Harlan County, Cumberland, Kentucky, 2015
One look at that photograph ought to tell you much about the state of America west of the Alleghenies. We have all watched the unfolding of the leftist blindness to Trump. We have watched friends and enemies, people we like and people we don’t, fail to figure out in what ways their navigation has led them onto the rocks of shipwrecked ideology. Mostly it takes the shape of the persistent refusal to understand that quite reasonable people can disagree in analysis and conclusions. I received the following article this morning from a dear friend, who shall be known as Sixtus Publius Quintus Romulus who, for instance, is quite sound on anthropogenic global warming, but was apparently farther into the Hillary cult than I could have believed.
It is copied below in its entirety so as to allow you to see what I am reacting to.
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Donald Trump “may not be good for America, but he’s damn good for CBS.”
—Les Moonves, President and Chief Executive Officer of CBS
The Ship of State is sinking and a rooster is chasing a hen in a neighbor’s yard. How can that be? A woman is hanging her husband’s underwear on the laundry line and singing to herself. The dead leaves are dancing on the ground while a few jump high in the air as if trying to get back on a branch they fell from. A strange dog in my driveway is looking off into the distance and wagging his tail. Don’t any of them have patriotic feelings? The Ship of State, festooned with Trump/Pence election signs, is sinking. Shouldn’t we all fall silent in awe? The bare trees look spooked though it’s past Halloween. The president-elect with a spyglass and his orange pompadour shouts from the crow’s nest that he can see thousands of Muslims on rooftops in New Jersey still celebrating the collapse of the Twin Towers—unless I’m hallucinating, but who nowadays can be sure their eyes and ears work? If he is bonkers, as he surely is, many of us are too, like that woman hanging laundry to dry on a day cold enough to snow.
All of us who are familiar with rural areas and former industrial towns in this country know the impoverishment and hopelessness of many men and women who live there. Barely surviving by holding part-time jobs, since businesses now rarely hire full-time workers in order to avoid paying benefits, they are not just underpaid and constantly in debt, but know in their hearts that they and their children are expendable. Understandably, they are angry. When Democrats proclaimed that the economy was doing well and that we were still the greatest country in the world, they started listening to Trump, who told them what they could already plainly see, that we are in decline. These unfortunates, who’ve been cheated and swindled by bosses, mortgage banks, loan sharks, health insurance companies, and both political parties, have put all their hopes in a billionaire who has a long record of not paying taxes, cheating his workers and contractors out of their pay, and seemingly using his own “charitable” foundation as a slush fund. They voted for a buffoon who doesn’t care whether they live or die.
They got plenty of help in making that decision. Having a candidate as uninspiring as Hillary Clinton, whose weaknesses ought to have been obvious to the party that nominated her and even more so after she lost the white working classes and the young people to Bernie Sanders in the primaries, as it was to many other Americans, including those like me who voted for her, turned out to be a catastrophic error. Not that it is easy to run a national campaign in a country so polarized as ours, split between liberal and conservative voters, urban and rural, educated and uneducated, religious and secular, rich and poor, with the predictable class animosities between them; and with the Internet and social media as our main source of information, a medium ideal for spreading lies and brainwashing the gullible. Without it ISIS could not have gotten all those tens of thousands of recruits and an outright huckster could not have become president of the United States.
It took years of deliberate effort by vested interests to create this “proudly ignorant populism,” as someone called it, know-nothing voters who are easily led by the nose, incapable of distinguishing lies from truth, or an honest person from a crook. Easily duped, they can be depended on to act against their own self-interest again and again. Throw into the mix racism, misogyny, hatred of immigrants, gays, and other minorities, the dumbing down of the population by inadequate education, suspicion of learning, rejection of science and history, and dozens of other things like guns and violence, and you have the kind of environment in which people chose their next president.
“Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will,” Goebbels said. Everywhere one turns one hears people parroting lies as if they were their own carefully considered personal opinions. The upshot is that an alternate reality has been constructed for millions in this country over the last couple of decades thanks to TV, talk radio, and the Internet. Spreading falsehoods, of course, is very profitable, as con artists of every type from mealy-mouthed preachers addressing their mega churches to those touting loans that require no background check can tell you. Lies sell everything from fattening foods to “your computer is damaged and we’ll help you fix it” scams. The basic requirement for democratic governance—that the majority of the population agrees on the parameters of what is true and what is false—has been deliberately obfuscated in this country. The absence of accountability for repeated fraud by those in power, both in government and in the private sector, the proliferation of fake grass-root organizations, think tanks, and lobbyist firms funded by the wealthy to deceive their fellow citizens and turn them against one another, has become the most characteristic feature of our political life. A genuinely functioning democracy endangers powerful interests and those working so hard and making so much money to destroy it, since they may sooner or later end up in jail.
To mislead one’s fellow citizens on such a vast scale is evil. We’ve seen it before. Never the good old days, of course, but the vile stuff we imagined we’d never see again. How is it possible that mass murder and torture, till yesterday universally condemned, now have their proponents, not just among religious fanatics, but among millions of Americans, including those running for the highest office in the land? The world seems to be divided today between those horrified to see history repeat itself and those who eagerly await its horrors.
In the meantime, I bet the fortune tellers in their storefronts are all depressed, since their prospective clients already know what the future holds. Once the new president settles in and brings the dregs of our society into his administration and they appoint other corrupt and worthless men and women to other positions in the government and start settling scores with their political and personal enemies and keeping their most rabid followers happy by deporting, persecuting, or physically abusing some minority, we won’t need a crystal ball to tell us what’s in store for us. Thank God, there are all these leaves still to rake in my yard and take my mind off this subject, and the quiet waters of the lake to reflect the setting sun just before a great dark night descends upon us bringing the kind of quiet that makes one hesitate to go indoors just yet, despite the chill, and turn on the first light in the house.
November 19, 2016, 9:00 am
I responded to my friend Sixtus Publius Quintus Romulus as follows:
Dear Sixtus:
Well, I reckon you have been waiting a while to find this one and send it to me. I cannot further proceed without disputing the dubious assertions of the article, in that they do not add up to what we recently saw in the States, which was a repudiation by the electorate of what they had been fed for years, and of a corrupt and distant elite, both Republican and Democratic, trading favours with each other since kindergarten. Curiously, the kind of Americans who come to our common country place: well dressed, well educated, well mannered, and – from what I have seen and heard this summer – quite contemptuous of their fellow citizens who live west of the Alleghenies and east of the Sierra Nevada.
The article asserts that the only plausible excuse or reason for Trump’s election is a profoundly misinformed electorate created by the powers that be to confuse people with fake news, corrupted research, and bought political campaigns. It then ends with
In the meantime, I bet the fortune tellers in their storefronts are all depressed, since their prospective clients already know what the future holds. Once the new president settles in and brings the dregs of our society into his administration and they appoint other corrupt and worthless men and women to other positions in the government and start settling scores with their political and personal enemies and keeping their most rabid followers happy by deporting, persecuting, or physically abusing some minority, we won’t need a crystal ball to tell us what’s in store for us. Thank God, there are all these leaves still to rake in my yard and take my mind off this subject, and the quiet waters of the lake to reflect the setting sun just before a great dark night descends upon us bringing the kind of quiet that makes one hesitate to go indoors just yet, despite the chill, and turn on the first light in the house.
I join with Conrad Black and others in thinking this is hyperbolic twaddle.
Trump won because he addressed what was wrong with the current system and mobilized votes better than his opponent.
He spoke straight about national decline, with the result that the chattering classes had the vapours. He has already caused a major change by refusing to kow-tow to political correctness, which is a thought-control program to isolate people from each other and from common sense. Without doing anything more he will have done us all a favour. And he has not even assumed office.
The Democrats and their media wing have been humiliated and in consequence the media are scratching for excuses anywhere they can find them for their performance, and since no one can possibly disagree with their world view and still be rational, dark forces of irrationality are invoked to explain away their defeat.
