There is two sides of the coin to understanding the phenomenon of Donald Trump. The first is to understand the con man and the second is to understand our human nature which desires to be conned. In November 2009 I wrote this lengthy reply:
We have buyer' s remorse because we begged Obama to flimflam us and he cheerfully and expertly did so. Now we want to blame Obama because we are disillusioned.
When we as a society eternally ricochet from candidate to candidate always hoping and too often believing that this time this man will produce the magic which will excuse us from our own willful dereliction of duty as citizens, the results are not only predictable but inevitable.
This quadrennial lusting after a political savior is fully in keeping with our human natures. But it does reflect well on us. It is an ignoble trait because it reveals us to be intellectually lazy and emotionally dependent. We were flimflamed by Obama not just because the media worked the crowd while he was on stage, we were taken in because we wanted to be taken in. We were vulnerable because we had not done our homework long before Barak Obama became a household tongue twister. Most of us have an inchoate understanding of our political process and a thoroughly distorted notion of constitutional governance. We have no well considered political philosophy so we seek not to evaluate policy but to judge the man. In the television age that rapidly deteriorates into a beauty contest.
In that televised beauty contest it is Katie Couric who controls the lighting, the camera angles, the editing, and the background music. Is it any wonder that conservative candidates get treated no better than Miss California? Is it any wonder that Barack Obama is literally treated as a Messiah? Is it any wonder that the best of Sarah Palin and the worst of Barack Obama are left on the cutting room floor?
Why do we yield the likes of Katie Couric power over ourselves? Why do we permit ourselves to be so deceived? Why do we want to be taken in by such a transparent siren as, "yes we can," or, "we are the one," when such bumper stickers are not intrinsically compelling, rather, by any objective test are simply mindless?
We are beaten on the one hand by the cynics who say, there is no difference among politicians, it matters not whom you vote for, they are all the same, and apathy, therefore, is the only rational reaction. It is the only way to save yourself from the liars. The only choice is not to choose otherwise you are participating in the sham and, God forbid, you will look foolish.
We are beaten on the other side by the mythmakers, both those who lionize and those who demonize. So Camelot was constructed around a psychotic and compulsive sex addict and a man who was addicted to psychotropic drugs. This myth was so firmly attached to the American psyche that literally no debauchery committed by his youngest brother would disillusion Massachusetts voters. It is folly to underestimate the power of the myth which idolizes an individual. That was why I posted so many times before the last election that Barack Obama had to be morally destroyed or the election was lost.
Equally, demonization myths are not to be underestimated. The mythmakers have denigrated Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, George W. Bush, Dan Quayle, and Sarah Palin, to mention some obvious examples, as stupid. Consider the myth that Richard Nixon is evil. This was well planted and nurtured long before he became president as a result of this politicking against communists in California and his association in the Alger Hiss affair. When Nixon was revealed to be as corrupt, but perhaps no more corrupt than Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Johnson who had recently preceded him in office, he could not escape the consequences for essentially the same acts which they had committed but for which they received no contemporaneous scrutiny and no adverse sanction.
We are beaten into the belief that our solution is in the person and not in the philosophy. We are beaten into the belief that we find truth by identifying the most trustworthy messenger. So if we believed Walter Cronkite we believed that the Vietnam war was lost. If we believed the successor to Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, we believed that George Bush cheated his way out of combat in Vietnam. If we believe those scientists that the media tells us we should believe, we are alarmed at global warming. If we are conditioned into accepting the truth of the message because we accept the trustworthiness of the messenger, we will accept the emotionally easy path of voting for the man and not the philosophy. We will be eternally seeking a Messiah and we will be eternally disillusioned.
By the way, we are not immune from this distemper here on Free Republic where one often reads that some opinion or another ought to be dismissed because the author of it is a liberal. This is the path of know nothingness , isolation, and minority status. This is the conservative world, our beliefs are the correct beliefs and they can stand scrutiny and challenge. To withdraw from the Fray is to commit our belief system to corruption, to a gradual death because we cannot correct ourselves. Is insupportable unless you believe that all conservatives are infallible all the time. It is not the man who brings us the truth but the truth which illuminates the man. No better example of this exists than the biography of Sarah Palin.
As long as we as a commonweal whore after the emotional release of surrender to a false Messiah, statists will have the advantage over us. Our commitment is to the principles of conservatism and not to an individual, not even Sarah Palin, not Glenn Beck, and not Rush Limbaugh. Our belief system is righteous and fully capable of meeting every test the left can throw at it. The one thing it cannot overcome is that folly which infects the rest of our culture.
