good news side, we’ll be in the right place for it. The most appropriate and logical place to resolve the case of Donald Trump is before the Supreme Court. If anyone has to be in a double bind and find a way out of it, these are the most appropriate people to bear that burden. Even though I’m not psychic, I feel quite comfortable making this prediction.
The Institute For The Future is an organization dedicated to the development and use of “foresight.” There is a methodology for detecting signs of change and crafting a few scenarios that might come to pass as a result. They call it “futures forecasting.” If you’re envisioning a fortune-teller, I hope you’ll go look at their website. The scenarios they create are possible futures, not inevitable ones. Remember what I said last week about contingencies? They cannot be predicted in advance of whatever the actual future turns out to be.
We are surrounded by many signals that a national double bind is indeed what we’re in for. I thought about showing you an example of such a signal and taking you step by step through unpacking its language and finding the precise words that tells me a crisis is coming. (I’ll spare you screen after screen of the discourse analysis — although I can share it if you ask me to.) Just look at this clip from the January 7, 2024 episode of “Meet The Press.”
The conversation you’ll see involves creating an outrageous situation while pretending that the situation is not outrageous. If it doesn’t leave you feeling crazy, you’re not paying attention. The outrageous situation is that a high-ranking elected official is on national television (in other words, presented as an authority) and is flat out lying (saying sentences that are either literally untrue or are predicated on assertions that are not true). The moderator is in “the show must go on” mode, pretending that everything is normal and like nothing scary is happening right here and now on “Meet The Press.”
I’ve edited the clip so that you will see the exact places where the Congresscritter lies, followed by the places where the moderator tries to correct the situation and fails.
This sort of dynamic could accurately be labeled as “gaslighting.” All gaslighting involves a double bind. Steve Bannon talked about it as “flooding the zone with shit.” Its purpose is to discombobulate people so they become confused and disoriented and unsure what is real. Gaslighting/flooding the zone with shit is a tactic of control and domination. There’s no such thing as “altruistic gaslighting.”
You just watched what must be the world’s most dysfunctional conversation. Kirsten Welker intends for this to be just a routine interview on “Meet The Press.” We see her doggedly trying to keep it on track as such. She does this by inserting her “fact checks” as asides to the audience, like an actor breaking the fourth wall.
Unfortunately, that only makes it worse. The lies just keep on coming. To get out of the bind created by Elise Stefanik, Welker would have to stop the interview and let the whole world watch while she unmasks the Congresswoman’s conceit. On television, it would look like a huge fiasco from which it would be very hard to recover. It’s not hard to empathize with the moderator here. No matter what she did, she was destined to look feckless.
An alternative scenario
So what could Welker have done differently? She would have to take a dangerous gamble. The only way to confront a gaslighter is to call them out and refuse to go along. After cutting Stefanik’s mic, Welker might have said (at approximately 1:13 minutes into the clip),
“Stop right there. You are making assertions that are verifiably false. We invited you on the show under the premise that you, as the third highest ranking Republican in the House, are an authority whose analysis can be trusted. We would not be here had we known that you would systematically and deliberately mislead the American people. Now you have to make a choice. Would you like to begin the interview over, without lying or attempting to manipulate the viewers? Or shall we stop it here and just deal with the fact that there’s going to be fifteen minutes of dead air, for which I’m likely to lose my job?”
I’m not saying this is what Welker should have done — I’m saying this, or something like it, is what she would have to do in order to foil the gaslighting. Either way, she would lose.
What’s our game plan?
People who grew up in alcoholic families know exactly how it feels. You may empathize with the hamstrung, “damned if you do” feeling Kristen Welker must be experiencing. You’re probably experts on it if your entire childhood felt like one continuous double bind. So, this is your trigger warning. Here’s the deal:
The situation, however it unfolds, is unavoidable. Think of it this way: it’s like being on a white-water rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. There are places along the way where the chance of getting pitched out of the boat and drowning is real.
This ride is out of your control. There is nothing you can do to make it not dangerous. There is only one way out and that is through.
The object of the game is, therefore, not to avert the situation but to survive it relatively uninjured.
In other words, we won’t attempt to avoid barfing by avoiding the danger. Instead, we’ll avoid barfing by staring that danger down. Here’s what I’ll be doing this whole entire year:
Scanning the environment for signals of change and upheaval and making them apparent to you.
Showing you how to do scanning too, but without subjecting you to an entire mind-numbing course on discourse analysis that you did not sign up for (this will be a challenge for me).
Calling out double binds when they occur and unmasking them for what they are: gaslighting, tactics of control and domination, dys-freakin’-functional.
Punchline
Understand that merely exorcising Trump will be necessary, but not sufficient. Everything about our system of governance relies on there being two healthy political parties. The Republican Party is desperately not healthy. The signals of that have been beeping for over forty years. No one knows who is supposed to intervene — DOJ? Party leaders? Some other agency? SCOTUS? Oprah? WHO?
The Constitution is silent on the subject. Our system was designed to resist takeover by a would-be monarch. Nothing in the Constitution anticipates a psychopath becoming President, supported in cult-like fashion by an entire political party.
One way to avoid getting dizzy and barfing (on our metaphorical ride) is to keep oriented to where the root cause lies. We’ve been saying it’s Trump, but really, it’s the Republican Party — currently paying for its past few decades of dirty tricks politics.
So, we deal. It’s like I’ve said before: maintaining a strong democracy takes enormous sweat equity. It is nearing time for American leaders to do as the founders and framers did: take our social compact to the next level. Create the language we currently lack that tells us step by step how to make democracy thrive in perpetuity.
If you’re the praying kind, you might offer a kind word or light a little candle for the justices. No god can “let this cup pass” from them.
Song Of The Day
“Jive Talkin’” - The Bee Gees
Support songwriters and support musicians by purchasing this track here or here or from a reputable vendor of your choice.
Keep on keepin’ on,
Cindy
didn't expect smiling while barfing! Thanks!
The media loves it all. Its just clik bait for them. They push their preferences but they love the chaos more. When I was doing some lobbying here in WA for my professional association, a lobbying friend had to pull me aside and say "Lobbying is about how to suck up without puking". I put the media in the same category.