Trump Rage and Psychological Projection
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
I refused to cast a vote for President in 2016 and am no fan of Donald Trump. That said, I don't generally give him much more thought than any other President I can remember. This apparently makes me a rare bird, if accounts of widespread Trump Derangement Syndrome -- or the infatuation with the Orange Man some acquaintances of mine seem to have -- are any indication.
Since so many of his policies involve government control of the economy, I regarded him as little better than a Democrat on that score before the election, and only the far-left lurch of that party since then has caused me to begin to consider holding my nose and casting a vote for him in 2020. I do not want to starve in the dark, and although Trump is no capitalist, his reelection may afford more time to fight for freedom than any of the likely alternatives.
Enter Heather Mac Donald, and her timely exploration of a topic that seems never to be far from the mind of the typical Trump-obsessed leftist: his alleged racism. Mac Donald makes a succinct case in the Wall Street Journal that, contrary to Respectable Blue State Opinion (aka, Almost All You Ever Hear on the News), Trump is not the one dividing the country by race. (Her points stand even allowing for him stooping to take advantage of the acrimonious climate others have created.)
Here is what she has to say after correctly naming academia as the source of so many of the more fashionable ideas on the left:
I disagree with Trump's immigration policies (among many other things), but I can see them coming from a place other than "hate." Furthermore, since I also disagree with Democrats on aspects of this issue, I do not appreciate their obvious hatred for debate, to say the least.Ms. Warren recently provided an unwitting summary of academic identity politics. Mr. Trump's "central message" to the American people, she declared, is: "If there's anything wrong in your life, blame them -- and 'them' means people who aren't the same color as you." She has in mind a white "you," but change the race and you encapsulate the reigning assumption on college campuses -- that white people are the source of nonwhite people's problems, and any behavioral or cultural explanations for economic disparities are taboo.
Image by Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia, license.
The academy's reflexive labeling of nonconforming views as "hate speech" has also infiltrated popular rhetoric against Mr. Trump. The president's views on border control and national sovereignty are at odds with the apparent belief among Democratic elites that people living outside the country are entitled to enter at will and without consequences for illegal entry. To the academic and democratic left, however, a commitment to border enforcement can only arise from "hate." Such a pre-emptive interpretation is a means of foreclosing debate and stigmatizing dissent from liberal orthodoxy.
Mac Donald is on the money here, and it is high time that someone named the real apostles of racial identity politics -- also known in better days as racism. And it is interesting to ask whether psychological projection might at least partially account for the constant accusations that Trump is a racist.
-- CAV
4 comments:
Yo, Gus, you write: "Since so many of his policies involve government control of the economy, I regarded him as little better than a Democrat on that score before the election, and only the far-left lurch of that party since then has caused me to begin to consider holding my nose and casting a vote for him in 2020. I do not want to starve in the dark, and although Trump is no capitalist, his reelection may afford more time to fight for freedom than any of the likely alternatives."
That's pretty much my view. He's a very mixed, deeply flawed fellow, but I still dislike him less than Hillary et Cie and I do enjoy listening to the left froth about him; you'd think more of them would have burst aneurysms by now. He's not the fascist they say he is (caudillo comes much closer to his style of governance and his appeal), though I can see him so debasing politics that prototypical fascism does become possible in a couple of decades. --I'm not talking about polarizing; the left would be polarized to treason by anyone whose politics are to the right of Noam Chomsky, and in return their own candidates should polarize the hell out of everyone not enamored of communist tyranny by stealth. The problem is that he doesn't offer anything like an intellectual alternative; his appeal to his rabid supporters (as opposed to those of us sick of the feasibly electable alternatives) is purely negative--stick it to the left in the same way they've been sticking it to us! And so public discourse continues to degrade, smeared with the increasingly septic offal of both sides
The closest I've seen them come to an intellectual defense of Trumpism by Trumpists, including notional Objectivists who say Ayn Rand was right sometimes but Trump is never wrong, is protectionism and an attack on "Cultural Marxism." And as I've said to you privately before, that latter is intellectually purely negative. Marxism is the most opportunistic intellectual cancer around; it will adopt pretty much any position so long as doing so advances the goals of revolutionary conquest and social destruction. Jim Crow oppresses black people? Perfect opportunity to discredit the American system! (Racism as a prop of capitalism was a massive part of Soviet propaganda after WWII that permeated Soviet propaganda; an example is this famous blues song that conflates race and social class to insinuate that racism = capitalism; Lead Belly was at least a fellow traveler. And mind you, while I dislike the intellectual gist of the song and what I know of his politics, I like Lead Belly and that song--for one thing, it doesn't make my ears vomit like Malvina Reynolds' scrofulous piece of junk "Little Boxes" that thoroughly dehumanizes the people in the song as a rhetorical move to claim capitalism dehumanizes them.)
