On November 8 it will be three hundred years since a travel book by a previously unknown author appeared in London. It was called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. Opposite the title page was a portrait of the writer, said to be “first a Surgeon, and then a CAPTAIN of several SHIPS.” Interspersed throughout the text were four maps accurately depicting known places like Sumatra, Japan, and North America, with newly discovered islands and peninsulas etched in. It looked like just another English voyager’s account from the still-unfolding age of European discovery, which was also the emerging age of European colonialism. This explorer is, indeed, a great believer in imperialism, explaining:
If a Prince send Forces into a Nation, where the People are poor and ignorant, he may lawfully put half of them to Death, and make Slaves of the rest, in order to civilize and reduce them from their barbarous Way of Living.
The book is, of course, the great literary hoax written by Jonathan Swift, and we now call it Gulliver’s Travels.* Unlike his ventriloquist’s dummy Lemuel Gulliver, Swift had a great hatred of colonialism, a rage that causes him late in the book to break character and assume a high style of savage indignation that is far beyond Gulliver’s own rhetorical powers:
Here commences a new Dominion acquired with a Title by Divine Right. Ships are sent with the first Opportunity; the Natives driven out or destroyed, their Princes tortured to discover their Gold; a free Licence given to all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust; the Earth reeking with the Blood of its Inhabitants: And this execrable Crew of Butchers employed in so pious an Expedition, is a modern Colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous People.
To prepare the ground for this excoriation of the rapacity and brutality of empires, Swift draws his readers into a vivid exploration of the idea of magnitude: What does it mean to be great, and what does it mean to be small? The first two of the book’s four parts are literature’s most famous game of greatness. Swift had read the work of his friend and fellow Irish Protestant George Berkeley, who pointed out that big and small are not absolute ideas. They depend on perception: “The Judgments we make of Greatness do, in like manner as those of Distance, depend on the Disposition of the Eyes.” Berkeley was concerned with questions of cognition, but Swift politicized those questions: if greatness and smallness are not objective realities, then neither are superiority and inferiority, civilization and barbarism, progress and backwardness.
In Lilliput Gulliver finds himself a giant among tiny people—according to the disposition of their eyes, he is an immense and thus almighty creature. He experiences greatness in its most literal form. But on his next voyage, to Brobdingnag, he realizes that he is now the tiny person in a land inhabited by giants. His own body has not changed, but its meaning has been transformed. He describes his shock:
In this terrible Agitation of Mind I could not forbear thinking of Lilliput, whose Inhabitants looked upon me as the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World; where I was able to draw an Imperial Fleet in my Hand, and perform those other Actions which will be recorded for ever in the Chronicles of that Empire, while Posterity shall hardly believe them, although attested by Millions. I reflected what a Mortification it must prove to me to appear as inconsiderable in this Nation as one single Lilliputian would be among us…. Undoubtedly Philosophers are in the Right when they tell us, that nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison: It might have pleased Fortune to let the Lilliputians find some Nation, where the People were as diminutive with respect to them, as they were to me. And who knows but that even this prodigious Race of Mortals might be equally overmatched in some distant Part of the World, whereof we have yet no Discovery?
What Gulliver experiences at this moment is the dizzying awareness that he can never really be at home again, either in his own body or in his own country. He can never be himself. He can never be normal. He must remember being his Lilliputian self, “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World,” or his Brobdingnagian self, the contemptibly inconsiderable homunculus. Since “nothing is great or little otherwise than by Comparison,” he is forced to hover neurotically between greatness and littleness. The terms of this comparison are strictly binary—there are only the great and the diminutive. One is either massively aggrandized or utterly mortified.
Swift’s storytelling is fabulously imaginative and full of comic absurdity, but his evocation of this condition is razor sharp. He was writing at a time when both European colonialism and the slave trade were expanding rapidly, and both of these interrelated enterprises create and are sustained by precisely this binary opposition. Comparison is all. Compared with the humblest free white man, every enslaved Black person is “inconsiderable.” Compared with every member of a colonized nation, every member of the colonizing nation is a giant. One belongs either to the greatest nation on earth or to the wretched of the earth. Greatness thus depends on there being a wretched of the earth. It is a condition entirely dependent on the continued existence of its opposite.
The long overthrow of slavery and the dismantling of the European empires, both of which we can see as culminating very roughly in the 1960s, created the conditions in which it was possible to, as it were, normalize being normal. By normal I mean escaping from Gulliver’s confounding predicament—the ability to be neither great nor negligible but comfortably on the same level as everyone else. To go back to Berkeley’s “Disposition of the Eyes,” we might invoke Philip Pettit’s “eyeball test” for the existence of a genuine republic: the ability of each person to “look others in the eye without reason for fear or deference.” And by normalizing I mean making this principle into a governing political ethic. I’m not for a moment claiming that status anxiety or structures of assumed superiority and enforced inferiority ever retreated from social and economic life. But I am suggesting that in the 1960s civil rights and feminist and LGBTQ and labor movements began to gain much more ground in democracies.
