A few days ago Erick Erickson published a missive full of dismay. Here’s a sample:
While all of this was going on, President Trump was on social media calling for the arrest of Joe Biden and other assorted tirades.
There is clearly something off now about the Administration, and the President seems to be unleashing his frustration by tweet. The problem is that his various and assorted tweets do nothing about the cost of living. In fact, he is still dogmatically convinced that tariffs are making everything better.
One of the President’s posts again suggests tariffs could be a replacement for the income tax. But we know how much income taxes bring in, and we know how much tariffs bring in. The latter barely makes a dent in the budget. Also, if they are bringing in as much as the President says, that burden falls on Americans, not foreigners.
This tree had to be taken down his fall. We’ll miss it.
To his credit, Erickson’s expressed doubt concerning tariffs working as claimed from the get-go – but didn’t connect it to the essential extremism and amateurism, and its consequent dystopia, if I may hyperbolize slightly, of the President. This, of course, is because Erickson’s an admitted extremist himself, a purist, if you will.
But now he’s facing what’s been apparent to many observers for a while, and that’s extremism doesn’t actually work. Left or right, all the various extremist ideologies are not moored to reality, and the arrogance of trying to impose ideology, whether it’s concerning abortion, the gold standard, isolationism, or your favorite bugaboo, on reality is a guarantee of failure.
At issue is the simple fact that our perceptions of reality, for all that it’s critical to our survival, is actually quite limited. We can’t see down in microscopic realm, our sense of change over time is quite dubious, and, to stretch a point, when our philosophy fails, then for answers we pretend we know the mind of some metaphysical entity for which we have no evidence.
Erickson’s post tries to conceal some of his concern behind assertions that President Trump can still turn it around, but, truly, I suspect he’s really wondering if it’s time to call for Trump’s resignation and putting up with the cipher of J. D. Vance. This is symptomatic of the conundrum facing conservative voters. Do you go with the loony amateurs on the right, or the arrogant loons on the left?
Tough choice.
