David Brooks in the Atlantic

The Atlantic has an article called Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good? by David Brooks.

David Brooks takes a lot of liberties telling the story of morality in America. The hope is to explain why people like Trump. For me the explanation is nihilistic desire to wreck things up, the death instinct. People think they're going to clear things out, shake up the system. It's not working the way they want, good Americans resent taxes, and with inflation and global warming, why not just wreck things up? There's too much to worry about, life is too complicated. Just lower taxes.

Of course the current regime isn't lowering taxes, just shifting money into rich pockets and running various grifts. 

Brooks story is that in traditional society, that gave you a role, and a scope of how to think about ethics. You tried to be the best you could be in your role in society. That was the best ethical thing you could do. Now we don't have roles in society. I've worked in a restaurants, hardware store, library, taxi driver, schools, publishing, warehouses, as a social worker, chess tutor, a million different jobs. There's no role for me in society besides worker, father, husband, citizen. It hasn't been hard for me to figure out how I want to vote, and to see the importance of voting. 

I live in a immigrant neighborhood. I talk in the park while my daughter plays. I can't seem to convince anyone to vote. Some American born, first generation woman even made fun of me by suggesting people vote. My son reports the hispanic soccer players in the park love Trump. 

Certainly the sizeable Jewish population around me votes for lower taxes, they don't send their kids to public schools, they don't trust the government. There's a polish woman who home schools her children, "not enough god in school", who told me to forget Trump's sieg heils. Lots of people drive Tesla cars in a Jewish neighborhood. They must not be so afraid of another wave of anti-semitism like the one in WW2. 

Israel is beset on all sides, but it's a place where Jewish people can go if things get temporarily hot in their country. The Jewish people have been kicked out of all the middle eastern countries in the middle east, but took over Israel. They will not be kicked out of Israel. 

Trump likes strongmen, he likes North Korea, Russia, Hungary and Israel. At the moment, the right wing Jews in my neighborhood like the current regime. The left wing Jews don't like him, of course, but there is a woman who stands outside the voting who tells the orthodox Jewish people who to vote for. They're what you call a single issue voter, they follow closely who supports Israel the most, and then say to vote for them. She wanted me to vote for Cuomo, who I didn't even rank. I look Jewish, so she told me how to vote. If I wear my baseball cap to keep the sun out of my eyes, I'm covering my head, so I could be Jewish. 

She saw Mamdani as a Muslim monster because he's Muslim and because he's a democratic socialist. The bile that has come out of even Democrats mouths, is amazing. Yet a huge turnout in young voters, he won by the slimmest of margins--12 votes!

Now with Cuomo, Adams and Silwa splitting the right and center votes, Mamdani is ahead in the polls. The left is getting excited, maybe the revolution is really happening. The right is terrified of communism. I have a right wing friend who specializes in eastern european woman who hate communism. It's like the Cubans. They can drive on public roads, walk down public sidewalks, have the government take away garbage, and hate with a white hot passion doing collective good by the government. 

What they don't like is totalitarianism, authoritarianism, but they confuse the means of communists with the actual desire for public good. We should have health insurance already, but no, America has to be against that. 

I've digressed from Brook's story, but I'm describing the political reality on the grounds that I see. I see a retired bus driver who watches Fox news and thinks they're persecuting Trump, not holding him accountable to the rule of law. You can't talk to these people they're so brainwashed. Brooks purports to explain why these people are so befuddled and confused. They like authoritarianism, it tells them how to think in this confusing world. The loss of roles, the freedoms of the enlightenment have completely trashed the humans ability to think. Brooks quotes his hero Alasdair MacIntyre.

Some selected quotes from the article

"We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease."

"How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences."

"One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization."

We sort of see that playing out in the supreme court as they make up whatever suits the current regime. I used to think the court had precedence, and legal reasonsoning, but no more. 

"If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation."

"In the 1980s, the philosopher Allan Bloom wrote a book arguing that in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I’ll do me. None of it matters very much. This is what Kierkegaard called an aesthetic life: I make the choices that feel pleasant at the moment, and I just won’t think much about life’s ultimate concerns. As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”"

"Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal."

"Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: “MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”"

Read the article.

Here is his conclusion:

"Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it. We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind."

Trying to revive America 

Yikes

“Some Democrats, still gripped by the lure of wonkery, continue to scratch their heads over which policy proposals might have unlocked more votes, but that was always a mug’s game. Trump voters never cared about policies, and he rarely gave them any. (Choosing to be eaten by a shark rather than electrocuted might be a personal preference, but it’s not a policy.) His rallies involved long rants about the way he’s been treated, like a giant therapy session or a huge family gathering around a bellowing, impaired grandpa.” (Atlantic Written by Tom Nichols)

“Back in 2021, I wrote a book about the rise of “illiberal populism,” the self-destructive tendency in some nations that leads people to participate in democratic institutions such as voting while being hostile to democracy itself, casting ballots primarily to punish other people and to curtail everyone’s rights—even their own. These movements are sometimes led by fantastically wealthy faux populists who hoodwink gullible voters by promising to solve a litany of problems that always seem to involve money, immigrants, and minorities. The appeals from these charlatans resonate most not among the very poor, but among a bored, relatively well-off middle class, usually those who are deeply uncomfortable with racial and demographic changes in their own countries.”

“Trump, as he has shown repeatedly over the years, couldn’t care less about any of these groups. He ran for office to seize control of the apparatus of government and to evade judicial accountability for his previous actions as president. Once he is safe, he will embark on the other project he seems to truly care about: the destruction of the rule of law and any other impediments to enlarging his power.”

“An affluent society that thinks it is living in a hellscape is ripe for gulling by dictators who are willing to play along with such delusions.”

I'm starting to connect political thinking. I wrote about a book by Larry M. Bartels. It was called Democracy Erodes from the Top. 

I read that there was a spike in people googling "Why isn't Biden on the ticket?" or something like that to figure out how Harris was on the ticket. They missed that whole drama. I wish I had that good of a filter. I think Americans just tune out politicians and so they have to say something dramatic to get through to people. 

That almost makes me want to put forward John Stewart, or Stephen Colbert. I think it should also be a white guy with charisma. I was thinking that military guy, can't find his name now. But I'm already wondering how I can help defeat Vance in 2028.

I've been thinking a lot about Leslie Knope, the fictional character that Amy Poehler created. I think that's what these times call for, someone with a positive fairly pure heart grinding in local politics, past all the obstacles, and obstruction. I really like that show. There's the libertarian Ron Swanson. There's the young cynical negative April Ludgate. There's the health obsessed Rob Lowe character, who's name escapes me right now. It's filled with quirky characters, and I love that show. 

Given the above quotes, what is the press' role of trying to jolt the American populace into seeing their choices more clearly? Or should they just try to sell papers, clicks and engagement?