Is The Fever Breaking?

Is this what happens when the fever is breaking?

That was my first thought after hearing that there was another attempt on trump. I was not surprised to hear that the suspect of this attempt had voted Republican. When they don't like something, Democrats tend to carry protest signs, Republicans tend to carry guns. 

Trump's singular achievement as a politician is that he activated and initiated the lunatic fringe into mainstream American politics. The guys (they are mostly white guys) who existed on the margins of society, the portion of the electorate who were rural, depoliticized and preferred to hate the government from their well-stocked and well-armed Doomsday bunkers, had a champion in the White House for a time. They became Trump's personal power base and the most ardent Republicans, elbowing out the centrist establishment normies. After his defeat in 2020, rather than step down as most losing candidates do, trump did the opposite, he consolidated his base of support and his takeover of the Party was complete. The only problem is, now that you are the Party, you own whatever happens to it. What happens when the promises you've been making all these years start being replaced by excuse after excuse? What happens when your supporters get tired of the familiar, old, boring, racist tune you've been singing, and you don't know any other lyrics to sing? And worse, what happens when you keep losing, and they stop believing your claim that every loss is actually a win?

First, they stop coming to your shows. Then they stop buying your merch. Finally, the most ardent of your supporters want you out of the picture for good. Trump is not only running to stay out of jail, he's literally running to stay alive. 

So what happens after trump loses (again)? Trump will say the election was rigged (again), as he is already doing. But this time no one will listen. He is not the president so this time he can not leverage that position for the purposes of disruption. There might be some protests, but there won't be riots in the streets. Chances are it will be like the protests he called for when he was in court in New York, meh. The only civil war we are likely to see will be in the Republican Party. Trump won't let go of the Party, he can't. It's his main family business. He's been trying to diversify the business for a while (bibles, sneakers, NFTs), mainly with the media division, and now a cryptocurrency (?), which suggests a pivot away from politics to some degree. The politics has always only ever been about the money. But he's never gone gently into that good night, ever, and he will fight to keep control of the Party because it's a formidable marketing infrastructure, and he has money problems on the horizon too. Unfortunately for him, his legal problems will eventually catch up with him, both financially and in terms of his liberty. Trump still has a few years of court ahead of him with appeals etc. before he is remanded into custody. But his legal problems will ultimately end his political career once and for all, if a heart attack or one of his followers doesn't end it permanently first. 

Since narrowly being elected to the Senate, JD Vance has seen himself as trump's heir apparent. That's what being trump's running mate has always been about for him. Trying to figure out how to take hold of the trump base with trump's blessing has been his objective. I can't see how that happens, even if trump is in jail. At best, he will become trump's mini-me,  and trump will make sure everyone thinks that he is calling all the shots, no matter what. But the normie faction of the Republican Party is still around. They were the Nikki Haley voters in the primary. Plenty of them will either vote for Harris (to vote against trump, like Adam Kinsinger and Lynne Cheney) or just stay home this election. They will reemerge after the election, and my guess is that they will get behind Nikki. She will come out of this political cycle well positioned to battle for leadership. Between her and trump/Vance, my money would be on her. But it will be a bloody, ugly fight. 

Harris vs. Haley in 2028. Another unprecedented election, but in a good way.

What we never learned from Plato

Everything is power. Whether we like it or not. It’s hidden in the pretext, subtext and context of every relationship, every book, every great work of art. No place for beauty or truth. No place for love or virtue. No such thing as an ideal. And so we sit around the fire in cold darkness of our cave, scratching ourselves, thinking of the next hunt, what meat will fill our bellies. And in our spare time, we fight over the shape and meaning of the shadows reflected on the wall of our cave, created by the figures who stand outside in the light near the entrance. We argue about whether they are friend or foe, we talk of our fears, and even our words are corrupt and deceptive. Sometimes, when the disagreement and distrust has reached a heightened pitch inside the cave, we fashion tools of power to gain the upper hand, and use them to bloody each other for the sake of our mistaken beliefs, convictions and desires. In our ignorance, of our ignorance, we forever fail, each other and ourselves. 

Political Frankenstein

It's been almost 10 years since that man rode the golden escalator down to the awaiting commoners to announce that he was running for President of the United States and I still can't get my mind around it. 

Realizing that he would be the most destructive and divisive president in modern American history, I came to grips with the possibility of his election in 2015, because he was the new thing, and Americans love a new thing. The desire for change is a powerful force. So they voted for a lying, gutter-talking, sex offending (on tape), draft-dodging, tax-cheating, pseudo-celebrity businessman, with a record of bankruptcies, stiffing suppliers, and conning customers, and who never did a day of public service in his life.   

But it's 2024 now. Haven't we had enough of his chaos and innumerable outlandish lies? After all, it's post pandemic debacle, in which over a million Americans perished (by many estimates, half needlessly), post two impeachments, post January 6th in which he fomented a violent insurrection against the Capitol and attempted a government coup, post stealing classified documents, post 36 felony convictions for covering up his affair with a porn actress, and, and... I haven't even mentioned post stripping away women's reproductive freedom by a Supreme Court he appointed. 

And this race is still neck and neck? Within the statistical margin of error? Is there nothing that disqualifies a person from becoming the President of the United States? Tax evasion? Bankruptcy? Adultery? A criminal record? Insurrection? I mean he's running while out on bail.

