In his latest New York Times column David Brooks expresses worry about the spiritual state of the country:
Trump is a cultural revolutionary, not a policy revolutionary. He operates and is subtly changing America at a much deeper level. He’s operating at the level of dominance and submission, at the level of the person where fear stalks and contempt emerges.
He’s redefining what you can say and how a leader can act. He’s reasserting an old version of what sort of masculinity deserves to be followed and obeyed. In Freudian terms, he’s operating on the level of the id. In Thomistic terms, he is instigating a degradation of America’s soul.
We are all subtly corrupted while this guy is our leader. And throughout this campaign he will make himself and his values the center of conversation. Every day he will stage a little drama that is meant to redefine who we are, what values we lift up and who we hate.
The Democrats have not risen to the largeness of this moment. They don’t know how to speak on this level. They don’t even have the language to articulate what Trump represents and what needs to be done.
I think the situation is somewhat worse or at least different than he thinks. You cannot hire someone to be decent for you. Either you’re a decent, honest person or you aren’t. You can’t be a decent, honest person and then grow rich through your power and influence. That is inherently corrupt.
The choice isn’t between the Trump and his indecent supporters or any of the two dozen Democratic presidential candidates and their putatively decent supporters. We are merely choosing between different forms of indecency. Any Chicagoan knows exactly what I’m talking about. We can only choose the form of the destructor.
I think this sounds like Trump has balls and that scares the hell out of Brooks and his ilk.
“The choice isn’t between the Trump and his indecent supporters or”
Hey Dave, …and the horse you rode in on.
You and Brooks worry about the “spiritual health” of this nation. Brooks even tries to weave in some pidgin Christianity. Oh, there’s some Christianizing going on alright. Like in “He hath loosed the fateful lightning” type of Christianity. Note that that “turn the other cheek” thing doesn’t say “repeat”.
If you doubt then just look at what goes on all around you. Despite, or maybe because of, the unprecedented and obscene level of obloquy heaped upon him by the media Donald Trump fills and overflows major arenas every week – in the dog days of summer in a year with no elections. I have never seen anything like it. You have never seen anything like it.
I first head this song more than 50 years ago. I guess all things come to he who waits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7qQ6_RV4VQ
Mr. Brooks is losing, and he does not like it.
One feels for Brooks. His calling as he’s understands it is to provide political analysis of the news of the day, to place a broader context and purpose from the small bits of flotsam and jetsam that randomly washes ashore.
Yet each week, particularly on the PBS news hour, he is read some tweet from the President that is vulgar, unnecessarily abusive, and often at best ambiguous as to its policy import. The flotsam and jetsam looks like excrement, and sometimes the response looks like the flinging of feces.
He didn’t aspire to a career in sanitation, and feels ill-suited for it. He feels something has gone wrong in his life and sees the world around him as somehow corrupting him. A rot has set in.
To paraphrase, the decency of others is in the eyes of the beholder. If you feel the other is irredeemably indecent or corrupt, well, there goes the conversation.
As for Brooks, he’s of the mistaken opinion that if you’re nice to others, they will automatically be nice to you. That happens only if there’s penalties for being incivil and they’re enforced. When they’re not, or worse if the penalties only apply to one side, civility becomes a liability.
“We are merely choosing between different forms of indecency.”
You have to overlook a lot to reach this conclusion. Trump does stuff that no other major politician has done. Making fun of John McCain for getting shot down and suggesting he was not heroic. (This coming from the coward who got out of the war with boo boos to his feet.) Even those of us who did not like McCain’s politics respected his service. Trump’s physically mocking a disabled reporter. That is something poorly behaved school kids do, not an adult, let alone the leader of the country. (I suppose this shows, as noted above, that he has “balls”. Takes a lot fo courage to make fun of cripples. We ought to give Trump the Medal of Honor for that kind of bravery.) Then there is all of the name calling. Again, what adult does that? Trump is so far out of the norm when not comes to common decency I dont know how you compare him to anyone else. (To be clear, you can find lower level politicians who sometimes say things on the same level. Even then you dont see it on such a consistent level, but no one holding a major office says the stuff Trump says.)
All that said, Brooks should knock off the whining. No one on his team cares. They are all in on everything Trump says and does.
Steve
Reads to me like an installment in the eternal nobs vs slobs war with a re-acknowledgement that the peasants are revolting. Hmm, Apollonian vs Dionysian? Either way, democracies are messy
Um, what adult does this?
“And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.†— Barack Obama
“But I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way so we can clean up the mess. I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.†— Barack Obama
“It’s very rare that I come to an event where I’m like the fifth- or sixth-most interesting person.†— Barack Obama
“The issue here is not gonna be a list of accomplishments. As you said yourself, Steve, you know, I would put our legislative and foreign policy accomplishments in our first two years against any president – with the possible exceptions of Johnson, F.D.R., and Lincoln.†— Barack Obama
“No, no. I have been practicing…I bowled a 129. It’s like — it was like Special Olympics, or something.†— Barack Obama
“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere…That’s the world! On which hope sits!†— Barack Obama quotes Rev. Wright
“I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown the black community. †— Barack Obama
“The point I was making was not that Grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn’t. But she is a typical white person…†— Barack Obama
And it goes on.
