Greg Fallis rejects mysticism for personification:
It’s become popular among some Republicans to claim Comrade Trump isn’t really a Republican at all. They act like he’s some sort of chimera — a semi-mystical, implausible synthesis of disparate bits of different animals. Part liberal, part conservative, part patriot, part iconoclast, part traditional, part unconventional, part who the fuck knows. A new type of politician, they say.
Bullshit. Trump is the distillation of everything the Republican party has become in the last couple of decades. He’s selfish, self-centered, cruel, mean-spirited, fearful of anything different, completely unscrupulous, alienated from reality, dismissive of science, contemptuous of facts, mercenary, fundamentally dishonest, sneering, arrogant, judgmental, and too privileged to give a shit about anybody or anything that isn’t useful to him.
Love it.
Let me add that the repeated attempts by libertarians to suggest that markets will self-correct, that government regulation is largely unneeded, seems more and more obviously a simple cover for the selfish or lazy.
Self-interest is easy. You get a simple, well-defined goal that applies to you, such as make more money, and you chase it without regard for more ill-defined problems. And this actually isn’t the worst approach to running a society when government is properly understood to have the responsibility and the power of safeguarding the greater good, whether it be the poverty-stricken or the environment.
But the libertarians became fixated on taxation, because that has a direct impact on the wealth accumulation drive, so towards the end of reducing taxation, they came up with ideas about why the government didn’t have to regulate. Some seem reasonable on their face; a few others didn’t seem to understand the phrase irremediable harm, such as whoever it was writing the mimeographed The Utilitarian. Or perhaps it was Utilitarianism. Their bit? Criminal law was unnecessary.
Back to the point, I have to wonder if the members of the GOP echo chamber would actually recognize the essential truth of Greg’s description. The conservative kant, as Greg describes it, if taken as such would blind the believes to the rather crass truth of Trump. And the GOP is too often fixated on fixed positions rather than principles. You can see it in their fruitless attempts to make the charge of hypocrisy stick:
Jefferson owned slaves.
Yes, a terrible thing in the 19th century.
Oh, wait, he lived in the 18th century. Was it still awful? Yes. But it was also part of society and, in fact, Jefferson was developing the higher principles that would lead the North to eventually reject slavery. Decades later, in the 19th century, the American Civil War erupted because slave owners, faced with a civil society consensus, a morality, which forbade slavery, revolted rather than conform to the principles of morality which had evolved in so many other countries, and had, at least, gained ascendancy in the backward United States. Why? Because their society might change; because their wealth might decrease.
We can reduce this to a principle, but it would be a tawdry principle suggesting that the accumulation of wealth takes precedence over the guarantees of liberty for all.
For people fixated on positions, the actions of Trump may indeed seem mystical, or at least inscrutable. For folks who function on principles, though, it becomes a matter of recognizing the principles of Trump. And that’s where liberals and most independents become sick of him, once they’ve studied him.
Why?
See Greg.
