It's because American culture has dispensed with objective truth. Substantive conversations rely on objective truth in order to characterize positions. Without it, in the world of subjective truth, everyone having their own truth, you end up with Trump and the Black Lives Matter movement. Shoddy insults and incoherent yelling.
Similarly, this is why attacks on Trump's boorish behavior haven't worked. Since we also dispensed with objective morality ("You mustn't judge, dear. It's not right."), there's no standard against which one can judge Trump's behavior. He made fun of a handicapped guy? So what? Who are you to judge?
The funny thing is that this is the world the progressives hath made. This is what they've wanted since the late 1960s at least. As they own academia, the arts and most levers of the popular culture in which all of us, conservative and liberal alike, marinate, it's no wonder that a very great many of us have adopted this underlying mental model.
So Trump is a liar, a fraud and a huckster. His supporters, having dispensed with objective measures of judgment as the progressives insisted we should, don't care because they now lack the tools to define those terms in any meaningful sense.
Ali my lefty Facebook friend keep posting terribly things about "conservatives" who have brought this camel's nose into the "conservative" tent.* Not to wax too Pauline Kael, but most conservatives I know REALLY do not like Trump. And as a conservative myself, Took Nichols's piece over at the Federalist is starting to resonate with me. ("I’ll Take Hillary Clinton Over Donald Trump")
ReplyDeleteBefore that horse's patoot threw his hat in the ring, the president was pretty much going to go to the Republican party. Now, it's a crap shoot. If Trump wins, and he's as bad as we think he'll be, we'll be handing the next eight years minimum to another Democrat, probably on the same mold as Hillary. Or Bernie.
If Hillary wins, I'm so screwed personally, but at least in for more years, the presidency will go to the Republicans. One would hope and pray that in for years they'll get their act together and run someone who WILL win.
* OMG -- the stuff they post as evidence of how truly "insane" teapartiers are beyond offensive. And it's as puerile as the Kardashians, but some of my Facebook friends who I always thought were rather intelligent buy into it...
Sigh.
BTW, I'm still the same anonymous who's too lazy to sign in.
Anon, you can be lazy all you want. I love reading your comments.
ReplyDeleteI can't see Trump beating Hillary. She's going to go scorched earth in the upcoming general election and Trump is tailor-made for attacks. He's got a glass jaw and will fall apart when they start throwing massive ad buys at him.
As for criticisms of the Tea Party, it's a good bet that none of those people can actually articulate a Tea Party position on anything.