Something subtle yet important has gotten lost in the media salivating over Oprah Winfrey’s Golden Globes speech and the prospect of a “battle of the network stars” presidential face-off. That critical subtlety is this: Winfrey and the current White House occupant, for all their surface differences, embody and model the same philosophy of life. Both are elite members of the American Narcissism Party.
So if you’ve wondered how a President could obsess over the turnout for his appearance at the site of an epic natural disaster, know that such Trumpisms are very much in keeping with the no-limits personal empowerment championed by Winfrey during a quarter-century TV career.
Indeed, though Winfrey’s impassioned call for women to keep telling “your truth” was prompted most immediately by the #MeToo phenomenon, she has long peddled a highly malleable approach to facts — a designer reality in which your world is not only whatever you wish it to be but what you deserve to have. In fact, by the time Winfrey gave up her daily show in 2011 she had become, with no contenders, America’s foremost docent in the world of delusional thinking, upholding a view of life in which “it’s all about you.”
Thus, as polar as Trump and Winfrey might be in their politics, they are individual gale winds in the perfect storm of narcissistic themes that has, regrettably, swept away the social contract as the so-called Greatest Generation understood it.
Neither Trump nor Winfrey invented this problem, of course. The long downhill slide actually began with Dr. Benjamin Spock’s indulgent slant on child-rearing, then metastasized to American schools, which transformed early-childhood education into hard-core brainwashing in self-esteem. Kids in at least one Southern school district disembarked their buses each morning to encounter a full-length mirror telling them they were “now looking at the most important person in the world!” That’s not a message that promotes cooperation or empathy.
The effects soon were compounded by helicopter parenting, wherein nary a detail escaped Mommy and Daddy as they sought to inoculate little Mitt or Muffy against any disappointment, stage-managing every detail of their kids’ existence.
By the 1990s, a phalanx of personal-finance gurus were encouraging the shameless accretion of wealth, legitimizing the idea of “looking out for number one.” Self-styled nondenominational pastors saw a growth opportunity in this emerging hedonism and cannily retooled their spiels to include fewer of those off-putting “thou shalt nots.” Such was the genesis, if you will, of Joel Osteen — man of the custom-made cloth and preacher of the Gospel According to Ralph Lauren, if one wants to be snarky. Some Christian churches even took down their crosses; crosses, after all, evoke suffering and sacrifice, concepts that had begun to sound insufficiently user-friendly.
Then, a true watershed moment, came Oprah herself. Her millennial lust for the New Age resulted in her showcasing for 13 million rapt daily viewers (at peak) a seamless progression of epiphanies espoused by this or that spiritual leader: “A Course in Miracles,” then “The Power of Now,” then the ultimate narcissist’s catechism: the blockbuster book/DVD parlay, “The Secret.”
Framing personal fulfillment as a birthright, “The Secret” posited the notion of an obedient universe just waiting for you to set forth your desires. And if your desires conflicted with your neighbors’ . . . well, too bad. They could take it up with their own cosmic ombudsman.
All of which represented a wholesale change in the tenor of American social and moral thought since the post-World War II period. It would’ve been unthinkable for members of that generation to confess the egoistic outlooks that have now become mainstream.
Sure, the parents of the Baby Boom had work to do in areas including race and women’s rights, but a sense of the social contract reigned supreme. American life was then about stoicism, self-sacrifice and service. If we fell short, at least we aspired to it. No more.
A half-century ago, the founders of the self-esteem movement justified their squishy regimens by insisting that massive infusions of self-worth were the sine qua non of good citizenship and generosity of spirit: “You have to love yourself first.” On the contrary, social psychologists have come to believe that an overabundance of ego can, at worst, spark some genuinely conscienceless behavior. Even at best, narcissists may grow up feeling utterly detached from the hopes and circumstances of those around them.
Bottom line, if the media get their wish, 2020 might be less of a true election than a run-off between two celebrities who probably agree on two things only: One, that when they look in the mirror, they see the most important person in the world, and two, that you should do likewise. It may not be too soon to begin asking if that’s the kind of leadership we want, for there are millions more “party members” just like them waiting in the wings.
Salerno is author of the book “SHAM,” which looked extensively at the self-help movement’s wider impact on American society.