These movements were driven by those who had experienced the contempt of the great. But it turned out that people as well as nations that had been on the more privileged side of the divide could live quite happily without greatness. They could do so in particular if they could swap “great” for “better”: great pretensions for better lives—better housing, better pay and conditions, better access to education and health care, better control over their own bodies and sexuality. But also more respect.
The irony of greatness for those who occupied its lower rungs is that, while it did not demand their utter subjection, it did demand their deference. The imperial state gives those who belong to it a sense of superiority, but it demands in return a surrender to its grandeur. What the rights movements taught not just their own members but democracies as a whole is that the opposite of greatness is not abjection. It is dignity.
There’s a connection here to something W.B. Yeats said a hundred years ago when Irish nationalists were staging riots at the Abbey Theatre in response to Sean O’Casey’s play about the 1916 Easter Rising, which ten years earlier had revived the Irish independence struggle. The nationalists were upset because the play did not depict Dubliners or indeed revolutionaries as heroic. It showed them to be merely (and unbearably) ordinary. But Yeats responded by suggesting that there is a difference between national pride and national vanity:
The moment a nation reached intellectual maturity, it became exceedingly proud and ceased to be vain, and when it became exceedingly proud it did not disguise its faults…but when it was immature it was exceedingly vain, and did not believe in itself.
National vanity is arguably dependent on the absence of national pride. To be proud of one’s country is, as Yeats says, not to disguise its faults but to want to believe that the country is capable of rising above them. The keynote of national pride is “We’re better than this.” National vanity, on the contrary, is indeed a form of disguise. It uses the mask of greatness to cover up a society’s complex realities. The dark parts of its history and the persistent stains of injustice must be erased. The dignity of self-knowledge is sacrificed to the willed ignorance of inflated self-esteem. Self-belief is replaced by self-delusion.
The most effective safeguards against the lure of greatness are this belief in betterment and the dignity of being able to look each other in the eye without reason for fear or deference. And these are the defenses that have been stripped away in recent decades. The stalling of generational social mobility has undercut belief in better; it is increasingly unlikely in most developed democracies that young people will have better standards of living and better access to education, housing, and health care than their parents did. And the rise of economic inequality, accompanied by ever more flagrant displays of vast superiority by a brash and brazen oligarchy, means that our societies ever more obviously fail the eye test.
It is against this background that we return to a neurotic form of politics in which, like Gulliver, citizens are made to hover between the poles of massive aggrandizement and utter mortification. These opposites come as a package; they must be experienced together. The great leader casts the people imaginatively down into the pit of abjection so that he (and only he) can lift them up into hyperinflated greatness. He does so because he has nothing to offer in between: no betterment, no dignity, no equality.
When greatness is evoked as the natural condition of the nation, equality is humiliation. Because greatness can be measured only by comparison, it cannot exist on the level. This was very much the dynamic of Brexit: the European Union affords each of its members the same status—an affront to those who know themselves to be exceptional and even have Great in the name of their country. And of course for the United States to be bound by international law, to be a partner in global organizations and a party to international treaties, is innately humiliating.
Humiliation turns the world upside down. As Wayne Koestenbaum puts it in Humiliation, his 2011 book, the emotion
involves a reversal: from top to bottom, from high to low, from exalted to degraded, from secure to insecure. The reversal happens quickly. Someone must be there to watch it happen, and to carry the news elsewhere.
Thus, humiliation creates a different kind of eyeball test. It is concerned not with how we are looking each other in the eye but with how we look “in the eyes of the world.” One of Donald Trump’s most consistent refrains from long before he entered politics is that They are laughing at Us. A Washington Post analysis in January 2016 found that at that point Trump had used this trope at least 103 times, going back to 1987, when he took out a full-page ad in three national newspapers : “Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.” “They laugh at us. Behind our backs, they laugh at us because of our own stupidity,” he said on Larry King Live when he was forty-one years old. “The world is laughing at us” was one of the catchphrases of his campaign in 2015 and 2016, and again in 2019 and 2020. The sniggerers have included, at different times, China, the world in general, OPEC, Mexico, Iran, Russia, terrorists, mullahs, and “the Persians.”
