“I decided to go against my handlers and pollsters,” said
President-elect Ernest Mann. “They wanted me to play it safe and follow what
was superficially-popular to say. Instead, since the Republicans were trying to cast Democrats as "socialists," meaning communists, I decided to shape public opinion and to tell the obvious, blunt
truth and rub everyone’s face in it.”
Mr. Mann spent months during the nomination process and the
campaign answering every question he received from the media by saying, “Donald
Trump is a fascist pig,” “The Republicans are totalitarians,” or something along those lines. His speeches likewise consisted solely of such exclamations.
For example, in a televised debate with the other Democratic
nominees, Mr. Mann was pressed on his plan for medical coverage. Instead of
answering directly, he held up and pointed at a picture of President Trump, and
shouted repeatedly, “Fascist! Fascist! Fascist!” To emphasize his point, Mr.
Mann proceeded to light his hair on fire.
Winning the nomination, Mr. Mann went on to debate President
Trump and he deployed the same technique, varying his choice of words only so
as not to bore the audience.
Twelve times in that debate, Mr. Mann interrupted the
president by pointing at Mr. Trump and shouting some combination of the
following: “Fascist dictator! Trump’s an evil totalitarian menace! 1984! 1984!
Fascist pig! Con man! Con man! Demagoguing fascist! Evil clownish man-child!
Psychotic lying fascist scum! Nazi white supremacist filth! Nazi! Fucking Nazi!
He’s a wannabe fucking Nazi!!”
When a moderator pointed out that he wasn’t answering any of
the questions directly, Ernest Mann stuck to his guns, pointing at his Republican
opponent, jumping onto his podium and shouting at the top of his lungs, “Trump’s
an American fascist! Danger! Danger! A totalitarian menace is standing right
over there. American Nazi! American Nazi! Wannabe fucking Nazi! Putin-lover!
Kim-lover! Saddam-lover! Fascist scoundrel! Evil, psychopathic subhuman clown!”
A miracle seemed to be afoot, because in the election Mr.
Mann won every state in the American union, including the so-called red states.
Shortly before the election he won three billion dollars in
a lottery, all of which he gave to charities. Two days later, he won four
billion dollars in another lottery.
A unicorn appeared out of nowhere and the president-elect
rode the mythical beast to his swearing-in ceremony on Capitol Hill. As he held
up his hand and took the Oath of office, a dove flew by and landed on his
shoulder.
Political analysts have struggled to explain these strange outcomes.
For his part, by way of explanation, Mr. Mann ventured, “The truth will set you
free.”
Beating Trump at his own game could work; but keep in mind that Trump's been at this his entire life. What appears easy - the childish put-downs, blantant lies, embarrassing gaffes - might actually be harder than it looks. To beat Trump, you would not just need to put aside your integrity, but your ego as well; which I guess is why you added the last bit with multiple jackpots and a unicorn.
ReplyDeleteThe question is: if people are this susceptible to (not even good) rhetoric, does the 1st ammendment make sense anymore? The right to free speech assumes that, in a free competition, truth and intelligence will ultimately prevail over falsehood and stupidity. But could it be that the ideal of free speech is just as misguided as free enterprise? To put the question historically: if the Weimar Republic not only imprisoned Hitler, but resolutely suppressed his right to free speech (along with that of his Nazi cohorts), would WW2 have happened? Is the right to say "Jews are the cause of all our problems." worth the lives of 6 million Jews? As much as I hate PC censorship, maybe Facebook did the right thing when it prohibited far right groups from using it as a platform to disseminate their views.
You raise a great point about the downside of freedom of speech. I’m reading some of Julius Evola’s far-right criticism of liberalism and democracy, and it’s clear that individualism leads to demagoguery and to other exploitations of human weakness. The problem is that so do all political systems. Where Evola goes wrong is that he posits all kinds of spiritualist and racialist malarkey to justify extreme elitism. Occam’s razor cuts through all of that when we notice that social hierarchies are biological, not spiritual. He wants to say aristocracy, for example, is justifiable only when the elites are spiritually pure, principled, and high-minded, and when the empire is united by what Spengler theorized as a core cultural idea. Harari would call that uniting idea a fiction that sustains mass cooperation, while Marx called that idea an ideology that distracts from the economic, materialist causes of societal organization. When we see the alphas exploiting the betas and other subordinates throughout the animal kingdom, we have no need for pseudo-spiritual and racist rationalizations. The strong take advantage of the weak and the genes prime their host bodies for such grotesque behavioural patterns. Anyway, I’m thinking through these issues for an upcoming article.
