President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

Pitchforks?

 

Jeanine is sensitive to familial political liabilities.

Can This Marriage Be Saved?

 

Yeah, that doesn't have anything to do with it. Not at all. But I could see why you'd read that into it.

I'd like to think I practice empathy for both sides but, more to the point, I'm fascinated by systems of thought - how an outcome came to be in the postmodern era, and the thinking and more often feeling that existed behind it.

And in an era where individualism is held in such regard that "fulfillment of personal identity," say, over the common good, is a cherished goal, I'm fascinated how liberal progressives, the architects of postmodernism, or rejecting authority and systems, found this movement turned back on themselves in ways that, when Obama was elected, couldn't have possibly seemed imaginable. Republicans played the postmodern personal identity game just as well achieving results I personally deem monstrous. We have an incompetent man - never mind that he's offensive, he has no idea what he's doing, and the Lewis Vanity Fair piece is damning in revealing how his administration just lets shit fester - as president, and he's only president because of identity politics, cultivated by right-wing media and ultimately Trump himself, who couldn't run a sandwich shop but has a keen sense for the mob's frothy wants.

In the last weeks before the election - when I could see it happening, when roughly 90% of my extended family told me they were voting for Trump - and then since the election, I've tried to trace back where I thought the tide against progressive liberalism started, when it intensified, how it did so, and why. And I'm just an amateur thinker, no better than you or anyone, but I think I have a bead on this, developed over many years.

And a focus on "coolness" is shorthand for some of that. In life, I'm oddly perched between the old-school Nixon/Reagan Democrats of my extended family, 90s prosperity gospel Christians and "love wins" progressive Christians. The first two voted for Trump all the way through, tho there was a few Gary Johnsons and one Evan McMullin. The latter voted mostly for Sanders. Few of any group voted for Clinton. (Which I did, and pretty gladly, too. More gladly than I voted for Obama in 2012, and, remember, Clinton was viewed as the ultimate liberal elitist.)

What I know certainly from the first two groups is Fox News-fueled ferocious disdain for liberal progressives. It's a real thing for them. That "cosmopolitan bias" line from Miller? I know folks who loved it. I have family who said, out loud, why wasn't there more outrage for the women who got shot in Minneapolis? Because she's white, and people don't care about dead white people. A family member said that to me. Now, of course that's ugly thinking, but there's hurt behind that, too. It's a misguided, self-absorbed hurt, but we're in thick of a postmodern era. People are misguided and self-absorbed all over the joint.

Anyway, those first two groups, they think liberals think they're better than conservatives as people - liberals are smart and good and everyone else is dumb and rotten - and they chalk that up as, well, they just think they're cooler. The cool, enlightened people over here. The losers Trump voters over here. Trump in some ways represents what they see as success - he's rich, he's his own man, his kids seem OK, he plays golf, he wears red, he says he likes America. To critique how he is doubles as a critique to how they'd like their life to be or have been. It's a personal offense.

To some degree, the critique is accurate. It isn't all true, but it's kind of accurate. Some liberals do think they're better than others as people. Certainly smarter. I'm consistently taken aback by the certitude - especially on social media - of liberals who've lived very little life yet have so much confidence about how immigration works, for example. Or how the human brain works as it pertains how far we pursue transgender rights - and whether the US military should be paying for those therapies and operations. And so on and so on. People voted for Trump to show just how much they hated cool people. I believe that. It was as much an assault on culture as anything, and any rhetorical ammo they could get to justify that...feeling...they did. And, more to the point, they won.

Can you imagine voting for that cretinous buffoon out of spite - out of protest for all the people who think they're better than you - and finding out you won? That more people felt the exact same way you did than you ever realized? Can you imagine the validation you'd feel? And how you'd react to every assertion thereon that you were a fool? When you won?

So I chew on "what is the roadmap back to some sense of balance and character? Where did liberals blow it?"

