There is nothing to disagree with in the Katherine Miller Buzzfeed piece cited in today's Pundit Roundup. I highly recommend reading the whole of her thoughtful and provocative article. But it is such an insightful analysis that it succeeds in defining very clearly its own limitations. It walks right up to, but then fails to go into, the next step, the growth of the new hidden in the decay of the old, the positive reason and role played by Trump in his destruction of our political institutions.
The more sophisticated we are, the more we identify health and vigor as the health and vigor of indicators within the system we have grown up with, because that pretty much defines sophistication -- sensitivity to, alertness about, indicators of what the system of which we are knowledgeable is doing. Of course we see Trump as a wrecker, someone who destroys the norms needed for the system to function, who is maybe just a symptom, maybe the cause, of the indicators of the health of the system going into the red.
Less plugged-in people, people who are so busy trying to get through their private lives, don't pay much attention to public life and public institutions except as they directly impact their lives. These less institutionally aware people are actually better placed to be aware of underlying decay, and the need for a new system. More importantly to their defection from loyalty to the old, they are not invested much in the old system. It never worked too well for them, and lately we more aware people have let it become positively destructive of their interests. We have compromised and retreated so much that whatever ideals and practical goals and means informed the old system, which might broadly be defined as the social democracy of the New Deal, have been diminished to ghosts in the machine. Our side is sort of still committed, only now very abstractly and ineffectually, to social democracy, but you have to be pretty sophisticated to be sensitive of the differences between our side and the wreckers, the radical Rs who never bought into the social democracy consensus. It is still clearly preferable to vote for our side, but only because we are less avid at the short term destruction of a social democracy we still, sort of, believe in. The downside to that, the dynamic driving long-term destruction of the old system inherent in voting for our side, is that our unwillingness to be openly and forthrightly for social democracy, seals the reputation for hypocrisy and disconnection from reality that now hangs like a millstone around the old system in the eyes of everyone but the sophisticated.
There is this sense that Trump's ability to diminish and destroy the dignity of conventional politicians is not a negative, at least not to the people who voted for him. They intended to destroy a system they perceive as decayed beyond redemption, and they correctly saw in Trump the only way to do that.
This is not to say that these Obama voters who switched to Trump in the last election, and made the difference that gave him his electoral college victory, are savants, the perceivers and tellers of truth that the politically aware should now defer to. They voted for Trump because he was the only choice available to people who believe -- quite correctly -- that our ancien regime is dying and deserves to die, if only because it has decayed past the possibility of revival. But only idiots would mistake Trump for a Huey Long, a politician who had the will to destroy the old system, but also is organized and aware enough to found a new system that served the people instead of the oil industry. These people, Trump and the people who voted him in, are right about the need for the old system to be tumbreled off to the guillotine, but they remain total idiots, inattentive to what a new system would even look like, would have to do. Many of them seem to imagine that we don’t need a new system to replace the old, that destruction is all that needs to be done, that we can get by, even do much better, if only we had no taxes, no govt, no public policy.
Aware people at this point are divided in our reactions. Few of us look much to the truly needful task, the construction of a new system. The immediate problem is limiting the damage of the wreckers, not what has to replace the wreckage of a system we can’t acknowledge is beyond revival. So mostly we focus on the Resistance, on stopping the wreckers, because they are wreckers, because what they seek to wreck has meaning and value, if only in memory, and they have no imagination for a new system, no intention beyond wrecking the public space in order to allow power and freedom to private entities to run society. But we’re defending a zombie. We can’t rally an effective defense and vindication of social democracy because we’ve spent generations disowning it. In this crisis, the best use we can think of for the opportunity of a SOTU response, is to give some fresh face in the party a moment in the spotlight to further his career. Messaging over substance is our only response, to everything, because we reflexively avoid substance as if it were a deadly disease. But we have messaged so much where substance was needed, that the message no longer means anything to anyone but us.
Trump and his people are not succeeding because he is some genius, stable or otherwise. He has dementia with behavioral disturbance. He would be a literal moron if we still used that classification. He’s succeeding because for all the cognitive function he’s lost, he perseverates effectively, as patients with early dementia mostly do, in some ever narrower space in which they are still competent. Trump’s got his continued competence down to just one dimension, one obsessive line, his thoroughly justified contempt for people sophisticated in and respectful of the old system. He can’t remember much, but he’s got our number, and he’s going to continue reading our beads until our system is destroyed completely. You don’t need a lot of retained cognitive capacity to do that, because our system practically refutes itself, it just needs little shoves from unexpected directions, and it can’t maintain equilibrium, and falls down, like the composite statue in Daniel.