Shock and Awe of Cultural Cataclysms 5
The influence of choice theory is substantial but not without its critics.
Emily Hauptmann (1996) has argued that political choice is not reduc-
ible to consumer decision making alone. She has raised concerns that
inherently point to the social and psychological aspects of how individu-
als support models of governance. Her assertion is that political deci-
sions occur in a social context on the one hand and efforts at exerting
choice are frustrated by institutions and powerful others on the other.
Her critique introduces some of the issues that we will address, namely
that not only do individuals ultimately make political decisions based on
emotion-based arguments but that the social contexts in which choice
occurs are constrained by political practices that increasingly resist free-
dom of political decision making.
The argument put forward here is that the 2016 U.S. presidential
election—as well as political events such as the Brexit vote in the United
Kingdom—breaks sharply from the tradition of rational choice and
exerts on liberal democratic societies a cataclysmic impact, one that
holds significant consequences for the functioning of a multicultural
society. The “what” and “how” of cultural cataclysm are distinguished
from normal (choice for) change in political direction in terms of three
factors: (1) the enmeshment of political choice with intergroup conflict,
(2) the habitual introjection of hate speech and vitriol into the rhetoric
of the political contest, and (3) the framing of the political outcome as
a winner–loser scenario in terms of economic and societal power. These
three signifiers—making political choice a function of intergroup con-
flict, the chronic use of hate speech in political discourse, and the pun-
ishment of the political loser groups—are frequently manifested via the
presence of a figurehead leader who legitimizes the use of hate as a defin-
ing political tool. Additionally, the presumption of threat or economic
deprivation for the in-group, the abandonment of a common ground
for political debate, and the creation of a triggering crisis that becomes
part of the collective narrative of the populace are part of the sudden
social upheaval. The cultural cataclysm of 2016 constitutes a dramatic
and sudden degradation of the state, its institutions, and its communi-
ties. A shorthand that I will employ to refer to the 2016 election is the
“culture wars” argument, first described by sociologist James Davison
Hunter in his 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define Amer-
ica. Hunter describes the conflict over the nature of American culture as
being fought between conservative religious groups and their politically
progressive counterparts. This theoretical perspective was transformed
into a political tool by the commentator Patrick Buchanan in his 1992
speech at the Republican National Convention: “There is a religious war
