Really insightful piece by Franklin Foer about Trumpist's class warfare against the "Creative Class" or basically people with college degrees who run things in a technocratic manner. If we look at the Cultural Revolution or Pol Pot's killing fields, we can see extreme examples of this, but are we really that far away when it comes to motives?
Today's horror show in the Oval Office with President Bukele of El Salvador is about one man falsely sent to a Salvadoran prison. It's bigger than that, and I don't mean just the constitutional crisis of Trump defying the Supreme Court. I mean...that's big. Trump no doubt feels that he can defy SCOTUS, because the sort of people who care about things like due process rights are usually from that college educated "Creative Class." We think more abstractly, and can extrapolate from Trump seizing a legal immigrant and sending him to a foreign prison without due process from him doing that to an American citizen. He mused as much during the press assembly.
If you're freaking out about MS-13, then sending a few innocent people to a foreign prison may be the price you are willing to pay for security. You are considering a certain tangible outcome. MS-13 is really awful, but deporting random people is unlikely to solve that problem. Still, you're not really considering someone else's due process rights as being critical to your own. That's not how your brain has been trained, and if you're poor, you might well fear that sort of immediate violence.
Trump needs to crush the college educated managerial class - whether in the bureaucracy, the universities, law firms or just suburban Wine Moms. I don't know that he can, because successful revolutions usually need the Middle Classes' buy-in, but he can do real and lasting damage as he tries.
No comments:
Post a Comment