DeleteNot sure if suppression of the freedom of speech is the right answer. A conservative like Evola would say not so much that freedom should be suppressed, but that the subordinates should be inspired by the greatness of the elites, which honour and respect should be reflected in their speech. We should be good little peasants, but we should value our position in the greater whole, because of the empire’s magnificence. It makes for an interesting criticism of democracy and indeed a Platonist might have some sympathy with it. I’ll write up some thoughts on it soon.
I could literally start a whole blog just spelling out what I think we can learn from Trump. You raise the question of how Trump can be defeated (or I suppose the above article raised that question), and that’s worth yet another article. The point I wanted to make with this satire is roughly the one that Bill Maher repeatedly makes. For several decades now, voting in America is about signs of strength and weakness, not about the nitty-gritty of policies, because the majority understands that all politicians are liars, that the American government is gridlocked, and that the whole country is polarized so that the government can’t solve its systemic problems.
Trump instinctively grasps that policy proposals are irrelevant because the facts don’t matter in politics. So he’s a master at framing the issues—at least for his minority cult of supporters. Most of the country sees through him because he’s obviously a clown and is useful only as a symbol for the crybaby white supremacists and hypocritical evangelicals. Trump somehow gets away with calling Cummings “racist” and Al Sharpton a “con man,” with calling others “clowns” or “mentally ill,” and so on and so forth. The projection is off the charts; indeed, it’s so obvious that we’re into gaslighting territory, which is the same tactic used by Putin’s advisor, Vladimir Surkov, as Adam Curtis explained. In an ideal world, whenever Trump projects with an insane degree of chutzpah, the media shouldn’t cover the story with any editorializing. They should simply show Trump’s asinine tweet and repeat by way of response, “Trump is the racist,” “Trump is the con man,” or “Trump is the clown.” No justification needed anymore, just repeat the reversal literally a thousand times until the next Newspeak projection crops up and needs a correction.
What the Democrats don’t seem to understand is that the facts don’t matter here—even though they happen to be on the Democrats’ side. What the voters want to see is strength in controlling the narrative. You can use hyperbole to burn a myth into the public’s minds. Trump is already doing that by calling the Democrats “socialists” and by using the “squad” of four progressives to colour the whole party. There’s no reason under the sun why Democrats can’t do the same for the Republicans and take the signs of Trump’s evil and unfitness and exaggerate them to the nth degree to tell a bolder story. Hence, the Democrats’ slogan should be “Trump is a fascist,” etc. The use of euphemisms, such as “Trump is unfit” only displays Democratic weakness. It’s a weak narrative which can easily fail next to Trump’s bolder propaganda.
DeleteYou suggest that Democrats should be humble and should respect Trump’s craftiness. Should the devil be respected for being the master of evil? Respect isn’t the right attitude when confronted with some combination of monumental evil and insanity. The Democrats should have grasped by now that they’re on a war footing with the Republican cult. The Republicans are theocratic and plutocratic cheaters who have been struggling, against the demographics, to attain a permanent majority at the expense of the will of most Americans. That’s to say the Republicans are out to destroy the Democrats and liberal culture. Of course, American liberals hate Trump’s supporters, but Democratic politicians are pathetic representatives of that righteous anger. The elderly Sanders and Warren are symbols not of vibrant progressive ideas but of Democratic weakness. They would certainly come across as weak next to Trump on the debate stage, as would the elderly Biden, although Biden might be more likely to speak his mind even at the cost of committing a gaffe. (Note how Trump committed a billion gaffes and won the presidency.)
This is Trump’s greatest strength: he really is an outsider, not a mere politician. So although he lies all the time, of course, he doesn’t lie like a politician. He lies like a full-blown psychopathic con man. That’s his strength and liberals seem too feminine to counter that masculinity in the arena of mass story-telling (politics). Feminine characters don’t seem cut out for politics—least of all when the country is on the brink of civil war.