Posted Friday morning, July 24, 2020.
“You’re GREAT just the way you are---LOSERS!”: Trump at his Tulsa rally back in June. Photo by Evan Vucci/AP via the Chicago Tribune, June 20, 2020.
Trump’s appeal is to the worst in his voters. It extends beyond their racism, bigotry, sexism, hatefulness and heartlessness in petty and soul-shrunken ways that inflect those more egregious vices. He gives them permission not to strive and self-improve. Assures them they’re fine as they are---GREAT as they are. There was no need to have gone to college or send your kids there: it’s all liberal “indoctrination”. (He’s looking into it.) And no need to listen to experts. What do they know? He tells them to embrace their resentments, nurse their grievances, and look for reasons for more resentments and to feel even more aggrieved. He encourages them to see themselves as heroes---warriors, he calls them---without their having done anything heroic and to swagger around like tough guys when in fact they’re not even bullies, just part of the gangs of weaklings who adopt bullies as their leaders and cheer them on. They all could have been contenders, he says, if it weren't for THEM!, and the could have been is as satisfying to them as if they had not only contended but won, at least a moral victory. He’s rallying a mob of Walter Mittys. In short, he tells them to see themselves as versions of himself, and he’s a man of no worth---no moral standing---even, maybe especially, in his own eyes, which makes part of his appeal leading them to see themselves as having no worth in their own eyes.
Walter Mitty was not a bad person. Merely an ordinary man with a vivid imagination.
Posted by: Lawrence Schuman | Friday, July 24, 2020 at 01:27 PM