I was watching DL Hughley on CSPAN being interviewed about his book “How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice from White People” by Congressional Representative Hakeem Jeffries (https://www.c-span.org/video/?448001-1/after-words-dl-hughley) a little while ago. I like Hughley because he’s smart, he’s funny, and he is as incisive as a scalpel.
At minute 24:57 - 25:14 into the interview Jeffries said: "It seems schizophrenic. You have Barrack Obama elected not once but twice and then you’ve got Donald Trmp. How do you contextualize this for people?”
DL Hughley: "I think that if you look at the things we’ve gone through, our whole existence seems schizophrenic.”
At this point, I started laughing deeply, completely, mostly at myself, because I suddenly realized that it’s easy to contextualize this swing between Obama and Trmp. It’s a perfect and extreme example of Hegel’s dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Neither Jeffries nor Hughley brought it up but I remembered my old high school history classes, for once, [thanks, Mr Schneller] and saw it immediately, the first time in a long time.
Of course, if you talk about Hegelian dialectics you eventually get to Karl Marx and we can’t have that which is one reason why I think people have not made this connection, at least publicly to my knowledge, very much if at all.
In addition, my post-modern sensibility of anarchistic syncretistic Taoist Buddhist cultivated confusion (I never am too sure about anything) leads me to wonder which personification, Obama or Trmp, I should identify with the thesis, the antithesis, or the synthesis. I guess we all get to decide that for ourselves.