Groomed for Trump
The New Republic points out that the right wing in the US has been encouraging ignorance and anti-intellectualism for decades and thus grooming a large chunk of the population to be unable to see through Donald Trump. Well yeah – it’s obvious, but worth saying anyway.
Not so long ago, in the days before Marco Rubio endorsed Trump, the Florida senator called him a “con artist.” It’s hard to imagine how anyone could dispute Rubio’s evaluation. The operations of Trump University alone paint the convincing portrait of a swindler. Yet the deeper question is how such an obvious mountebank could win the majority of a major party’s delegates. Is there something in the nature of the Republican Party and its conservative base that made them particularly vulnerable to Trump’s deceptions?
Well of course there is. Have we forgotten “the reality-based community” already?
In a sense, conservative voters have been groomed for Trump since the 1960s. As the historian Rick Perlstein wrote in The Baffler and The Nation in 2012, the American conservative movement has become more and more amenable to get-rich-quick schemes, snake-oil salesmen, and confidence men. Direct-mail barons like Richard Viguerie began raking in the dough in the 1960s by stirring up ideological hysteria and convincing an audience of senior citizens that only their small-dollar donation could fend off union bosses, abortionists, and gays. Of course, most of the money ended up with the fundraisers.
From the direct-mail bunco artists, it was a natural progression to conservative media selling ads to the most outlandish dream peddlers and conspiracy-mongers. After Perlstein subscribed to email lists for publications like Townhall and Newsmax, he started getting some strange notices, including “the 123-Cent Heart Miracle,’ the one ‘Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.’ (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: ‘I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,’ read one of the testimonials. ‘I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.’).”
If you’ve been trained to think that business is always and automatically honest and self-regulating, you’ve been trained to stop thinking in general.
In Perlstein’s words, “The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began.”
There’s another factor at work here: The anti-intellectualism that has been a mainstay of the conservative movement for decades also makes its members easy marks. After all, if you are taught to believe that the reigning scientific consensuses on evolution and climate change are lies, then you will lack the elementary logical skills that will set your alarm bells ringing when you hear a flim-flam artist like Trump. The Republican“war on science” is also a war on the intellectual habits needed to detect lies.
They raised up a viper and now it’s biting them in the ass – and unfortunately it’s biting the rest of us too.
And at the same time taught that government is always dishonest and intrusive, as well as expensive and inefficient – I hear that as much from the left as from the right, and they are no more capable of hearing that the vast majority of things the government does, it does well. We only hear about the awful things, or the things that are botched up, and we extrapolate that to everything, partially because we don’t even know what things the government does for us (remember keep your government hands off my Medicare?).
And every person touting the idea that government is all fouled up has one anecdotal incident, which is nearly always vague and rather unimpressive. Most of them don’t realize that the FEMA debacle after Katrina was the result of deliberate messing with the machinery to make sure it didn’t work right, or that the biggest problem in expensive is the Pentagon, and other agencies are held accountable for their budget and aren’t buying $900 toilet seats. Or that the guys leaning on their shovels when they drive by are doing one of the hardest, hottest types of work there is, and they would be resting, too, because otherwise you won’t survive a Texas summer working on the roads (and of course they never notice the other guys, the ones that aren’t currently resting).
We don’t notice things when they work like they’re supposed to, so the big foul ups that were the result of bad mismanagment on the part of a rogue political party are all they see.
I’ve been referring to Trump as the GOP’s Adam (ala Frankenstein) for some time now, as opposed to other metaphors I’ve heard, most notably the barbarian at the gate. He’s not an outside force; he’s the rampaging result of their deliberate efforts to appeal to the worst elements of humanity.
If you look closely, you can see all the individual bits that were stitched together to create him: The racism of the Southern Strategy, the barely concealed misogyny of the pro-Lifers, the willful obstruction of science and embrace of ignorance on everything from evolution to global climate change, the decision to cast every bit of evidence against their arguments as being part of a conspiracy of the ‘intellectual elites’; all this, stitched together by the toxic belief that wealth = virtue and given life by the faux-populist lightning of the Tea Party.
And any Republican who chooses to stay on the ticket this fall, underneath Trump, deserves to be identified and condemned as a sell-out who bartered support for a neofascist for their own greedy grasp of power.
To make matters worse, the technological nature of the media these days means that conservatives are less and less exposed to alternative viewpoints, unknowingly trapped inside informational “filter bubbles,” all the better with which to be microtargeted by corporate and political wolves.
A paragraph from George Saunders’s excellent piece about Trump voters in the latest New Yorker is apt:
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/george-saunders-goes-to-trump-rallies
I found it both funny and illuminating when he said “I went to an Ivy league school, I’m very highly educated, I know words, I have the best words.” This is the end result of that grooming process: an anti-intellectual leader pandering to an anti-intellectual audience, showing off his vocabulary with “I have the best words.”
iknklst, on thing that always drove me crazy was DMV jokes. I go online, set up an appointment, look up what I need to have to be prepared, show up on time– in and out, much faster than appointments for interviews, doctor visits, etc.
The anti-rationalism, credulity, conspiratorial ‘skepticism’ etc. are equally prevalent in the pseudo-Left. There seems to have been a general decay in education and judgment which has little or nothing to do with ideological leanings.
Except for the degree that a gullible public can be exploited by a tame media. Chopra, Oz, Oprah etc. may be raking it in, but they aren’t posing as Populist Leaders….yet.
Samantha Vimes @5: I remember when government-run health care was constantly being described as having the compassion of the IRS, the efficiency of the post office and the service level of the DMV–my only response, ever, was, “So, a hundred times better in all categories than what I’ve dealt with from private insurers?” At least the government’s “death panels” wouldn’t be given annual bonuses based on how many people they manage to exempt from coverage.
JtD @ 6, I’d go further. Since the mid 1980’s I’ve seen the education system in Commonwealth countries progressively degraded by right and centre-right governments. This has taken the form of forcing public Universities to function as businesses more akin to a supermarket than anything else, school funding models have been changed in a way that ensures schools are no longer receiving adequate funding and public money is more and more directed toward private and often religious schools.
The individual effects are subtle, but the cumulative effect is to produce students who are process and reward focussed, not independent thinkers with broad educations. I’m sure that suits the decision makers just fine.