Frankly, it doesn't matter at root if it's arguably "Cultural Marxism," the question is whether it's true or false, right or wrong, pro- or anti-intellectual rights, because what Cultural Marxism wants is to discredit all opposition, and if that results in supposed defenders of freedom defending Jim Crow or women's not having the right to own property in their own name or whatever else out of pure opposition, then that's just pure gravy for them. (A perfect symbol of this is the irrelevance of the point made by certain right-wingers that one of Lenin's first acts was to legalize abortion. They don't add that one of Stalin's first acts was to make it illegal again. Marxism doesn't care about abortion one way or the other. It only cares about power. If legalizing abortion secures the allegiance of women and that outweighs the opposition of others, then Marxists will propagandize for abortion rights; if prohibiting abortion is of greater political value, Marxists will outlaw it.)
Part II:
On the other hand, the rabid hatred of Trump (most of my family shares it, so I get a goodly dose of the latest memes, lies, and abuse in my social media) is definitely tiresome (indeed, I'm too worn out by it to describe it accurately; tiresome will have to do). I was pretty sure he'd be not much of a good deal when I read a defense of Trump's positions before the election by a former reader of yours who used to comment here (back before he white-washed his half-Korean ancestry and started claiming to be pure white on other sites where he preaches the biological inferiority of anyone with darker skin than mine, though probably not his, and fewer Y chromosomes than me), who posted a list of Trump's actual positions from his public statements and indicated which ones he agreed with. They were a god-awful mess, like Trump had never even heard of separation of powers and rule of law (though it's more likely he just says anything that pops into his head as a form of political camouflage--let the left froth over the window-dressing while he pushes his own agenda), and this was just as true of the I think 60% of them this fellow said he agreed with as with the others.
But you have to remember I wasn't surprised by his election (I think I must have paid much closer attention to the Brexit vote than all the forecasters did who were surprised out of their gourds by it but then who so failed to learn anything from it that they then were even more surprised by Trump's victory, even though it was only such a surprise precisely because, as Nate Silver later admitted, they tricked themselves with their own rhetoric saying Trump couldn't win), and that total surprise to so many of the Left might be the reason they hate Trump so viciously. And you can be sure they will not admit Trump is any less evil than Hitler because Trump = Hitler is the best propaganda for their side they could dream up--if he is so evil (he certainly is not), then anyone who refuses to condemn him utterly and completely is equally culpable and equally beyond the pale socially, intellectually, and--they are working very hard on this--legally; they couldn't wish for a better tool to crush dissent among their own group (which I suspect is their immediate most important goal, normalizing Antifa tyranny over the minds of their followers, or as they call it, revolutionizing the masses and all that), and as a pretext for normalizing political violence directed against society at large, force to be applied freely against anyone deemed fascist, where their practice shows that includes people on the left carrying US flags in the vicinity of their attempted terrorism (and if they had their way would include you and me), it is far more worrisome than the Trumpism they campaign against.
So yes, the reaction of the Trumpists is perfectly understandable--but are they right? Are they conducive to the political health of the US? Only compared to their loudest opponents. That is a big problem. Can they buy time for a better alternative to make its case? One would hope so--and that might ultimately the longest-term good side of Trump. But is that likely? That is the biggest problem, alas.
Snedcat,
I sometimes half-joke to myself that today's far-left Democrats are so intellectually opportunistic (as you note of Marxism) and oblivious to the essence of the Nazism they claim to see everywhere, that Hitler's greatest sin was not having a "(D)" after his name.
Gus
Ugh. That was less coherent than I had meant to write it. Unfortunately, my first draft was too long, so I cut it into two and rewrote it partly in Word and partly in Wordpress...and unfortunately the two versions grew apart and some of the stuff here builds on points I made in the Word file. First, Lead Belly's song is from 1939--I was referring to it as an example of the CPUSA's hard-pedaling "racism = capitalism" in the 1930s. And while Jim Crow was evil, the CPUSA would, if it had had the opportunity, instituted an even more viciously evil, far more murderous system based on class rather than race, differing mostly in what you might call a "one-dollar rule" to match the "one-drop rule."
Second, I don't think the Communists themselves ever went on at great length about the right of women to own property, though that was one of the legal restrictions by sex similar to those that they did go on, and it was an issue many feminists campaigned about (and rightfully so) that the more socialist feminists (including the truly commie ones) supported, at least a preliminary measure to smashing capitalism. More to the point, that I have heard many on the right now enamored of Trump dismiss as unimportant in wholesale, uncritical attacks on feminism as such--I'm thinking especially of one Objectivist blogger I have come to utterly despise both personally and intellectually, but who was quite correct in saying that the legacy of feminism is mixed, securing women's full rights to property being one of the points she mentioned in support of her statement, only to be attacked as a socialist-tinged leftist pretending to be an Objectivist for precisely the statement that feminism in any guise is less than utterly socialist, evil, and indefensible. (Mind you, I don't think she did much of a good job distinguishing the better strains of feminism four or five decades ago from the must more septic mess that is modern academic feminism, but I don't thin it would have made a difference to the people attacking her if she had.) That's a perfect example of the unthinking opposition to "Cultural Marxism" I was alluding to.
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