The Age of the 'American Berserk'

Trump embodies what the author Philip Roth called the "indigenous American berserk," and Trumpist chaos threatens the surival of the American experiment.

In his landmark novel, “American Pastoral,” Philip Roth coined the term, “The indigenous American berserk,” by which he meant that America has always had a deeply ingrained capacity to go bonkers. If you think of America as a nation of contradictions, a place that’s as capable of losing itself as much as it is loving itself, Roth’s description isn’t only apt for our own hellish moment, but for all time.

A former colonial outpost of Great Britain, which violently severed ties from what was then the world’s most powerful empire, America has been nothing if not defiant, audacious, and often visionary. A 248 year old experiment in representative government whose republican ideals date back to ancient Rome by way of English and French Enlightenment philosophers, America has been something of a beautiful paradox.

In the era of Donald Trump, questions abound, not only in regard to what America is, but more specifically, who we are as a nation. For better or worse, these questions cannot be adequately answered simply in terms of ideology or electoral politics. I view these questions as more cultural, even spiritual, and perhaps, like Roth, too “berserk” to warrant succinct answers. But at a time where something akin to a mob mentality has paralyzed our national discourse, and where our unique, yet complicated nation spins on its own deeply Orwellian axis, such questions may indeed be more important than the answers.

To me, these are forever questions about American studies. As it happens, I did my graduate work in American Studies at Brown University. And what is American Studies exactly? In truth, American Studies is so all encompassing as a discipline as to render it nearly impossible to define. For me, I used what academics call American Studies to undertake a close examination of politics and its relationship to American literature and popular culture. I came away with, among other perspectives, a gimlet-eyed portal in which to tackle that ever elusive question of what it means to be an “American.” If as Henry James once observed, “It’s a complex fate to be an American,” then any definitive explanation about our complex national identity, is insufficient at best and an outright falsehood at its worst. But I am forever vexed as to why a country as decidedly optimistic as American can, more often than not, surrender to moments of deep and existential panic.

America is nothing, if not an idea, but in these corrosive times, Lincoln’s Gettysburg ideas about “a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” feels like something of a dream deferred. Lincoln’s own Republican Party, founded in 1854, as a means of barring the expansion of slavery into newly admitted states, has morphed into a noxious gaggle of conspiracy theory cultists, white nationalists, kooks, clowns, authoritarians, and Trumpist foot soldiers. And while Trump’s ascendancy feels like a full throttle descent into fanaticism, he’s far more symptomatic of the malignant populism which has devoured our body politic.

At its best, conservatism from the Cold War era up until Trump emphasized the merits of limited government and free market capitalism, the rule of law, the value of virtue and the primacy of national security as central to its governing and philosophical aims. Yesterday’s conservatives have morphed into today’s mouth-frothing populists and go for broke nihilists, willing co-conspirators all to Trump’s lawlessness, venality and autocratic wreckage. Our nation does not have a parliamentary system, whereby multiple parties can coalesce in order to form a majority. Rather, we are a two-party republic, with three co-equal branches of government, ostensibly designed to put on check on themselves. Yet when ideological differences become eclipsed by constitutional mockery, the words “we the people,” cease to be worth the parchment they are written on. It’s precisely this reason the framers put an impeachment clause in the Constitution, and it’s what James Madison meant in Federalist 51, when he wrote, “Ambition must counteract ambition.” To put it another way, various branches of government can be designed to check the other. And though the worst human actions must be counteracted, human nature itself cannot be fundamentally changed.

While Roth’s labeling of the “indigenous American berserk” might feel particularly prescient about Donald Trump, Roth’s own purview, like so much of American literature, reveals great insight into the burbling discontent that’s always lurked beneath the surface of American life. For there have always been two Americas. There is the seemingly rational America of constitutional government, consensus, rights, and republican ideals. And then there is the America gone mad; the irrational, often violent and unhinged America depicted in the works like Melville’s “Moby Dick,” Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Our country’s finest fiction, and Roth was no doubt one of its more perceptive practitioners, dramatizes the anxieties, the losses, the pain, and the tragedy which have always been at the core of our national narrative. Our political language revels in myths, while our literature, on the other hand, reveals our lies and our evasions, and, well, our sins. Berserk or not, the Trump phenomenon has made so many of us re-think this notion of a national “romance,” and dispel the illusions that our institutions, let alone our values, can withstand not only Trump’s pernicious demagoguery, but much of the ferocious delusion which undergirds it.

Americans have long been persuaded by their own claims to “exceptionalism,” the “shining city on a hill,” whereby the New World is inherent with promise, and where religious violence and nationalist lunacy were left behind on the shores of old Europe. In his contempt for America, Trump’s seemingly endless well of malice defiles the promise of the American experiment which has been, for all of its imperfections, the most durable exercise in self-government in political history. But in the 9 years since Trump first descended down the gold escalators, any notion of working toward Lincoln’s idea of a more perfect union has often felt like a chaotic fever dream.

Trump has unmoored us, if not from our devotion to America, but in our conviction that it would always be something of a sanctuary. But the underbelly has now been shown: Lie to people long enough about some unachievable fantasia and a deeply entrenched disenchantment will make a monster of our discontent. Faced with the real possibility of a second Trump presidency, it is no longer a question of whether or not we are to be afraid of these proverbial monsters, but precisely how we vanquish them. In the end, the question is far deeper than the necessity of a second Trump defeat. Our ‘American Berserk’ is proving a most formidable foe. Here be monsters indeed.