Seeing Right Through “Them”
Remember how, back in the formative days of the so-called Tea Party conservative movement, the Republican grassroots mocked and ridiculed a woman who infamously gushed about how, if Barack Obama were elected president, he would pay her mortgage and put gas in her car? Today, these same Tea Partiers are listening to Donald Trump’s spokescheerleader answering a reporter’s question about whether the White House is recommending voters do anything in particular to help them get through this rough economic moment by repeatedly saying, “Trust in Trump, he knows what he’s doing, it’s a proven formula that works,” to which they solemnly nod their heads, repeating to themselves reverentially, “Trust in Trump.” And then, reciting their apostle’s creed, “How dare that leftist media hack ask such a stupid question, as if Trump didn’t know how to make America great again.”
Just as freedom of speech is a meaningless platitude if it is not understood as a protection for unpopular political speech, so railing against “Their” irrational subservience to a fantasy saviour is worth nothing coming from…well, from the people we used to call the Tea Party conservatives. These mesmerized millions have long since refuted any credibility they ever seemed to have on anything whatsoever.
I note that the Obama true believer of 2008 later became a genuine Obama skeptic and critic. I wonder whether these erstwhile Tea Partiers and their ilk will arrive at a similar revelation some day. I cannot help thinking that the principle of safety in numbers will allow this group to hold out against reality quite a bit longer than their former laughingstock.
Trust in Trump. That is the brilliant new ad copy from the Trump team. It is horse manure demagoguery of the first order, of course, and follows in a line of equally brilliant cult-baiting mantras, to wit: The Wall, Make America Great Again, Mexico will pay for it, Stop the Steal, etc. But these mantras work. Obi-wan Kenobi insists, in the only genuinely sage words coming from the Star Wars universe, that the force only works on the weak-minded. Sadly, after decades of desperation, poor education, and angry shouting at radios, the weak-minded have become the voting majority in America. There is no coming back from this, or at least certainly not for generations. A republican society, its founding principles and antecedents, and its institutions of moral education and belief in human decency and dignity, are not the sort of things that a country can jump back onto once having jumped off. The train is not merely moving too fast for that, but rather the train, once abandoned, simply vanishes into thin air. The people were its substance. Without them, it becomes a will–o’-the-wisp, a vague memory, and then empty words on lifeless pages.
