Sunday, September 26, 2021

The Only Moral Authority

When I ask why anyone pays attention to this clown, I don't mean we should ignore him, at our peril or otherwise. I mean: "Why does anyone give him any serious attention?" I don't care how many people come to his "rallies," I don't care how many people tell pollsters they support Trump: it is all meaningless unless we give it meaning. The obverse of "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled is making everyone believe he doesn’t exist" (a ridiculous statement that only sounds clever; pace C.S. Lewis) is "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing people to see him in every shadow." And we are letting Trump cast such a long, long shadow. That's the latest; that Obama didn’t win re-election over Romney, because the vote counts can’t be trusted if Trump doesn’t like them.  Yes:  pay attention to that:  if Trump doesn’t like them.  Trump’s a terrible conman:  he fools himself more than he fools others.  He’s not even in on the con: he believes the con.  He lives the con.  Well, the rest of us don’t have to. The Arizona vote count must be "decertified"?  How does that even happen, except in his fevered imagination?  This “the republic only.stands if we all agree it stands” nonsense is the pernicious lie, not Trump’s idiotic rantings.  It’s as if our government(s) only exist because we all say they do, and the moment we stop, the emperor is naked (or non-existent), and the bubble of this democratic republic bursts. There is a strong part of our society which is based on agreement, not just coercion.  We don’t need a policeman in every house to keep us all from becoming anarchists and to prevent rising chaos.  But we do have a strong system of laws which, as I keep saying, batted away the stupid attacks on the election Trump tried to use.  It has even punished the lawyers who went to court promoting it.

I’m listening to local PBS as I type, and they mention that 70% of those under 20 in Houston today, are African American/Latino.  By 2050, the entire country will look like Houston today.  There’s your “economic anxiety.”  There’s where Trump is getting his “power.”  That’s why racism is becoming more public and more popular. That’s why the generation under 30 in America, by and large, is not interested in any picture of society which is not multi-racial and multi-cultural (I’m old enough to remember the invention of the latter term, and what a flashpoint it was.  Today that argument is recast as “CRT”.). And why Trump’s supporters are all white and old, or wish they were old. They wish they were old because they wish for the return of a past that never was, instead of the future that is (thank goodness) finally coming.  Our children, whether they know it or not, have learned the lessons we taught them.

That’s a mixed bag, of course.

Fear of Trump is also fear of the future.  David Gergen, eminence gris who’s real claim to fame is being as mundane and unchallenging as a human being can be, never presenting anything riskier than sheer mendacity, fears the future Trump will bring.  But why?  Because people whose existence he has ignored for decades now impinge upon his comfortable world? Because democracy is, indeed, messy in America? Is more than a snowball thrown at a top hat? Has Jacksonian roots as well as Madisonian ones? David Gergen fears the future, and so he fears Donald Trump. I don’t fear either.

As a character in a British murder mystery series I’m now watching just said: “They’re angry because it makes them feel important.”  Life is full of such serendipities; or maybe it’s Joycean epiphany?  Nah, probably not. Anyway, it’s a sound way of regarding Trump and those who gather publicly to cheer him on.  Anger makes them feel important.

It doesn’t mean they are; or that we should make them important.
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