rolling explaining conservatism

Projection

mr. trump wrote the "op-ed" to show liberals how wrong they are about his intellect and inflexibility. on halloween he'll reveal he's really Q, and the liberals will be forced to admit he's a stable genius. #maga

mike tokes!

BOMBSHELL: Christine Blasey Ford’s brother worked with Peter Strzok's sister-in-law at Exelis Inc, a US Defense and Intelligence contractor.

•Jill Strzok is Peter Strzoks' sister-in-law
•Jill Strzok works with Thomas Blasey
•Thomas Blasey is Christine Ford's brother pic.twitter.com/KTFBM6TZxd

— Mike Tokes (@MikeTokes) September 29, 2018

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright. The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them.

As much as it's a facile opinion, it does seem like owning the libs is the only coherent way to explain modern conservatism. Which is maddening, which is the point.

i'm not sure how into christianity trump is, but otherwise that's otm

white evangelicals sure are into him, so he reciprocates the love

for sure. also, he attended sermons by norman vincent peale as a youth and was certainly influenced by the kind of cult of solipsism that peale helped make into the true american religion

i'm actually surprised that connection hasn't been mined more in essays. "the power of positive thinking" definitely had a huge impact on trump and his refusal to acknowledge facts that don't fit his narrative. he's one of the few people other than his father that trump has openly cited as an influence

I think one thing that the election made crystal clear is that 'christian' is more of an identity than a religious belief for most americans. the facade that the right was a bunch of true believers was something they lost in 2016 that they'll never get back.

Me: 'I don't like Brussels sprouts so I will opt to not eat Brussels sprouts.'
A conservative: 'I don't like Brussels sprouts so there is nothing I won't sacrifice in the long-term pursuit of filling the Supreme Court with justices who will rule Brussels sprouts to be unconstitutional.'

Funny that, conservatives over here don't like Brussels much either.

"having integrity and morals limits one so. lying, cheating, getting help from our enemies makes it so much easier"

The right has followed the Powell Memo, the 1971 roadmap for business domination of politics written by Lewis Powell — then a corporate lawyer and soon to be a Supreme Court justice — almost exactly, except for this part: https://t.co/X0lD6zlhjj pic.twitter.com/cO1WF89J7Y

— Jon Schwarz (@schwarz) October 9, 2018

i'm actually surprised that connection hasn't been mined more in essays. "the power of positive thinking" definitely had a huge impact on trump and his refusal to acknowledge facts that don't fit his narrative. he's one of the few people other than his father that trump has openly cited as an influence

Gary Lachman's Dark Star Rising - https://garylachman.co.uk/dark-star-rising/ - gets into the influence of Peale on Trump and expands outward to the occult via Dugin, Evola, etc. Worth checking out.

except for this part

that part turned out to be too costly and ultimately superfluous to the success of the program

"presidential harassment" -- sure thing, mitch ; )

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/mcconnell-urges-dems-not-investigate-trump-after-midterms

no joke, this is pretty good

https://newrepublic.com/article/151603/nihilist-nation-empty-core-trump-mystique

are all your other posts jokes then or

Yeah I started reading that article with the same feeling of frustration that I read the GQ "Republicans all hate you" article a few days ago, like, the feeling like "oh great another article that isn't actually getting it" but then this article started to get it, I think. There's more to it than this, I feel? But I'm not smart enough to unpack it

I liked that quite a lot thx. Normally when things get so reductive i get all “theres way more than THAT” but i think the mutually reinforcing relationship of nihilism and endstate capitalism well.

I don't know, the premise of the article is good and I'd like to have seen where he was going with it but, really, where was the editor? I made it as far as the Mike Pence and Lady GaGa bit and then I thought the author of this has got lost in the woods

where was the editor?

i'm finding a lot to enjoy in the article, but this sentence stopped me in my tracks. especially the second half.

