Corrections to the blogosphere, the consensus, and the world

Sunday, June 12, 2016

What rough beast

We can say, surely, that Trump is the most uncomplicated candidate that there has ever been, nationally - without, and without any particular interest in, intellect, knowledge, ideology, morals, religion, or anything else other than ego and resentment - and you can therefore say that anybody who votes for him does for out of, and only out of, ego and resentment. He may not win, but he's already punched an enormous hole in the fundamental concepts of democracy.
He's won over about 60% of white males. He can't gain much support from the other groups, because he'a already promised to support whites against them.  Imagine, though, if everybody - white and unwhite - was wearing virtual reality headgear through which they heard Trump's resentment directed against the people they  disliked. Blacks, hispanics, gays, women, would be offered different targets.  Is there any reason, then, to believe that they are actually more virtuous than whites - that if offered that faustian pact, they would not take it? If 60% of any group is capable of operating only through hate and fear, 60%  of any group is, and 60% of people are; and our polity has survived till now only because we have such a complicated web of different interests that it is very difficult to assemble a majority whose resentments all point in the same direction and are not undercut by competing differences.
When I say interests, of course, I mean psychic interests, or what in material terms one would call false consciousness.

1 comment:

Adelaide Dupont said...

Vote One Resentment.

And we all know that when self-interest is in the race, it is trying. ⾺🐎🝖

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