The ADHD style in Trumpist politics
By 
This isn’t even a half-baked idea — it’s more like I just started pre-heating the oven, so don’t taze me bro — but it’s something that sprung into my mind after reading this really fascinating interview between John Guida and the cultural historian Jackson Lears (gift link).
A few excerpts:
John Guida: There has been, in Trump 2.0, a near-constant hum of activity., from the war in Iran to the tearing down and potential rebuilding of the White House ballroom. A lot has been written about the personalities and politics involved, and how it makes sense (or not) as policy. But you have often taken a different approach to culture and politics, identifying subterranean cultural influences and currents in American history going back to the 19th century. For example, you wrote a book about “animal spirits.” What do you mean by that phrase, and do you see it as an underlying source animating this style of politics?
Jackson Lears: “Animal spirits” is a phrase that captures the notion of a vital force linking matter and spirit, soul and body. It also acknowledges the role of free-flowing energy in human experience, from romantic relationships to capital investment. For the philosopher Henri Bergson, animal spirits animated a current of “élan vital”; for the economist John Maynard Keynes, they constituted “a spontaneous urge to action” that was the key to investor confidence.
For human beings in general, they constituted the core of the personal magnetism that energized successful democratic candidates. Americans in particular have been obsessed with the pursuit of vitality for centuries, often characterizing it as the expression of animal spirits, a current of energy or life force that is morally neutral. Its meanings vary with circumstances. Donald Trump’s animal spirits have been a huge part of his appeal — he has seemed to embody spontaneity and authenticity against the scripted tedium of managerial liberalism. But he scatters his energies in a hundred different directions, usually with destructive consequences — against immigrants, trading partners, foreign allies and rivals.
A whole lot is going on here, which Lears suggests can be interpreted in light of everything from a Bergsonian life force frame, to Keynes’s insight that “animal spirits” drive investor behavior, to Teddy Roosevelt’s masculinist evangelizing imperial project, to, more darkly yet, the fascist worship of violent action at the expense of rational reflection.
Consider too the uncanny Silicon Valley’s role in this general cultural trajectory:
Guida: How do you think about this type of vitality in the context of tech — particularly the people and companies making the universe of A.I.? I’m thinking of someone like Marc Andreessen, who recently said he practices introspection as little as possible and who lamented what he has seen (as he wrote in 2020) as the “failure of action” and an “inability to build.”
Lears: Once again, we are back in the realm of relentless activism, in this case under the misleading guise of technical rationality. True reason depends on reflection, judgment, wisdom — none of which have any place in the tech world of algorithmic rules-based decision making.
Yet another trail in this intellectual garden of forking paths is the connection with what Lears calls “old weird America:”
Guida: You have referred to an “old weird America.” That aspect of our history is sometimes overlooked. In looking at vitalism in the context of politics, how should Americans think about that strain of our history?
Lears: The phrase “old weird America” is from Harry Smith’s Smithsonian collection of folk music and it suggested the strangeness of rural and small-town America that was erased from the Hollywood version Reagan embraced. In fact, the woods and villages were full of clairvoyants, mental healers, believers in second sight and reincarnation, not to mention conspiracy theorists and debunkers of professional experts. None of these people are about to disappear. (One thinks of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA contingent.)
Trump’s campaigns have dramatized a widespread crisis of authority (scientific, governmental, parental) in this country — not the first such crisis but still devastatingly wide. The attraction to conspiracy theories and the distrust of credentialed experts have real staying power, for good reason. The misuse of technical expertise is equally pervasive; consider the resurgent argument that nuclear wars are winnable, and tactical nukes are weapons to be used like any other. Expert opinion continues to deserve skepticism — indeed, some remnants of the old weird America are worth preserving.
For me, reading this interview felt like a series of epiphanies: Lears is I think very much onto something, or various things, that interconnect in important ways, that help explain something that I’ve felt as a sort of inchoate background fact about Trump and the Trumpist era, which is the sheer continual franticness of it all.
Which brings me to my pre-heating of the conceptual oven, which is this:
Trump and Trumpism can be interpreted within a frame that uses mental illness as metaphor, in the way that Richard Hofstadter famously used paranoia as a metaphor for understanding a certain cognitive style in the history of American politics The metaphor here is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
ADHD is a particularly rich metaphor in this context, because as I understand it there’s an ongoing furious argument among clinicians and other experts regarding whether ADHD should be best understood as a discrete mental pathology, or a neurodivergent cognitive style, or, more radically, as a kind of pervasive cultural condition, rather than an individualized malady per se.
The latter is what I’m thinking of when considering the possibility of using ADHD as a sort of Hofstadteresque frame for understanding Trump and Trumpism: It is politics as a kind of frantic, furious doomscrolling of the internet, an off-brand Oswald Spengler on X and TikTok and Facebook 24/7, a kind of cultural Gottterdammerung mediated by the YouTube algorithms . . .
Thank you for your — ever-more fleeting and transitory — attention to this matter.
. . . in response to a thoughtful comment from Brandunaware about the dangers of using ADHD to understand the cultural moment:
I want to emphasize the metaphorical function of the ADHD frame here. Hofstadter wasn’t arguing that the vast majority of the people and movements he was analyzing were literally paranoid in a clinical sense . . . he was extending illness as metaphor for understanding a pervasive cultural condition.