To be laughed at is to be belittled but also to be made a show of. “Humiliation,” says Koestenbaum, “has its rewards. Among them: the privilege of being seen as exemplary. The pleasure of being a spectacle. The perk of visibility.” In Brobdingnag Gulliver is utterly humiliated by his littleness and powerlessness, but he is also an exciting exhibition, an object of wonder. Trump’s constant reference to the idea that the world has nothing better to do but sit around and laugh at America is not incompatible with American exceptionalism—it is a kind of backhanded compliment. This is not petty humiliation. It is epic humiliation, like the scene in the Iliad in which the warrior-hero Ajax slips and falls in cow dung and is laughed at. The vast scale of the laughter is proof of his heroic magnitude: it actually confirms the greatness of its object.
The pleasure of being a spectacle is allied to the pleasure of self-pity. Greatness is appealing in part because it politicizes the gratifying sensation of feeling deeply sorry for yourself. We tend to think of self-pity as similar to low self-esteem, but it is in fact a form of self-regard—and this is why it is pleasurable. The early-nineteenth-century English radical Leigh Hunt, in his commentary on John Keats, picks up on the phrase “flattered to tears” in Keats’s poem “Music”:
In this word “flattered” is the whole theory of the secret of tears; which are the tributes, more or less worthy, of self-pity to self-love. Whenever we shed tears, we take pity on ourselves; and we feel, if we do not consciously say so, that we deserve to have the pity taken.
The more highly we think of ourselves, the sorrier we feel for ourselves when we do not get what we know we deserve. Herbert Spencer in The Principles of Psychology (1855) puzzled over the emotion he variously called a “pleasurably-painful sentiment,” “the luxury of grief,” and “self-pity”:
It seems possible that this sentiment…may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth as he estimates it and the treatment he has received…. If he feels that he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast. One who contemplates his affliction as undeserved, necessarily contemplates his own merit…. There is an idea of much withheld, and a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.
Self-pity thus combines two things that may otherwise seem incompatible: a deep sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority.
It’s important, of course, to distinguish between self-pity and rightful indignation. People should feel indignant about being oppressed and impoverished, disrespected and silenced. Some of the energy of the reactionary movements that threaten democracy is undoubtedly fueled by a sense of loss that is rooted in economic decline and cultural dislocation. But self-pity is not dependent on any objective reality of oppression or injustice. It is proportionate only to one’s sense of having “deserved much.” The sense of injustice it feeds off is entirely about one’s sense of one’s own proper status. To put it simply, if you always travel first class but one day, for some reason, you get relegated to economy class, you will spend the trip feeling terribly sorry for yourself. If you always sit in economy class, it just is what it is. And if you’ve always known that your skin color or your gender or your sexuality or your nationality entitles you to privilege, mere equality can feel like victimhood.
A near synonym for humiliation is degradation—literally being taken down a grade or two. And the thing about this sense of degradation is that it can be deeply felt even if nothing in your life has really changed. Gulliver’s body doesn’t alter between Lilliput and Brobdingnag, but his sense of it swings radically from exaltation to degradation. Similarly, a white man may remain highly privileged but still feel that he is being downgraded if a Black woman is rising up. Nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison. The feeling of belittlement very easily becomes a sense of victimhood.
This is what far-right movements across the world have both conjured up and mobilized, just as they did in the 1920s and 1930s. They replace the idea of universal rights with the idea of just deserts. It is a double idea: we should get our just deserts (as Americans, as men, as white people), and those who are preventing us from having them should get theirs. Greatness conveys entitlement, and those who prevent us from getting what we are entitled to must be punished. The overwhelming weakness of the politics of greatness is that it cannot bring genuine justice, but its overwhelming strength is that it can deliver it in the potently toxic form of revenge. “I am your justice,” Donald Trump declared in 2023, “and for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” The good leader offers mere concrete betterment; the great one offers the thrilling double act of victimhood and vengeance.
This dance of humiliation and hype has its aesthetics as well as its politics. What used to be called Burkean conservatism is disappearing before our eyes—and those of us who were instinctively critical of it are forced to mourn, with Joni Mitchell, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It appealed—nostalgically and anachronistically—to an idea of modest scale: what Edmund Burke (incidentally born three years after Gulliver’s Travels was published, and a student at Trinity College Dublin when Swift was dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral a few blocks away) called the “little platoon[s]” of family, church, and community as the foundation of “public affections.” But if Burke’s politics are vanishing, his aesthetics are thriving.
In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke called attention to the sadomasochistic delight in the aesthetic experience of terror:
Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.