Back to your suggestion that it's personally fueled...I'd say it isn't. I'm...kind of a modernist. So I don't necessarily filter what I think through the filter of how I feel. I think in terms of building better systems and better thinking, which does make me sanctimonious on a message board, and at times hypocritical. But, then, it's a message board. It's a launching spot for ideas.

 

As a PS, I thought Tom Junod, who seems like a cool guy to me, nailed it years back with his Jon Stewart piece. There's something behind all that enlightenment Stewart likes to try on, and it's something smug, and not good.

Jon Stewart and the Burden of History

An excerpt from the piece:

"Wait. He wasn't funny? He wasn't affable? He kind of spoke power to truth when Wallace dared to point out that Stewart seems to crave political influence? He sort of pulled rankon Wallace, and was smug and condescending without bothering to be funny at all? He even started saying, "Are you suggesting that you and I are the same?..." in the same tone he would have used if Wallace had gotten a little schmutz on Stewart's shirt?

O-kay. Well, Stewart had his reasons, I'm sure. After all, he's really not the same as Wallace, is he? I mean, Stewart's the coolest guy in the room, any room, by definition, while Chris Wallace wouldn't look cool next to the guys in hats riding little cars at a Shriner's Convention. He's the very embodiment of the self-important yet dim-witted — or is that dim-witted yet self-important? — media creature whom Stewart has made a living schooling over the last tumultuous decade. So if Jon Stewart can't be smug and contemptuous and superior with Chris Wallace, who can he be smug and contemptuous and superior with? It's not like he came right out and said he's better than Chris Wallace...

Oh. Wait. He sorta did? He said, "What I do is much harder than what you do"? But just last year didn't he tell Rachel Maddow that what he did was less honorable than what she did? Ah, well, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little talk-show hosts. It's not like he started comparing himself to, like, Mark Twain or someone like that...

No! He did that too? He actually asked Wallace, "What am I at my highest aspiration? Who am I? Am I Edward R. Murrow or Mark Twain?" And then he told Wallace: "I've existed in this country forever. There have been people like me who have satirized the political process... I've existed forever. The box that I exist in has always been around."

Come on! He did not say that! He's Jon Stewart, for God's sake. And Jon Stewart did not go on Fox News Sunday and say that He Is Music, and He Writes the Songs...

 

the cool kids theme is intriguing: i actually wouldn't be shocked to find that the "cool kids" from high school -- the jocks and potheads who peaked then, and look back on high school as a wondrous time and sort of went adrift ever since -- are big on trump. and the nerds and off-beats and socially inept high schoolers who got the hell out of town, found themselves elsewhere and peaked later, are more liberal. i guess this falls under the 'life is high school forever' cliche, but, i just think, hmmm....

 

Alma,
Have you ever read Freddie deBoer? He's become a favorite of mine. You guys share some views, disagree on many others, but your thoughts on this remind me of a lot of things he's been writing about, especially since the election.

 

I agree there is way more of it than ever before. I do think it is weird to, apparently,state a fact and then let people debate it. Or worse deny it. I don't watch the evening 1/2 shows, I hear they do cover many stories. My problem with the msm is the harping on 1 or 2 issues all day. There is so many other things that need attention. What I REALLY hate is how they seem to fall for the distractions. For example the transgender story, while it deserved attention, he was not at the time making it law. Talk about it and move on!

Although when you say vicious it seems to imply that they are extra rough on trump.

 

Link?

 

C.K. had a line in Horace and Pete, "Can't a pumpkin condescend to a peanut?"

 

I don't think I've seen anything like this - it seems like dropping raw meat to a bunch of piranhas who frenzy over it. Vicious might not have been the right word, but it seems some are hell bent in hoping there's actually an impeachment, as if they can undo the shock they got on Nov 8th.

I'm speaking in really broad brush, general terms of course, which is dangerous, but no one these days strike me as Woodward and Bernstein.

And along a similar line of thinking, no one in Congress strike me as Baker either. Congress is where we have really needed more intelligent people over the past 20 years. The net IQ of that entire group seems to me to be on a downward slope for years. Which doesn't help the current Executive Branch situation.