As I sift through the political Internet, I feel like a giant whale taking in a ton of water with every mouthful, then squeezing it out through my baleen, leaving behind the tasty krill. It is hard work. As I vacuum up the ocean of bafflegab, utterly predictable views, and outright hysteria on the subject of US politics in general and Trump in particular, I have occasion to consider that I have not seen US politics so demented since the era of President Nixon.
Only this time the MSM, the deep state and the Democratic power structure is not going to bring down the President.
Why am I convinced of this? Several reasons.
- There is nothing to the Trump-Russian collusion story. Even the Democratic New York Times occasionally allows this to be admitted. The analysis by Mollie Hemingway in the Federalist of the New York Times piece is very useful. She wrote:
“In paragraph 69 of the lengthy story, The New York Times takes itself to task for burying the lede in its October 31, 2016, story about the FBI not finding any proof of involvement with Russian election meddling.
The key fact of the article — that the F.B.I. had opened a broad investigation into possible links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign — was published in the 10th paragraph.
It is somewhat funny, then, to read what The New York Times buries in paragraph 70 of the story:
A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump’s advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government’s disruptive efforts.
No evidence of collusion after two years of investigation with unlimited resources? You don’t say! What could that mean?”
Through all the brouhaha of Democratic and MSM agitation, if you read closely, the flagship voice of the MSM admits that the story is void of merit. Think about that for a moment. Two years of relentless agitation and political theatre, all predicated on something they now admit is nothing.
2. Trump keeps winning. Be it North Korea or Iran, or tax reform and putting America back to work, the decisions and actions of Trump have led away from nuclear war, they confront the wicked, confirm that the professional diplomatic class is consistently wrong, and (I gloat) offend left wing opinion. Much could go wrong in any direction, and always can. Yet it is a relief to have someone in the White House who can deal with thugs, because the bad parts of the world are governed by them, and not by left-wing professors, or people who think the opinion of the Harvard University Faculty Club actually matters.
The deeper mystery is why the apparent insanity of Establishment opinion on the subject of Trump. By insanity I refer to the obsession with him, the assumption that he understands nothing, that he is a fascist, racist, homophobe. and so forth, menace to the Constitution, illegally in power, and so forth. The under-estimation is endless, and leads the opposition to Trump into vast errors. Why are the intelligent so stupid?
I have not seen such political dementia on the part of so many otherwise intelligent people. It occurred during Nixon, and it may have been present in Republican circles during the time of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s.
Scott Adams explains this as a complete breakdown of the predictive value of their world view. “This side has been wrong about everything for two years”.
Dysfunctional and non-predictive. Nothing makes sense to them anymore. Hence the insanity.
Adams has been making predictions since 2015 that have become true. He says his success is based on his idea of political discourse, which is that it is an insult contest. If you adopt this view, then you have no cognitive dissonance, and reality makes sense to you. Hence you are not angry. Hence you can appreciate Trump without adoring him, evaluate him without hatred or passion. I feel cool or mild toward Trump; I feel I watch him carefully, evaluate what he is doing and come to what I think are reasonable judgments. I am not excited, or offended, or adulatory.
Those on the other side of the debate cannot hear me, or you. Their picture of the world has broken down and nothing is making sense any more. For instance, they keep assuming you are saying something different when you speak. Just as Jordan Peterson kept saying to his interviewer, Cathy Newman, “no I am not saying A, I am saying B” and she could not hear him until the moment when she realized she was being absurd. But Newman was intelligent enough, and honest enough, to know that she had been fairly caught. Most anti-Trumpers are too distracted by their cognitive dissonance, too enmeshed in their outrage, to realize they are just spluttering.
Reframing, rebranding, that is the business of politics. And Trump has been a genius at it.