In the same way as antecedents for Donald Trump can be found in Roman tribunes and Nazi demagogues but not in any previous American president, you will search the historical record in vain for persuasive evidence confuting that nihilism in this country is something new.

there must be a simpler way to make that point. holy shit

I read it a third time and took delight in the author's preference toward more cryptic phrasing. I feel like it's actually kind of necessary? to get you to the "the answer, trite as it is, is l-o-v-e" ending

Xp I had the same issue with that sentence. Wtf is “confuting?”

causing confusion

confusing is just refuting. my main point of confusion was the presence of several dozen negatives in that sentence and trying to figure out which ones canceled each other out

= in the same way as
*antecedents for donald trump*
+ can be found in roman tribunes and nazi demogogues
- but non in any previous american president,
::
+you will search the historical record
-in vain
+for persuasive evidence
-confuting that
*nihilism in this country*
+is something new

in other words, "nihilism in this country is something new."

I think there is a lot of truth to this article

before anyone criticizes, yes, i am a professional sentence diagrammer and that was my very best effort

also, on the whole i liked that article a lot and recognized a lot of what the author was talking about in people around me, and impulses that i have, as well

i'm gonna be the one to say that it felt like this guy was stretching... a lot

I honestly don’t think he is.

Nihilism sounds like a kind of hysterical term but he definds it well here. And he is right: trump supporters aren’t pursuig some kind of positive good that is just different from ours, in mant cases their sole motive seems to be “owning the libs” or else exacting some kind of punishment on their target groups (women, minorities, percevied “cultural elites”) from which they will draw no benefit. This is a passion for negativity, not just selfishness.

The aversion to climate research is the most symptomatic thing here in my view. They’re hurting themselves too.

they're impervious to harm though because they've already been mugged by reality

punishment on their target groups (women, minorities, percevied “cultural elites”) from which they will draw no benefit

the religious cohort of the right wing at least defines such punishment in positive terms, as the ascendancy of the power of right and good over evil and wrongheadedness. they see this as pleasing to god, as beneficial to society and therefore to themselves as followers of god and members of society. in their terms, it is redemption rather than nihilism.

I think it’s more likely they’re so alienated they don’t really grasp consequences, experiencing the world as some kind of spectacle from which they’re disconnected

Xp qualmsey

I think those people are different than the bulk of people who are really embracing this trump wave. Most of his supporters seem to be enjoying his offensiveness—they’re along for the ride. It doesn’t seem like it’s about punishing the wicked in some fundamentalist christian sense although those people are around too

xps - for some of the Trump supporters that is no doubt true. but when you paint at least 80 million people with such a broad brush, you're going to be wrong every time, both in large and in detail.

i think maybe it's a self-aware kayfabe routine, wearing a 'trump 2016: fuck your feelings' tshirt to a 'war on christmas' protest rally, laughing inside, grimacing outside, sticking it to the virtue-signaling know-it-all libs who don't "get" "hypocrisy"

The article doesn’t say that trump supporters are the only nihilists, aimless. He says there is a larger crisis of meaning and trump’s rise is just the most prominent example of it. The author also singles out postmodern academics. It’s definitely not a trendy position but I think there’s truth to it. You can’t have a functional society where everyone is an iconoclast.

The article doesn’t say that trump supporters are the only nihilists, aimless. He says there is a larger crisis of meaning and trump’s rise is just the most prominent example of it.

and that capitalism drives people toward nihilism

Right. Capitalism is the ultimate cause of this, constantly refashioning society in its own image. Not an original insight but a true one

are we any closer to any answers yet? or is this just the new republic trying to accept that the only alternative to fascism is fully automated gay space communism?

the final frontier. these are the voyages of the starsearch american idol. to boldly no collusion where ALEC has fair and balanced limbaugh!

The Godwin point always comes with a Derrida point in these long-form pieces.

I think the author would get a lot further if he dropped the "nihilism" idea and replaced it with maybe a Civilization and its Discontents style analysis in which Trump has released the libidinal transgressive drives that neo-liberalism submits to an exhausting self-policing. This is, after all, something the Left tries to tap as well. Both gesture towards the dissatisfaction or failure of sublimation at the root of consumerism.

But even that doesn't explain the typical Trump voter--to my mind a steretypical older white suburbanite. I think there you'd need something like the psychosis brought on by an obsessive need for security (well described by Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity). I think they are people increasingly drowning in the deepening abyss between the protestant ethic and the empty promises of American middle class life and they are making a last ditch effort to square that circle by clinging to the last bit of driftwood that's floating past. After all, "Make America Great Again" is a bizarre slogan for a nihilist but maybe I'm missing something. It's a classic mistake, in any case, to misread someone who has different values from you as having no values at all.

