The Trumpian Vertigo of American Politics

[robosmith]

The Trumpian Vertigo of American Politics

Quote

Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse and defaming his victim. He incited a violent attack on the Capitol, called for terminating rules in the Constitution, dined with a neo-Nazi, and floated the idea of executing the nation’s most senior general. He has been fined for fraud on a massive scale, faces more than 80 felony charges, and is accused of withholding and sharing top-secret national-security documents.

Faced with all of this, the Republican Party says, Yeah, we want four more years of that. GOP leaders wearing red ties make lockstep pilgrimages to his felony trial in New York to show their fealty, while wannabe running mates mimic his rhetoric and echo his lies about the 2020 election. And now there’s Nikki Haley, who has called Trump “unhinged,” “toxic,” “diminished,” and unqualified. Yesterday, she said that she would vote for him anyway. The alleged frauds, adultery, sexual assault, threats, and possible felony convictions don’t matter. Close to half the electorate seems to agree.

Which brings us back to our chronic airsickness. Most of us took it for granted that Americans by and large shared certain ethical assumptions. Despite our differences, we imagined, we all used roughly the same moral compass to judge right and wrong.

But what if that’s not true anymore?

What if the guardrails of the U.S. legal system turn out to be illusory or broken beyond repair? What if we have exhausted our reservoirs of democratic values and shared norms? And what if the constant turbulence buffeting our sense of reality is a sign that we are in a different world, one whose values we don’t understand?

I suspect that the great thinker Hannah Arendt would recognize some of the aspects of that world. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she described the annihilation of truth and the collapse of moral reasoning:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.

Or, to paraphrase the immortal line of Bette Davis’s character, Margo Channing, in All About Eve: Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy year. 

Of course Trump has annihilated truth for the MAGA CULT rubes.

 

[myata]

With that one, I have to disagree. The vertigo is only due to the partisan political system that has worked itself right to the end, the only one possible. More heated partisanship will not help in fixing this conundrum one bit. The political system runs itself, it's talking to itself it's doing weird things nobody could understand, it lost all connection to the reality of the country and it will produce hiccups and vertigos now with predictable certainty now unless, one of the two: the society finds the will and the power to update it to; or it collapses.

I honestly don't see any other options down this path.