Was reading essay in I think
The American Interest about the left coast roots of Trumpism’s intellectual
conceits – the argument that there’s any intellectual angle to Trump at face
value seems absurd, but it isn’t. The essay made clearer to me something I’ve
touched on before – namely, that a certain segment of Trump supporters embrace
the ‘movement’ because they see American democracy as a broken thing that cannot
be fixed and therefore Trump for them becomes the first manifestation of things
to come – they don’t so much believe in Trump as they do in seeing him as the
beginning of an end they’ve been predicting – again, America is broken and
democracy as it’s currently dysfunctionally practiced in the West is not up to
the task of fixing it.
What the essay fascinatingly
points out is that it makes complete sense that this ‘ethos’ flowered in a place
like California, a mess of a polity that used to have a strong conservative
animus but has relentlessly been turned into a single party leftist tyranny by
the very things that are turning America as a whole into a single party leftist
tyranny – public institutions that serve a leftist agenda, a liberal elite in
charge of a media/entertainment complex that serves a leftist agenda, and mass
immigration of poor, poorly educated and low skill Latinos who have dramatically
changed the demographics of California and whose left wing sympathies mean the
statehouse will never again be open to conservative ideas – which effectively
means California is now a one party leftist oligarchy - and consequently a
dysfunctional high tax, high debt bureaucratic mess. You take away Silicon
Valley and Hollywood and California is essentially a third world country at
this point.
You see why these
‘intellectuals’ would not so much embrace
Trump as welcome him as the advent of a ‘truth’ that will rattle the very
foundations of the republic. Trump is no Caesar come to wrest control of the
country from the corrupt hands of the elite – and I’m sure these intellectuals
understand that – Trump is much more clown than he his anything even remotely
Caesarian – but they no doubt welcome him as the first instantiation of an
inevitable battle between an increasingly autocratic progressive elite and a
now increasingly autocratic populist/nationalist/vaguely conservative
reactionary reply.
Not saying I agree with these
reactionaries point of view – am sympathetic to it though. I believe I recently
read a poll that registered Obama’s approval rating at 55%. This guy is the
worst president the country has ever had, an unmitigated disaster – foreign
policy is a mess, domestic policy a mess, economy is comatose, racial animosity
at levels not seen since the 60s, violent crime spiking, America’s standing in
the world in decline – and then there’s all the scandals, lying, unconstitutional
executive abuse - absolutely awful president – and yet if given the chance
apparently would be reelected. How can one look at that and not think:
something is horribly wrong.
