Impious Thoughts On A Passing Nation
To everyone who has ever accused me personally, or any other critic of Donald Trump for that matter, of suffering from the non-existent ailment (but all-time great example of psychological projection), “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” I offer the following:
Dear Jonas,
Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT
We the deranged, foreign (like myself) and domestic (so sorry for you), saw this stage of America’s national degradation coming all along, and warned of it repeatedly. The saddest part of all is that even as I write this I am fully aware that the million man march to MAGA suicide remains largely unfazed by such outbursts of blithering idiocy from their god, and therefore that the people to whom I am hypothetically addressing these remarks would be seeing in the above quotation nothing but more evidence of Trump’s genius, and in my non-approval yet more evidence that I am suffering from…you guessed it, that non-existent ailment that has become the stock answer, and indeed at this point the only possible answer, to the plain and daily observations of that majority of the human race which has not completely lost its marbles.
Since the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the American polity, left and right, has come to accept some measure of illiteracy, or at least the lack of effective communication skills, as mere peccadilloes in judging potential presidents, or indeed leaders of any kind. Upon the departure from the scene of the last great communicator of world politics, Ronald Reagan, the United States descended quickly into an era of Newspeak and Nonspeak, roughly corresponding to Democrats and Republicans, respectively. Clinton and Obama intoned with glibness and superficial fluidity, but said nothing that was not a cliché, an obfuscation, or a blatant lie. The two Presidents Bush, along with Joe Biden, spoke ungrammatically, haltingly, and without style, the Bushes due to a lack of education or natural curiosity, Biden due to a lack of innate intelligence.
But with Trump, America has transcended her generational and somewhat tragic willingness to abide the collapse of the English language within, and even atop, her political discourse, and has now dropped into a most dangerous spiral of political decay, no longer merely overlooking incoherence and vulgarity, but actively embracing them. Trump’s followers, who in 2024 comprised a sizable plurality of eligible American voters, did not merely excuse Trump’s grade school drop out grammar, vocabulary, and intonation, but rather admired and praised it as “straight talk” and “saying what he really thinks.” No, Trump’s language, such as it is, merely reveals a mind that has reduced what passes for thought processes within its dusty corridors to nothing but minor variations on two themes: “This is what I want, so give it to me,” and “If you don’t give me what I want, I’m going to get you.”
There is no straightness in this, and certainly no national good. This is the soul divested of all noble or reflective impulses, and devoid of some very minimal subtleties required of civilized human interaction, namely: a wish to persuade other minds rather than compel them; an appreciation of the possibility of error and the need for self-refinement; and an instinctive understanding that any language worthy of being called communication at all — in fact the very essence of linguistic communication — is by definition an act of bringing men together by means of their reason and shared will, rather than whipping them to obedience like slaves or cattle. In short, grunts and moans, even when they are given the outward shapes of a few words from a dictionary, are the prelinguistic emissions of a mind that has not yet evolved to the stage of being capable of living peaceably among others in a community. To raise such a prelinguistic “speaker” to the highest seat of power within a community is therefore the most extreme act of self-destruction. In the case of a representative republic, such an act amounts to a people’s intentional abnegation of the power and right of self-government.
From the final chapter of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages, “The Relation of Language to Governments”1Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, translated by Victor Gourevitch, New York: Harper & Row, 1986, 293-94.:
Languages are naturally formed according to men’s needs. In ancient times, when persuasion served in lieu of public force, eloquence was necessary. Of what use would it be today, when public force replaces persuasion? It requires neither art nor figures of speech to say such is my pleasure…. Popular languages have become as thoroughly useless as has eloquence. Societies have assumed their final forms: nothing can be changed in them anymore except by arms and cash, and since there is nothing left to say to the people but give money, it is said with posters on street corners or with soldiers in private homes; for there is no need to assemble anyone; on the contrary, subjects must be kept scattered; that is the first maxim of modern politics.
Rousseau wrote these words during the 1750s, when The United States of America was not yet even a glimmer of an idea. Yet in this passage he speaks to the death-throes moment of the American idea as though he were here today, watching it all unfold. That is why the philosophic life is best; and I note this in observance of the fact that the Trump era embodies the absolute antithesis and natural enemy of the philosophic life, which is to say the enemy of human nature.
Lest you imagine my last remark was a self-indulgence or cheap shot, I note here that at Texas A&M University, the philosophy department has been prohibited from teaching Plato’s Symposium, in compliance with the school’s “anti-wokeness” rules against teaching any material related to “race and gender” issues. This, apparently, is part of the MAGA agenda to restore Western civilization: accusing Socrates’ most gifted student, the man in relation to whose thought Alfred North Whitehead described the entire history of Western philosophy as a mere footnote, of the crimes of impiety and corruption of youth. And so here we are, back at the beginning of it all, where the pre-philosophic world, scared of losing its hold on irrational and unjustified power, takes aim at the advocates of reason, open-minded dialogue, and a more civilized political life.
