Just banal
The divide in the country is often described as right vs. left. In Lakoffian terms, a divide between “strict fathers” and “nurturant parents.” But there is another, less talked about divide.
We saw it in the Wall Street wilding leading up to the financial crash, and in the coke-fueled “greed is good” 1980s, and in the self-delusions of trickle-down economics and the Laffer Curve. We see it in what I’ve dubbed the Midas cult, twisted souls who believe anything that might be turned into gold should be. Most recently, we see it in corporate CEOs, law firms, and universities willing to sacrifice their democratic birthrights to keep the money machine turning. And in Donald Trump.
Trump, the professional conman and self-promoter, is famously said to have refused to visit Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018. He blamed rain. Trump reportedly said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In another conversation, he called the fallen “suckers.” During a 2017 Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery, he stood with then-homeland security secretary John Kelly beside the grave of Kelly’s son, Robert, killed in 2010 in Afghanistan at age 29. Sources told The Atlantic that Trump turned to Kelly and said, ““I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
I revisited those events in light of something Paul Krugman writes about our country’s slide into autocracy. (I’d argue that we’re beyond that.) Krugman contrasts the acceleration of democratic backsliding under Trump to that of Hungary and other recent examples. (Digby touched on this on Sunday.)
“It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s,” Krugman writes.
That national backlash has stunned the congenitally cocky Trump and his boot-licking lieutenants.
Krugman continues:
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc. think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
Standing up for principles is a concept “alien to them.” It simply does not compute. There must be something monetary in it for citizens to gather en masse in the frigid streets of Minneapolis. Otherwise why face off against Trump’s mercenary thugs on behalf of neighbors? Especially those of different races and ethnicities?
Politifact recently addressed the only explanation that makes sense to a man without principles. They must be getting paid:
“The thugs that are protesting include many highly paid professional agitators and anarchists,” he said Jan. 18 on Truth Social.
“They’re paid agitators and insurrectionists,” Trump said at a Jan. 20 press conference.
The next day in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said the “fake” protests were “done by agitators and professional insurrectionists. … They’re professional troublemakers.”
He added, “We are looking very strong at the money, too, in Minnesota and other places.”
Politifact concludes “social media posts we found that claimed to show evidence of paid protesters were either AI-generated, recycled conspiracy theories or unsubstantiated.” (I’m sure the amount of backpay George Soros owes me is staggering.)
Trump the pitchman came to power having convinced large swaths of Americans that he had their backs, understood their struggles, was more American at his core than snooty liberals. His base has yet to come to terms with the fact that he and his inner circle neither understand them nor share their values. Self-aggrandizement is not among the virtues recognized by any of the world’s major faiths.
I waited tables for several years after getting my first degree. Customers regularly asked if I was in school. When I told them that I’d graduated, they asked in what. Philosophy. Their eyes would glaze over. You could see the gears going around in their heads as they asked themselves how that (philosophy) translated into [mentally rubbing their fingers together] cold, hard cash. They’d ask, “But what are you going to do with it?”
I’m still doing it.
And there it is again: the divide. What’s not marketable has no value. What the Trumps and those who bend their knees to them cannot fathom is why anyone would risk their lives in defense of the Constitution, the principles behind it, and the rights enshrined therein. Why people would face police dogs, fire hoses, beatings, and jail to demand that America make good on the promissory note that came back marked “insufficient funds” if they weren’t being paid?
The same government reactionaries who once brutalized American citizens during the Civil Rights era 60 years ago are back at it. Back, like the fascists the Allied dead who lie in Arlington and Aisne-Marne sacrificed their lives to defeat 80 years ago: for democratic principles, for their neighbors, and for foreigners they did not know. And to defeat the banality of evil.
The divide is too great. They’ll never understand.