I always believed that repressed memories were hooey, a cultural hangover from the Satanic Panic. I believed that, anyway, until 2013, when my own repressed memories finally broke through. I will not be talking about my own memories here but I feel that I can offer some perspective on repression that may help us sort out current morbidities of today’s politics.
In 2019 and 2020, I was a supporter of Bernie Sanders’ second presidential bid. Naturally, but especially in this day and motherfucking age, a lot of the cohesion and conversation of a group of supporters of one candidate is occupied with pointing out the deficiencies of the competition.
So, naturally, I joined thousands of other Sanders supporters writing about Joe Biden’s declining mental faculties and the possibility that he was already in the beginning stages of a neurodegenerative condition of some kind. We traded videos of Biden freezing or wandering off in the middle of his own campaign’s livestream events. We shared videos of the bizarre confrontation in which Biden accuses a young female protester of being a “dog-faced pony soldier.” (An accusation he has made against two other young women since.)
But then our man, Bernie Sanders, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden and many, though not all of us, were swept up in the campaign to defeat Donald Trump. While I supported those efforts, I was hardly “swept up” in them. I was already souring on the left, as a coalition, for other reasons.
Once Biden’s shakiness and decline showed up on camera, early in his presidency, I noticed a substantial difference in my friends’ reactions depending on how swept up they had been. Fed on a steady diet of MSNBC, CNN, CBC, John Oliver, Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, those most committed to the 2020 campaign began trotting out the “he has always talked like that. He’s had a stutter since he was a child,” “it’s ageist to say those things,” “he is healthier than the average man that age,” “that video is Russian disinformation,” etc. Those of us less swept up were a little bewildered. Did they really not remember what they used to think?
When challenged on these ideas they would fight back vigorously but be strangely non-receptive to new evidence. This is how one behaves when one is repressing a memory.
Stephen Moffat’s Doctor Who monster, “The Silence,” is the best metaphorical illustration of how repression actually works. It is a monster whose power is that every time you look away from its horrifying visage, you forget having seen it. But when you see it again, you remember every time I saw it before and forgot.
You see: you do not repress a memory once. One of the reasons people with repressed memories have very poor mental health is that they are constantly working, remembering something and forcing themselves to forget it again. But making yourself forget something actually requires constant vigilance and a kind of subconscious awareness. You are constantly sustaining a double consciousness, one part of you not knowing and another part of you working around the clock to conceal that information from the rest of you.
For the past five years, mainstream liberal and progressive Americans have been engaged in an act of collective repression, noticing some new sign of Biden’s decline, the act of noticing causing one to stop repressing momentarily and remembering all the other times you noticed, remembered and then forgot again.
In this way, repression intensifies over time. There are more and more memories to suppress and there is an ever greater desperation to keep them repressed. If you couldn’t handle the original piece of knowledge, after all, how are you going to handle the knowledge of all the events that temporarily broke through the repression and all the times you made yourself forget again.
On June 27th, an event took place so important, so public, so consequential that it broke through half a decade of progressive repression. No Democratic Party supporter was unaware of Joe Biden’s deteriorating condition and none of them is acting like someone who was genuinely surprised. Instead, the residents of the progressiverse are responding the way the children of a recently deceased pedophile might respond to the discovery of child porn in dad’s gun locker.
- “Why wasn’t I told!?”
Congressional leaders who are blaming Biden’s inner circle for withholding vital information from them fall into this camp. They complain that they were not given access to Biden after 4pm, that his handlers made it almost impossible to meet with him, that he almost never had unscripted events, that his wife and a small group of handlers hovered over him and would whisk him out of rooms. Given these incredible access restrictions, they complain, how could they have known how badly off the president was?
Except that those restrictions were, in fact, all the information they needed. Why would these restrictions be in place around a person unless their dementia had progressed to the point of causing regular sun-downing? The people saying “why wasn’t I told?” had every bit of information they needed to know the probably state of affairs and, had they been curious or inquisitive, would have sought to get to the bottom of things, what with their responsibility to ensure the nation was governed properly an all.
- “C’mon, we always knew!”
Following the fizzling of his own insurgent bid against Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom has remade himself into the consummate Biden surrogate. Sure, Newsom and his ilk concede, the president is not quite the man he was. But he is the best man for the job, even despite what we know. That is because he is a great person who has assembled a great team. It’s almost as though we are in the early stages of the most brilliant living will ever written.
We are seeing this response from both elite and grassroots Democrats. They are responding to the collapse of repression the opposite way. Instead of feigning and indignant surprise, they are naturalizing their own repression, claiming always to have had a stable consciousness of the president’s mental state and never a double consciousness.
- “How is this even relevant!?”/“I bet his buddy molested more kids.”
This is the response of individuals who are attempting to continue their experience of double consciousness and is represented more strongly in the party’s grassroots. The issue is stopping Donald Trump and any effort to relate the quality of one’s own ticket to stopping Trump is simple relabeled as either changing the subject or covert support for Trump.
In other words, the response is “Look over there!” The people engaged in this approach are trying to keep their double consciousness going long enough that Democratic Party elites can help them repress their memories again, so that they can forget about the nasty couple of weeks following June 27th, when Joe Biden was drugged by Roger Stone operatives because he is JUST FINE now.
In 2012, Salon magazine observed that Mitt Romney had practiced a new kind of political dishonesty in his presidential campaign. Like the corporate raider he was, he had contracted out the work of believing his lies to his audience and had ceased bothering to make them believable himself. I believe that our current moment reflects a further degeneration from that point, not merely a kind of programmatic, intentional gullibility but the kind of double consciousness that indicates not just morbidity above but profound stress below. Repression is a response to trauma and the more repression we see, the more traumatized a population it reflects.
But the thing about trauma that we learned from the 2007 Indian Ocean tsunami is that it is, in many ways, expectation-based. People with unreasonable, childish expectations are more easily traumatized. Two people can experience the identical loss and one will be traumatized, the other not. This difference is something people in the Global North call “resilience,” and think of it as a magical, mysterious quality to be studied, especially among supposedly oppressed and colonized people who seem to manage to lead perfectly satisfying, happy lives.
The problem is that resilience is actually the normal human condition. There is something wrong when it becomes uncommon enough in a society to even have a name. America lived through the end of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Their history records the Dowager Empress role the imperial consort took on in the last days of those presidencies. It did not traumatize the nation in the same way as the rule of Jill Biden currently does. And that, to me, indicates a profound lack of resilience, an emotionally coddled population whose unrealistic expectations are nurtured by a corrupt political class at the end of its rope.