But all this doesn't actually say much about the candidate. It says much more about the electorate.

As I've mentioned before, I started reading Allan Bloom's 1988 book The Closing of the American Mind to try and understand how our standards have sunk so low during my lifetime. I sensed that the story begins way back, around the time I was born in '64, and came to fruition around the time I graduated university in '86, which is exactly the period that Bloom writes about. This is from a chapter in the last quarter of the book: "The professors, the repositories of our best traditions and highest intellectual aspirations, were fawning over what was nothing better than rabble; publicly confessing their guilt and apologizing for not having understood the most important moral issues, the proper response they were learning from the mob; expressing their willingness to change the university goals and the content of what they taught." You'd be forgiven if you thought he was describing the way universities (mis)handled, actually tolerated, the anti-Semitic and destructive pro-Palestine encampments on the university campuses this past year. Actually, he was writing about a chaotic 1968 civil rights demonstration at Cornell that he witnessed.

Reading Bloom made me realize something. We've been primed for a candidate like the Monster From Mar-a-lago for at least 50 years. I realized that this candidate isn't an anomaly. We've been creating him for decades. He's a composite, a political Frankenstein that we've stitched together from the unsavoury and unseemly characteristics of almost every president we've had since LBJ, just more so. Think about it. He is corrupt like Nixon, contrived like Reagan, adulterous like Clinton, clueless and inarticulate like Dubya, and inexperienced like Obama. Left off this list are Ford, Carter and GHW Bush. And that's because they are the exceptions that prove the rule. They were decent, honest, and forthright presidents. They paid their taxes, served their country honourably in war, and ran scandal free administrations. And they were all one term presidents. In other words they weren't really presidential material, at least not in the way my generation seems to prefer occupants of the Oval Office. 

I guess we'll see soon enough if standards have changed. The debate looms and the thought of the deformed ugly creature of our making once again standing behind a podium and being respectfully asked serious questions that concern all of us, as if a genuine answer can be reasonably expected, is to my mind an indictment. But not of the politician. The monster was never the creature, it was always his creator. 

Plato predicts the internet

"O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for the discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories, they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

Plato, Phaedrus, circa 370 BC

The Candidate Who Laughs

Fellow citizens of this great nation, I give you the candidate!

He is the very image of leadership. Tall, well-fed, well-dressed, with a head of carefully coiffed hair. He is not a career politician. He knows nothing about governance or how government actually works, and like most everyday citizens, has contempt for career politicians. He is a wealthy businessman, and relishes the symbols of his status. He cultivates a 'self-made' image, even though his wealth was entirely inherited from his father, but in our great and wealthy nation there is nothing wrong with intergenerational wealth. Like all citizens he is addicted to media and craves fame. He even starred in his own television show based on the image of success he publicly cultivates. In other ways he is quite common. He loves making money. In fact, making money is the only thing he really understands or cares about. He enjoys all the trappings of celebrity and power, living in a large house, having a private jet, a limousine and servants, in other words, he is the embodiment of every American's idea of success and he understands the power of projecting this image, and relishes the limelight. He has only one genuine skill, how to sell things, which is quintessentially American. He holds only one credo - everyone and everything can be bought for a price. He understands that to sell you must speak plainly but always with utmost confidence no matter what you are saying. His sentence structure and grammar are elementary-school level and filled with hyperbole to demonstrate force of expression, also an American trait. He uses a lexicon of simple words that he repeats over and over. His words are never meant to explain or clarify, rather they are meant to obscure, so he can deny what he has said before, or say the opposite and declare he was previously misunderstood. He never communicates to convey any particular idea or belief, because his aim is to never commit to anything. His only commitment is to himself. He communicates to leave an impression, not to be understood. He lies repeatedly, about everything and anything, no matter how small or big, because outside facts don't matter when your only objective is self-interest. Repeatedly lying is an effective way to inure people to all lies, and muddy the truth. He thinks people are lazy, ignorant and uninformed, because he is lazy, ignorant and uninformed. His most devoted supporters are exactly like him in this respect, and this is why he has contempt for them. What his supporters love about him is his authenticity, and by authenticity they mean his capacity to say anything he wants without any regard to the facts. They wish they could live like that. His world is a world of make-believe, like a child's, no matter how absurd or ridiculous. His adolescent existence extends to a total lack of responsibility. Like a child he thinks he is the center of the universe, and at the same time, like a child, he is completely incapable of accepting any responsibility. Whatever happens it's always someone else's fault. He has no sense of accountability, someone else is always to blame, he is the victim. Because his world is make-believe, the media is his main ally, because they also trade in make-believe. They either fabricate drama out of whole cloth or amplify it into a crisis because it's good for ratings. The candidate is skilled at tailoring his messaging to attract and hold the media spotlight. Maximizing attention, through the media and at political events, is the only metric of performance that matters to him. When he performs for his supporters he tells jokes, usually to insult or demean the opposition. His supporters love him for that. They wish they could live without consequences too. But he never laughs. He is incapable of laughter because laughter shows vulnerability. Nothing is more threatening to him than showing vulnerability, because he knows deep inside that he is fragile and weak.

You can vote for this candidate, or the one who laughs.