America has been in decline under the Bushes and the Clinton/Obama regimes. Factories and jobs have been lost on a massive scale. Some 12 million illegal immigrants are dragging down the skill level and the wages of the American working class. The American working class is in a drug, alcohol and mortality crisis the likes of which are actually causing declines in the age of death. If the same had happened to gays it would have the AIDS crisis, but since it was occurring to the cracker class it was of no political significance to those who count, namely people like you and me.
As Michael Moore, the long-time Democrat rabble rouser pointed out, the system has taken away their jobs, their kids are doing worse than they did, their houses have been lost in the crash of 2008, or the value of their house has been lost, the hospitals won’t give them enough drugs – his words not mine- and they had one thing left: their votes. So they decided to stick it to the candidate who has sold herself hardest to Wall Street. That you, a soi-disant leftist, should be aroused to anger over the fate of the candidate most in hock to Lloyd Blankfein and his ilk, should be a cause for some reflection and self-examination.
For thirty years the political left in the United States has been assuming it would continue to achieve electoral victories by balkanizing the vote into ethnic, sexual, national and racial disunities, by telling Americans they had more in common with their fellow members of such identitarian groups than they did with each other. They have been working assiduously to fragment the nation and to cheer on the supposed and projected disappearance of the majority which is composed of white people. The exultations of the multiculturalists at the decline of white America have been loud, mocking, and as racialist as anything happening in American society. Is it any wonder that some white people awoke to this and said: stuff and nonsense.
The basic issue I have with all such analyses as you sent me is the arrogant presumption of the political left that no one may rationally disagree with their outlook. I saw it at university when this stuff started (it was then Marxist, but rapidly metastasizing into feminist) and it has triumphed throughout academia and making its long march through the institutions. I recall some lady NDP leader in the Mulroney era, the scion of a wealthy family, let loose candidly on the evils of being conservative, and it was simply the honest expression of her profound conviction that by being left, she was morally superior, and that was really all that mattered. Armed with the righteousness of being left, she need not consider that her collectivist and authoritarian state-knows-best policies might fail to achieve her stated goals of a more equal society. That would be one level of realization and that should suffice for more humility. Yet there is another, more profopnd, level of error, which is undiscussed, and that is, that an egalitarian society established and maintained without sufficient regard for the ways in which humans are not equal, can be a ghastly prison camp of the body and soul. Witness the USSR.
The alternate reality that I would draw your attention to, in contradistinction to Simic’s fantasy America, is the one in which a high-minded group of well-intentioned people can govern society by replacing the judgments of the many with the collective wisdom of the Few. It is one that I suspect you live in most of the time. But even if you do not, the author of this piece, who I assume is a Charles Simic, clearly does.
The Left has built Trump into a monster and they have created the conditions whereby this monster has come into power. I would like to suggest, for your careful consideration, that the political left has monsters in its own mind, and projects them outward onto its opponents. Much of what it says the right is or does is merely its own thinking and behavior projected outward.
But in any case, Trump is the man who was elected to deal with the delusional politics of Obama, which sought to bring peace to our implacable enemies and stiff-armed our allies, which sought to substitute Wilsonian high-mindedness for appropriate demonstrations of military power, and which preached tribalism at home (remember “Trayvon Martin could be my son”) and the unity of man abroad, and which was feckless, lazy and arrogantly out of touch.
When the officer class fails, the warrant officers and sergeants have to take over. This is what has just happened, and being a member of the officer class, you feel the revolution and loss of status greatly. The peasants have revolted. Much of the hand wringing we see is the elite feeling its social inferiors have been rude and insubordinate. The lower orders have just begun to return what they have been receiving in kind.
Again, what I just said might not be true, but I suspect it is. I hold in my wallet a crisp $100 Canadian bill from someone who was very willing to take my bet on Christmas 2015, as if he were taking candy from a baby. I feel vindicated in my judgment of reality, and I am aroused to the defence of what has happened from the vain, self-indulgent and vapid posturings of America’s poet laureate, Charles Simic.
Thank you for so stimulating my Saturday morning, Sixtus. We will be down before, at, and after Christmas and you may feel free to continue my re-education over more Scotch
Veuillez accepter, mon cher, l’expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués
Dalwhinnie