I Am Interested In Politics
Just to desperately attempt to avoid the comments of the few loons out there on this site who still support Trump, but the question I have here is not about Trump's goodness or badness. It's just a question about what comes next (if anything).
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phsU1vVHOQI]
In the video, linguist John McWhorter describes Trump's speaking from a professional point of view. But at the very end, what he says is kind of chilling. Because, left or right, we can all agree that Trump's unscripted chatter is often a source of real problems - political, economic, diplomatic - but imagine if it weren't Trump.
That's what McWhorter says. He says that this sort of youtube-star-esque way of relating to the world is more or less the harbinger of things to come. To his credit, I've read his books. He's been complaining about the decline of formal, eloquent, perhaps even flowery speech in its proper social place for some time. To him, Trump, with his lack of formal graces represents the culmination of a social trend against formalism that was just a long time coming.
So my question is, is this what we're stuck with? What if, instead of getting a narcissist, we get some kind of neurotic? What if, instead of our days being filled with the bloated ego of a bloated man who strikes the majority of us as being unstable, we get some other kind of weird instability that can't check itself because it has no formal graces either? What if, in short, the presidency becomes a kind of reality drama?
As a caveat, I have trouble buying that formalism will go out entirely, even in this society, though if it does we have lost something. Even so, the democratic [i]mechanisms[/i] are there to do it, so I do wonder if there's cause to worry.
So let's put the question another way: do you think we could get a Trumpllike person [i]again?[/i]
I am also, as a final word, reminded of Ortega y Gasset's concern in [i]The Revolt of the Masses[/i], that the masses had become aware of politics, had come to control the means of imposing social order, and were by definition those who could not govern themselves. This was written in 1930. After the war, it seemed his thesis in some sense confirmed. Mass Man had wrought utter destruction wherever he had come to power - in Italy, in Germany, in much of the Balkans, in Russia, and so on. But after the war, liberalism found in the resources of social democracy, the New Deal, and progressivism justification for the general application of the welfare state, (though Mass Man was brutally repressed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, who valued excellence and had no Leninist illusions about most cooks being able to be state officials,) and this, for a time, seems to have sated Mass Man, alleviating the worst of his pains. So I wonder, is Mass Man back? Why now? Mass Man has no real taste, he is a consumerist through and through. If he is, there is a question of what social progress can mean if all the higher things are devalued completely, and they will be. That does not speak to progress, it speaks to iconoclasm at best and nihilism at worst.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phsU1vVHOQI]
In the video, linguist John McWhorter describes Trump's speaking from a professional point of view. But at the very end, what he says is kind of chilling. Because, left or right, we can all agree that Trump's unscripted chatter is often a source of real problems - political, economic, diplomatic - but imagine if it weren't Trump.
That's what McWhorter says. He says that this sort of youtube-star-esque way of relating to the world is more or less the harbinger of things to come. To his credit, I've read his books. He's been complaining about the decline of formal, eloquent, perhaps even flowery speech in its proper social place for some time. To him, Trump, with his lack of formal graces represents the culmination of a social trend against formalism that was just a long time coming.
So my question is, is this what we're stuck with? What if, instead of getting a narcissist, we get some kind of neurotic? What if, instead of our days being filled with the bloated ego of a bloated man who strikes the majority of us as being unstable, we get some other kind of weird instability that can't check itself because it has no formal graces either? What if, in short, the presidency becomes a kind of reality drama?
As a caveat, I have trouble buying that formalism will go out entirely, even in this society, though if it does we have lost something. Even so, the democratic [i]mechanisms[/i] are there to do it, so I do wonder if there's cause to worry.
So let's put the question another way: do you think we could get a Trumpllike person [i]again?[/i]
I am also, as a final word, reminded of Ortega y Gasset's concern in [i]The Revolt of the Masses[/i], that the masses had become aware of politics, had come to control the means of imposing social order, and were by definition those who could not govern themselves. This was written in 1930. After the war, it seemed his thesis in some sense confirmed. Mass Man had wrought utter destruction wherever he had come to power - in Italy, in Germany, in much of the Balkans, in Russia, and so on. But after the war, liberalism found in the resources of social democracy, the New Deal, and progressivism justification for the general application of the welfare state, (though Mass Man was brutally repressed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, who valued excellence and had no Leninist illusions about most cooks being able to be state officials,) and this, for a time, seems to have sated Mass Man, alleviating the worst of his pains. So I wonder, is Mass Man back? Why now? Mass Man has no real taste, he is a consumerist through and through. If he is, there is a question of what social progress can mean if all the higher things are devalued completely, and they will be. That does not speak to progress, it speaks to iconoclasm at best and nihilism at worst.
