Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, 1949.
“The Indians, whom we call barbarous, observe much more decency and civility in their discourses and conversation, giving one another a fair silent hearing till they have quite done; and then answering them calmly, and without noise or passion.”
– John Locke
Passions, as John Locke warned, reach faster and further into the human heart than reasoned arguments. Anger, hate, revenge, violence, racism, misogyny and all the devils of human nature have been steadily churned up while any reasoned approach based on becoming informed in traditional Enlightenment ways of knowing, including a respect for authority greater than one’s own, are now rejected and despised by the irrationalism of passion. Passions cannot create any worthwhile dialectic but rather begin and end in their own fury.
A man that incited an insurrection has yet won the popular vote. Regardless of Trump being found guilty of 34 charges, passionate attachment swipes these away. Trump promises to prosecute the police who defended the Capital but pardon the insurrectionists found guilty and now in jail. What could explain these travesties of reasoning except acknowledging that passionate conviction cannot be breached, rather like faith defying all reason.
The weapons of establishing by reason what is true and who is guilty have been set aside as if they never existed. Trial by jury is just seen as “lawfare”; elections are corrupt unless Trump wins. Being astounded and upset are not the passions that form any kind of successful offense against a promised purge of Trump’s enemies. Within the pathology of a megalomaniac who is actually given power, an enemy is whoever doesn’t bend the knee to him.
Trumpians explode when names are mentioned. Not arguments or views. Just names. “That guy should be in jail;” “she’s a Communist;” “he ruined the country;” “those verdicts were politically weaponized;” “Fauci is a crook;” “Obama incited racism;” “Bernie’s crazy.” AOC and the Squad elicit shouts of disgust. Biden was a laugh and so on. In short, serious positions are closed down immediately by passionate rejection, raging anger and an impulse to shut these elites up. Whereas historically, elites were the wealthy and powerful, they are now anyone who presumes to have the authority of a reasoned position. Those to be pilloried and vilified, arraigned and prosecuted are those who have challenged Trump in any way, contesting his will to dominate. It’s clear from the election results that many voters have assumed Trump’s enemies as their own. The politics of one man’s passion has infected many. Even though there’s a Trump Bible, there’s no sign of the Seven Heavenly Virtues in Trump’s revenge plans.
The enemies of God, Family and Country that the Passionate are ready to destroy make up a very weak, spineless bunch compared to the vehemence on the other side. Democrats didn’t deny the results of Trump’s win or take to the streets. You could say they’re passionately fearful, alarmed, disgusted and anxious to leave Trump’s world. Liberals, as well as all brands of socialists, “make the case,” construct a serious argument, “follow the path of logic” and so on within the Western Tradition of Reality and Rationality. All of that is now dismissed out of hand as tainted by political prejudice. Within the politics of passion, a socialist leaning elicits more anger than even a Liberal one. In the U.S.. We shall see if “the Leftists” are rounded up in the days ahead, arraigned as insurrectionary threats to the country, liable to storm Mar-a-Lago.
Regardless of whether Americans are aware of the role market economics plays in bringing the whole country to a pre-Civil war condition, that cause remains primary. Human induced global warming will not go away because some say it doesn’t exist. Ironically, rather than move toward a politics of distribution, those injured by a market rule economics have moved in support of such, and an angry response to whatever opposes or moderates such an economics.
Passions do not erupt over the wealth divide issue; the pernicious link between extreme wealth and power doesn’t register among Americans. Perhaps because a spin and spectacle society operates in the playground of the passions and the U.S. is such a society. Power lobbies here on the frequency of spin, spectacle, juicing the passions. In a severe winner/loser divide anger, hate, retaliation are juiced. The view of economics as the underlying problem is an argument, a case being made. It requires an attentiveness that has become slow, old and over in a TikTok world. TikTok is not dangerous because it shapes the American mind but rather because it confounds reasoning and leaves you with only the responses of the passions.
Just before Trump won the election, the Passionate promised a bloody shootout if Trump lost. Fear and trembling on the Liberal side and a rush to cover, not to their guns. What the sides are is about as clear as mud. A whole lot of Americans want to exterminate the “Deep State,” a monster going after God, Guns, Country, Family. A bureaucracy of Liberal elites. A psychiatrist would point out the delusionary at work here. As much as the Democratic Party has been in search of a platform and therefore a clear view of the opposition, it does have reasons to fear and oppose Trump.
A politics of passion of course does not admit this, whether evidence presented in two impeachments of Trump or 34 felony convictions. Incredibly, all of the facts and evidence presented were jettisoned at once because here passion not reason is the arbiter. Example: when asked what charges would be brought against Pelosi or Harris or Biden or Hillary or Schiff, et al, the passionate response is: It was for what they did. And what they did was get in Trump’s way. No Evidence needed. End of trial.
This situation itself reveals a societal confusion precipitated by that society’s undermining of rational determination of anything. All this being said, there was enough anger and antagonism sparked by the “cultural” priorities of Liberals and enough disgust and fear sparked by Trump and those rallying to him to engender war talk. And lost on a far horizon is the economics that since Reagan has shaped a plutocratic order that has been wearing down a middle class democracy for the past four decades. The aftershock of that not recognized by those subjected to it but existing nonetheless, as a child not knowing fire burns will yet burn the hand he puts into it. But the capacity to acknowledge what is reasonable, what is the case and what is not is far from being able now to disclose where the fault lines are.
A key question here is whether the destruction that Trump will rain on wage earners, while at the same time nurturing dividend recipients, will dampen the passion of the former for Trump. Counter-passions may erupt. Donald Trump isn’t playing paddle ball with us. His is a knife fight in a phone booth (the last one on the planet) politics. Reason isn’t in there. Historical parallels of reason evacuated, or gone mad, reveal the extreme potentialities of the politics of passion.
It’s a crap shoot whether Trump’s Border Czar will hit the WTF headlines when he does what he says he’s going to do, which amounts to doing what Stalin’s chief serving as head of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD,) Lavrentiy Beria, did. He oversaw the deportations of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Balts, and Romanians to remote areas or to Gulag camps. The hatred and fear already infused in the MAGAs may applaud whatever harsh punishment the Czar administers. We’ll have to wait and see.
Who will be the new Joseph Goebbels, Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany, who spread Nazi ideology. It controlled the media and theater. Trump has no ideology but the cult of Trump worship and the hatred of those outside that cult is clearly already here. We’ll see if Trump brings Maggie Haberman and other investigative reporters in for interrogation, by which I mean how Goebbels will he go?
A selection of Mao’s sayings were compiled into the LITTLE RED BOOK, which became revered within his cult of personality. In May 1966, with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao launched the Revolution and said that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. Mao called on young people to bombard the headquarters, and proclaimed that “to rebel is justified”. Trump’s revision of this replaces capitalism with the Deep State; both Mao and Castro maintained the right to rebel (Mao) and our revolution is ongoing (Castro) at the same time as they sought to create an impregnable order grounded in themselves. Trump is entering this dilemma but he is neither Mao nor Castro in balancing this contradiction. But he will come to understand it.
The simple answer as to why so many have adopted the pathology of a megalomaniac lies in the fact that the path of reasoning your way out of such has been shut down. What it takes to escape this destructiveness is not a university press publication, or education in critical/skeptical reasoning, or another denomination of Christianity. More likely, people will die, memories too as the past will fade even faster than it does now, fascinations will be branded elsewhere, and passions, which must be watered constantly, will wander elsewhere. There is no regime of thought that will survive Trump. Nothing dies faster than groundless passion.
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