The literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant saw the American Dream as cruel optimism, a condition “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your own flourishing.”
Berlant felt Trump’s spectral presence everywhere, his bluster mimicked and channelled by the Party establishment. Though hardly a man of nuance, he had tapped into the subtleties of affective politics. She called it “the Trumping of Politics.”
The so-called affective turn was propelled, in no small part, by a series of essays, starting in the mid-nineteen-nineties, by the late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who had become fascinated by the work of the psychologist Silvan Tomkins. He had identified nine primary “affects,” some positive , most negative , one neutral . Tomkins—who had a background in theatre—believed that people acted toward one another according to social scripts.
Berlant roots her version of affect theory less in works of psychology than in works of Marxist thought, especially those of Raymond Williams, who, back in the nineteen-fifties, wrote of the “structure of feeling.” He was trying to describe how we come to agree on social or cultural conventions—the intuitive, pre-ideological sense a cohort has that one version of the future is feasible while another is not.
In sentimental fiction, we encounter righteous solutions to problems that feel unresolvable in real life. Berlant held that American popular culture had been built, layer by layer, from “” to “The Simpsons,” upon the assumption that identifying with “someone else’s stress, pain, or humiliated identity” could change you. “Popular culture relies on keeping sacrosanct this aspect of sentimentality—that ‘underneath’ we are all alike,” she observed.