And we could go into the erudite Dunkin’ Donut ownership observations of Joe Biden etc etc
To equate any of those, some of them quotes of other people, with what Trump says is bizarre. Have to assume it is late and you had more scotch than usual. On the one hand you have a guy physically mocking a cripple. On the other a guy quoting an author on a political theory you dont like. That would be like me criticizing Trump as indecent beaus he suggested that cutting taxes will lead to economic growth, which I have never done. You have decided that any political comment by an opponent is awful, or evil or something. In Trump’s case we dont even have to have politics involved and the guy engages in words and behaviors that no one else would even consider, other than high school idiots.
Note that I am not criticizing Trump for bragging about his accomplishments. Lots of politicians do that, and while it is annoying, there is no issue of common decency being offended. Mocking cripples, making fun of POW war heroes, name calling? Not even close. Try again.
Steve
I am an indecent Trump supporter. I am anti-immigrant and anti-free trade. I support machismo and traditional sex roles. I am an isolationist.
Make America White Again.
Robert De Niro: “I’d like to punch him in the face.â€
Cory Booker:
“Trump is a guy who you understand he hurts you, and my testosterone sometimes makes me want to feel like punching him, which would be bad for this elderly, out-of-shape man that he is if I did that. This physically weak specimen.â€
Joe Biden:
“The idea that I’d be intimidated by Donald Trump? . . . He’s the bully that I’ve always stood up to. He’s the bully that used to make fun when I was a kid that I stutter, and I’d smack him in the mouth.â€
Rashida Tlaib:
“we’re going to impeach the motherf***er.â€
Madonna At the White House:
“I dream of blowing it up”
Kathy Griffin making funny with a mockup of Trump’s severed head.
Trump making fun of the behavior of a man who is handicapped is not the same as mocking the handicapped.
This is in the same vein as he should not criticize the mayor of Baltimore’s long policy record because that is an affront to Blacks.
I think what people miss here is that if you alter your characterization of a person’s behavior based on race. You are a racist, Trump is no racist. He calls them as he see’s them.
You guys are moving the goalposts. There have been commonly accepted standards of decency for many years. I hope they still exist but you guys make me think you have rejected them. For example you dont mock disabled people by imitating their disability, especially exaggerating the disability for laughs or applause. That is exactly what Trump did. He imitated the tremors of a disabled person. He mocked the handicap, but for some reason you guys are OK with that. I would hope that if someone in your own family has a disability which causes them to shake or drag a foot you would at least frown at those mocking the disabled person, though in Trump’s case you defend that behavior. Until Trump came along everyone knew it was OK to challenge a former POW on their policies or political beliefs, but you didnt mock and make fun of their being a POW. There was always respect. Trump changed that. I wonder which POWs Bob likes to mock? (I am guess he never knew any or just hated them for some reason.)
So the best you guys can come up with even moving the goalposts comes from comedians and actors making banal statements that no one has ever before considered indecent. Single 35 y/o guy hits on a 25 y/o woman. That’s OK. Hits on a 16 y/o, even if it is legal, it’s not decent. We all know that. We all know lots of people and most of us have wanted to punch someone sometime, but we dont. That is not indecency. (Maybe offering to pay the legal fees of your supporters if they attack someone comes close. Not sure.)
“I am an indecent Trump supporter.”
Who apparently supports any and all indecent behavior on the part of Trump.
Steve
I’m with Dave on this one. Yet, I also sympathize with each commenter so far.
It’s not so much that politics as we knew it is broken, it is that our old political ways have already been rendered obsolete by accelerating socio-technical shifts. The old tactics don’t work anymore, and they are not likely ever to work again, and we are all in the race to figure out what will replace them.
Hegemonic control of the narrative is permanently gone. Anyone on the internet can set their own definitions now, and those who are good at it can attract many followers who agree, but no one can enforce their definitions anymore on people who don’t accept them. “Decency/indecency” is a fine example, yes?
The internet has now matured to the point that ideological opponents are both too agile to pin down and too entrenched to smash, and new viewpoints can be expected to continue to proliferate faster than they can be checked or tracked. The proverbial cat is out of the bag.
To those accustomed to setting/enforcing the tone, that’s a crisis. To everyone else, that’s an opportunity.
To me, it’s an engineering challenge.
Given the technical nature of the ongoing changes in the online political battlefield itself, and given the biological nature of the drivers of our human discontent, how do we pull out of this as a society? This is increasingly the question that matters.
How do we collectively reframe the problem in a jointly solvable form? By embracing what is there, not just what we wish were there.
Sometimes, chaos follows deterministic rules. We need to find them.
But, I’m just a musician.
“engineering challenge”
And the Chinese are way ahead.
Give it up, steve. You career on selective outrage. Go join Mataconis.
Give it up Drew. You are so deep into the cult now that you can rationalize any behavior by Trump. Dont you have to go meet up with some fellow culties somewhere and follow some old, crippled veterans around somewhere and make fun of them?
Steve
Only want to add, Calling people racist is name calling as well. And does nothing but drive them into different camps. It’s not unifying, but divisive.
“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!”