Everyone on television appears to want to be consoled and inspired by the same people who coerce them. Not that I'm diagnosing, of course, but I think of anyone who is begging for a president to care for them, or who has spent a lot of time thinking about what they wish the president would say to them, as . . . sexually complex, but definitely compliant. I respect that, of course.
Consoled by Presidents
By Crispin Sartwell
Article II of the Constitution, somewhat cryptically, enumerates the powers and obligations of the President: he is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, for example. He has the power to make treaties, appoint various officers of the United States (with the advice and consent of the Senate), and to grant reprieves and pardons. He has the duty to report to Congress on the state of the Union and to see that the laws are faithfully executed.
Conspicuous by omission is what many politicians and pundits evidently regard as one of the core functions of the executive, which we might think of as therapeutic. At times of national trauma - these days, that seems to be all the time - it is apparently the duty of the President to "bring us all together," to "speak words of healing and unity," to be the "consoler-in-chief." We expect our President to bring a sense of hope to all of us in this difficult moment of dummy bombs, hurricanes, and mass shootings. Article II, that is, omits one of the President's most sacred duties: to hold us while we cry. Or at least to convey the impression that, if he could, he would reach out from our televisions and draw us all into a group hug.
Abraham Lincoln, as we learned in school, brought all Americans together with his immortal words, even as his generals burned their way across Georgia. After immolating Waco, Bill Clinton felt our pain and held us as we went through it, though he was also rubbing up against us in a somewhat disconcerting way.
In this regard, many people are very disappointed with Trump, who often appears to be too self-involved to perform the emotional duties of his office. Many pundits portray themselves or at least Americans other than themselves as in need of a sort of national Mister Rogers, to explain this puzzling world to us and convince us televisually, in a deep and quietly melodious voice, that everything will be okay. Even as Donald Trump gets blamed for the bombs, for example, the President of the United States is expected to provide words of healing. Now that is emotional labor.
Feminist sociologist Arlie Hochschild came up with the idea of "emotional labor" in the 1980s to describe, for example, the unenumerated duties of someone working as a waitress: all the smiling, expressions of connection or concern, the self-effacement in the face even of abuse. It is one way, for example, of describing some of the traditional duties of the housewife: to see to everyone's feelings as well as their bodily needs, and hence keep the family functional.
Writing in Quartz, Leah Fessler gives a typical description of emotional labor, both in the office - "constantly smiling, making small talk, planning birthday celebrations, cleaning up after celebrations" - and outside it - "endless texting to help siblings through breakups, evaluating whether friends' hookups were fully consensual, cleaning roommates' dishes." "It is time we start recognizing this unpaid labor, which is disproportionately performed by women," writes Fessler. And by presidents.
That Americans allegedly want to be nurtured or consoled, by the same person who, in faithful execution of the laws, operates the Federal prison system, or who is to see that the taxes are collected, or who can press the nuclear button, annihilating life on earth, is puzzling in a way; there's no particular reason to think these functions ought to be combined. It seems, really, that we want a national Dad to discipline and protect us and a national Mom to do the emotional dishes and rock us to sleep, as European nations split their authority figures into President and Prime Minister.
Now, one may be somewhat puzzled by the power of the President to console a wounded nation. He speaks to all of us in general and none of us in particular. When he is doing the emotional labor we expect, he is uttering highly conventionalized words, like a customer-service representative. We know exactly what he is supposed to say before he says anything - "This is not who we are as Americans," for example. President Obama reached the point, after responding in the conventional fashion to a number of mass shootings, where he remarked on the futility he felt in speaking at all: "Somehow this has become routine," he said after a 2015 shooting in Oregon. "My response here, from this podium, has become routine." And yet he produced the required response anyway, because he acknowledged our deep need.
Perhaps Article II can be amended to enumerate a list of emotional duties within the purview of the executive, and then Trump can be impeached on the grounds that he has failed to perform some of them satisfactorily. Admittedly, the amendment process will be difficult in this partisan environment. But I have faith that it will happen. After all, even in the darkest times, Americans have always risen together to meet every challenge.
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Here's Donna Brazile on "This Week":
Here's Kathleen Parker, again telling Donald Trump, word for word, what she wants to hear from him. What good it is going to do her or any of us to operate Donald Trump like a sock puppet is anyone's guess.
That people think this way about political leadership, or rather about government power - that it should nurture and heal them, and tell them what is true and not - is a pretty good candidate for the fatal evolutionary flaw that will bring us to extinction.
