To my ears, Trump is an inarticulate ignoramus with a heavy dose of meglomania. In a prior post, I linked to John McWhorter‘s analysis of Trump’s speech patterns. These YouTube clips summarize his conclusions:
McWhorter elaborates in The Atlantic and concludes that Trump is a walking “hot mike” with no sensible filter.
I agree. But as cogent as I think McWhorter’s analyses are, they fail to explain why so many Americans are bamboozled by his rhetoric. The Economist provides a probable explanation – the confidence of his delivery:
Trump as confidence-man. Revisit the night of his win in 2016, he looks to me like a man uncertain of his fate: He used his processional walk to gather his composure before addressing the crowd. I am convinced that he was flabbergasted, entirely shocked to have won and he wore doubt on his cant of his eyes and the set of his jaw.
For him, the run for president was a continuation of The Apprentice. And only by using the time-honored “fake it until you make it” business technique has he survived. But the act has been subsumed and now the actor has become the role; over the ensuing four years he has “grown” – in accordance with Lord Acton’s maxim – power has become his purpose.
The gravity of any specific issue – Covid, China, Russian election interference, economic collapse, whatever – is less critical that the presentation of them, of how to play to the crowd. Spin and ratings take precedent over solutions. The confidence game and the Big Lie are constant techniques in the political arena, but Trump has taken the game to another level entirely. Or perhaps, it is more accurate to state he has taken it back to a previous time.
It is fitting that George Orwell’s Animal Farm celebrates its 75th anniversary today (August 17, 2020).
Despite his own democratic socialist bent, Orwell’s allegorical novel was conceived as a warning against what can only be described as an intellectual infatuation with Josef Stalin.
The idealized communism and propaganda that marketed Stalin as “Uncle Joe” was a convenient wartime fiction to make him a palatable ally, but Orwell was not fooled. He was keenly aware of people and tenaciously honest in his assessments.
Orwell lived and endured shared hardships with the working class to chronicle the social injustice and class iniquities across Europe, and therefore he was not blinded by the utopian lies about Stalin’s Russia that were in part perpetrated by British and American propaganda. Orwell’s was not an academic analysis. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War with Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM) and experienced the Stalinist oppression of the Marxist idealism. Homage to Catalonia (1938) is a journalistic recounting of his time with POUM and served as the basis for his better known allegory.
Animal Farm was completed in 1944 and Orwell struggled to find a publisher. The manuscript was rejected by T.S. Eliot when he was at Farber and Farber.
Eliot’s critical evaluation and reason to reject it:
Now I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation.
Ah, the ignorance of a poet! Eliot could not recognize evil. For Eliot, I suspect his position was in fact reasoned and based on a critical evaluation of Orwell’s literary construction, but the realpolitik of 1944 wouldn’t abide the negation of an ally. The US and British used Stalin to help defeat Hitler, but the intellectuals were enamored of egalitarian idealism. This is a cautionary tale with currency on several levels – be wary of political expediency, Russian duplicity, and intellectuals who forget human nature!
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Stalin’s Secret Agents, by M. Stanton Evans.
Evans outlines compelling evidence that the Russians infiltrated FDR’s circle and influenced policy. While that may be true, the argument lays too much blame on espionage; we were complicit. It wasn’t just mavericks like George Patton who recognized the Russian threat, the British developed a contingency plan: Operation Unthinkable.
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Orwell remains all-too-necessary 75 years on: his work decrying fearmongering, authoritarianism, tribalism, and historical erasure stands vigil against the easy manipulation of untempered human nature.
Political and polemical speech. Trump has played the crowd masterfully. Despite inherited wealth and elitist isolation, he connected with the common man. He showed empathy for their plight and gave voice to their fears. MAGA resonated and the throng gathered. Trump follows ratings because he plays to the masses. Frank Herbert feared charismatic leaders because they sway the crowd readily and deflect criticism effortlessly. Herbert had Kennedy in mind, but Hitler, Stalin and Pericles are earlier exemplars to fear and learn from.
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Here we go again: sheep want to be ruled and intellectuals think they know best.
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I remain incredulous that a virus has become political, that basic hygiene is now a statement of political affiliation and mask-wearing is deemed an oppression of liberty. Living in Portland, it is all too easy to dismiss this perspective as nonsensical, but travel away from the urban core and the narrative is very different. We overnighted in Seaside and saw few masks among the locals. Our summer vacation took us through rural Illinois and Indiana; the Trump signs and flags are displayed proudly and prominently. The upper middle class, college-educated, urbanites who watch CNN forget at their peril that Fox News holds a powerful voting segment captive who will influence several swing states.
The political landscape in the US is violently binary in 2020 and the propaganda machine is Goebbels-worthy. The cranks understand how to manipulate the masses to play the Electoral College:
The danger of correct-minded liberals is the notion that they are clever and strong enough to resist the grip of totalitarianism. With Trump it’s easy to recognize his gaffes, arrogance, lies and power grabs, these the liberals know are clearly wrong. But liberals will remain ironically susceptible to the moralizing progressives, “public-spirited pigs,” who have the “real” solutions.
Heed Zarathustra’s warning:
Aber der Staat lügt in allen Zungen des Guten und Bösen; und was er auch redet, er lügt—und was er auch hat, gestohlen hat er’s.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Chapter 11, “Vom neuen Götzen”/”The New Idol”
- The state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen.
- Variant translation: Everything the State says is a lie, and everything it has it has stolen. (As quoted in Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History (2010) by Andrew Napolitano)
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Why Does Joseph Stalin Matter, by Stephen Kotkin
Kotkin illuminates the strategies Stalin used to consolidate power. The control of ideology is frightening. Then, read John McWhorter on the control of the far-left narrative.
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[1] Admittedly, the 1940 Time magazine cover is planted out of context. Stalin in 1940 was “celebrated” as the Man of the Year because of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact which tipped the balance of power in Hitler’s favor: he gained access to raw material from Stalin who got a non-aggression promise in return. However, Stalin was again on the cover in 1943 for the defense of Stalingrad – where the Soviets held back the Germans at a terrible cost. >More<
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