Both gesture towards the dissatisfaction or failure of sublimation at the root of consumerism.

But even that doesn't explain the typical Trump voter--to my mind a stereotypical older white suburbanite.

i think the nihilism of that particular group comes from an additional source - racism, identification with whiteness, the sense that their dominance is being erased, and most importantly, the sense that they're inevitably going to "lose" the demographic battle. basically, just look up things neo-Nazi house representative Steve King expresses openly about whites being "replaced" by other ethnic groups through immigration, what white supremacists sometimes call the "great replacement". a nihilist trump supporter is Steve King without the expectation that things will be turned around. the reason i mention all of that is because i think it helps to explain this:

"After all, "Make America Great Again" is a bizarre slogan for a nihilist but maybe I'm missing something.

it's not a bizarre slogan for a racist, because it's a slogan that implies that things were better in the past. most people don't want to go back to the past. racist white people do, because the further they go back, the more dominant the were. i don't think MAGA is an expression of hope for the future so much as a statement that the past was better.

Just to go back to the piece on nihilism for a second, my personal Occam's razor is anti-intellectualism, a genuine desire to destroy and any all manner of complexity. This can translate either into suspension of disbelief (Trump or Bolsonaro or whoever else as Redeemer) or into transgressive oversimplification (this attitude veers closer to what Keizer is describing).

When Derrida writes of the undecidable, he's not arguing that you henceforth get to believe whatever you like. Rather, he's pointing out the difficulty (rather than the impossibility) of making an ethically correct decision, which does not mean that we are absolved of our responsibility towards others. On the contrary, we are only responsible insofar as we understand our inadequateness and make do with it (he often quotes Paul Celan: 'The world is gone / I must carry you'). Thus, there's a tragic dimension to Derrida's oeuvre that's hardly reducible to 'there is no truth lulz', which is no less lazy a move than calling Nietzsche a proto-nazi. Difficulty and complexity ask that we bear with them, that we avoid Procrustean solutions such as 'lock them all up', 'just build a wall', 'hand out assault rifles to children/rabbis', i.e. that we be willing to think through the irresolution, even though we're always running out of time (something Derrida did more successfully than most philosophers, especially in his later writings. If anything, alt-righters and their ilk do the exact opposite: their statements are maze-like not because they reflect the matter's intricacy but because they impatiently seek to annihilate it. If anything, it's a conspiracy-oriented, a priori form of argumentation wherein the initial premise will invariably be proven 'true', by any subjective means necessary, even if that requires you to deny reality or your own ostensible belief system in the process. It's all done 'for the win', and there always is a 'win' at the end of it, which is a goal foreign to deconstruction.

This phenomenon is (I agree with ryan) much closer to Freud's theories than to any supposed 'nihilism': the lack of security (real or imagined) derived from being unable to cope with the world's overwhelming complexity, with the dearth of persuasive metanarratives, with the absence of a mythical community, can lead to despair, but this very despair can in turn explode into a frighteningly joyful violence whereby you avenge yourself of whatever keeps your death drive in check. This is predicated on the exercise of power, which you are bound to look for above, whether in a tower in NYC or in the sky. And such impulses are anti-intellectual, precisely, insofar as they reject the self-denial and anonymity of reflection – the pause you mark as you stop to consider whether you might be wrong, the necessary, undecidable moment of doubt that reminds you of your limitations – because it gets in the way of the primitive pleasure of dehumanising your enemies and obliterating them. Such impulses are not easy to overcome. I've always looked to aesthetic catharsis as a way of keeping them in check, but that's not enough for those who wish to go all the way, to turn the violence of fascist legends into a reality. Actual war is always more exciting than the Iliad when you've a psychopathic streak (and most of us do, as history unrelentingly shows). Anyway, I'm rambling at this point. Unsurprisingly, I don't think there are any easy solutions, and they obviously vary a fair amount from continent to continent, country to country, culture to culture.

There's also this classic piece by Umberto Eco:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

After all, "Make America Great Again" is a bizarre slogan for a nihilist but maybe I'm missing something.

Only if you assume that he actually means the words that he's saying, which he doesn't.