Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, November 4, 2024

Serwer On Trumpists

 Adam Serwer has been, arguably, the best observer of Trumpistan. Today, he makes a critically important observation about Trumpists: they live in a state of unreality.

For most people, this is sort of obvious, but Serwer does a good job of explaining WHY they live in unreality. Some of it is that they simply don't believe what he is saying or that it won't apply to them. 

The two most interesting observations are that Trump is the avatar of every species of conspiracy theory. He basks in them and bastes his speeches with them. If everything is a conspiracy, then you can't trust the elites. News stories with facts in them are fake news, because the shadowy elites have decided that they are.

Of course, Serwer leaves unsaid the interesting link between the rise of Trumpism and the Right Wing Wurlitzer that is headed by Faux News, but now includes all sort of tendentious bullshit. 

The other unstated observation is that nothing could more clearly crystalize the growing educational polarization in the electorate. Yes, of course, there are conspiracists with college degrees. Hello! Ted Kaczynski! However to create an entire political movement, you have to convince tens of millions that the words coming out of Trump's mouth don't mean what they obviously mean. 

If - as I fervently hope - Harris wins tomorrow, the "lightly educated White male" problem (to quote Erik Loomis) isn't going anywhere. Paradoxically, a Trump defeat - especially a crushing one - will only amplify their conspiracist ideas. It's not even clear that a successful Harris administration could ever really win them back, because no economic message wedded to actual economic performance is going to shift their beliefs, because their beliefs are, themselves, unreal.

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