The reactionary politics of today is a politics of the sublime—pain invoked, pain distanced, pain rendered politically delightful. This was true of Brexit, which depended on invoking an idea of Britain (in fact a free and prosperous country) as enslaved and oppressed by the European Union. And it is true of Trump. Before him American political rhetoric (including conservative rhetoric) had a grammar of uplift—the American Dream, Kennedy’s New Frontier, Reagan’s Morning in America, Obama’s arc of history bending toward justice. But Trump, from the beginning of his campaign in 2015, went for the full sublime. He created a vision of America as a hellhole—what he called in his first inaugural address “American carnage.” He imagined it for his fans as a country on the verge of obliteration. But he also presented, of course, a dramatic denouement: the appearance of what Gulliver called “the greatest Prodigy that ever appeared in the World” to transform this abjection into its opposite—greatness.
Strikingly, Burke noted that the sublime, this thrill of terror, operates equally at both the Lilliputian and the Brobdingnagian scale: “The great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise…. Nor can we distinguish in its effect this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.” That’s because in our experience of each of them “the imagination is lost as well as the sense.” Burke’s description of this loss of sense is strikingly reminiscent of a Trump speech: “All is dark, uncertain, confused, terrible, and sublime to the last degree…. The mind is hurried out of itself, by a croud of great and confused images; which affect because they are crouded and confused.”
Perhaps what we get in this renewed politics of greatness is a bastardized form of tragedy. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, deals in greatness, and produces pity and terror. This contemporary sublime politics turns up the dial on greatness but produces self-pity and terror. And perhaps what you get when you replace pity with self-pity is the impossibility of revelation. Revelation triggers reversal, a change of fortune: when the messenger tells Oedipus what he has really done, it’s not just rather upsetting news for the king; it means that he can no longer be king. Revelation, in the form of accountability, is also one of the crucial mechanisms of democratic public life. But when terror is ramped up and pity is not for the state of the country or the world or the human condition but for oneself, revelation has no force. It cannot have consequences.
Yet, even in its own terms, greatness is not so great. This kind of politics is always vulnerable to the whims and foibles of the man who embodies it. Megalomaniacs get caught in a vicious circle where sycophancy reinforces their sense of infallibility and their sense of infallibility cannot abide anyone who is not a sycophant. Rational decision-making collapses. Greatness can lapse very quickly into idiocy.
Then there is the problem of succession. The leader embodies greatness because he is unique, a one-off, appointed by God. Absolute monarchies dealt with this problem by imagining that greatness passed through the bloodline, and even when that idea seemed credible it was as often disproved as vindicated. (The ex-prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has done a fine job of renewing this lesson in the United Kingdom.) But without heredity there is no obvious way to make the one-off a two-off. Trumpism without Trump remains a knotty problem. The president’s own progeny do not provide much evidence for his belief that genius is genetic.
Yet the largest underlying problem with the politics of greatness is the inevitability of disappointment. The national vanity of greatness is always backward-looking. It must return again and again to the idea of the new golden age, a trope of Boris Johnson’s brief post-Brexit ascendancy in Britain, and of Putin’s Russia, and of course of Trump’s America. “This,” he began his State of the Union address in February, “is the golden age of America.” Yet the golden age must not only be in the past (hence the “again” in MAGA and the “back” in Take Back Control) but also show up the terrible decadence of the present. The golden age was first elaborated in Hesiod’s Works and Days as a long-ago era when people had neither facts nor processes to worry about: “Like gods they lived, with spirits free from care.” This golden age was merely the ideal from which humanity had been expelled forever. After it came the age in which, as Hesiod has it, “they could not restrain themselves from wicked outrage against each other.”
If that sounds familiar, it is not coincidental. The golden age of greatness is indissolubly paired with the brass-necked age of unrestrained outrages and pain. Greatness promises fulfillment and security, but it is always radically insecure—first, because it can’t live without its opposite. It can’t just decree that everything is now great in the new golden age. To do so would be to make itself redundant. It must continue to foment the terror of abjection that is its evil twin. It is radically opposed to the American Revolution’s elevation of “the pursuit of happiness.” It must pursue unhappiness. The golden age cannot be enjoyed because only the great leader stands between it and annihilation.
Second, since greatness has no stable meaning in itself and is always a matter of comparison, it cannot be a steady state. If it is not to recede, it must get ever more great. Inflation can’t be stopped. It must expand to infinity and beyond—or perhaps to Greenland and beyond. And since it can never be achieved or satisfied, greatness generates narratives of betrayal and reactions of frustration. Both bend toward violence. Violence alone transcends the contradictions of greatness. It simplifies superiority and inferiority into the most brutal binary of the killer and the killed.
In Dublin, a few minutes’ walk from where Swift wrote most of Gulliver’s Travels, there is a statue of the early-twentieth-century labor leader James Larkin, who, in Yeats’s phrase, “hurled the little streets upon the great.” On it is inscribed the phrase he often used in his speeches: “The great appear great because we are on our knees: Let us rise.”
English (US) · 