Good article by Roger Cohen Friday:
"[Trump's] supporters, and there are tens of millions of them, never had illusions. I’ve not met one...who did not have a pretty clear picture of Trump. They’ve known all along that he’s a needy narcissist, a womanizer, a lowlife, a liar, a braggart and a generally miserable human being. That’s why the “Access Hollywood” tape or the I-could-shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue boast did not kill his candidacy.
"It’s...why the itch to believe that the moment has come when everything starts to unravel must be viewed warily.
"There’s a deeper question...Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did.(1) They came down to his level. White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality. They made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge. So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American today? Who are we, goddamit? What have we become?
"Trump was a symptom, not a cause. The problem is way deeper than him.
"...the insidious malignancy of Trump...will not be extirpated overnight."
All true, but not all of the truth. We analyze this as a domestic concern--"Americans elected Trump." "Who are we, goddamit?"--at our peril. We should not forget,
We
Were
Attacked
Russian dezinformatsiya influenced the Lowlifes. The 2016 campaign was so foreign to uninfluenced Americans that we did not recognize it as foreign, as Russian. Look at the way politics is practiced in Russia. Now look at how politics has been practiced in America since 2015. Trump's racist nationalist rhetoric was right out of the Russian political playbook. The plays were sent in to the Lowlifes by Bannon and Breitbart and Fox. It was hidden in plain sight from the rest of us who do not read or watch Breitbart and Fox. I did not know what Breitbart was until my-brother-the-klansman sent me one of their propaganda pieces as legitimate news. I got Breitbart confused with the Daily Beast. I had never heard of Steve Bannon. We, the Uninfluenced, missed the "dog whistles," they rang tinny in our ears but we didn't know at the time that it was Russian tin making that ring. We didn't understand the message. The Lowlifes, who had long been eagerly lapping up what they were now being spoon fed, got it. That tinny ring was music in their ears.
Putin and his disinformationists did their homework. They analyzed the American electorate with precision. The seeds of an authoritarian, racist, nationalist politics could not have found more fertile ground than in White America: the isolationist paranoia of the Declaration of Independence, the steady mutation of constitutional Republican democracy into mobocracy, the embedment of slavery in that same Constitution, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, Civil War, the paranoia-messianic type of the Great Awakenings, unreconstructed Reconstruction, the Klan, Jim Crow, the Dixiecrats, McCarthyism, The Authoritarian Personality, the Civil Rights movement, the Southern Strategy, the browning of America, culminating in the first "Blackish" POTUS. That is who we are goddamit. "The problem is way deeper than Trump" indeed! The roots run back to America's founding.
But I ask Roger Cohen and all diagnosticians of this "insidious malignancy" this: Given that that is who we are and always have been, why did the Catastrophe happen in 2016? The answer is:
We
Were
Attacked
"[Trump's] supporters, and there are tens of millions of them, never had illusions. I’ve not met one...who did not have a pretty clear picture of Trump. They’ve known all along that he’s a needy narcissist, a womanizer, a lowlife, a liar, a braggart and a generally miserable human being. That’s why the “Access Hollywood” tape or the I-could-shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue boast did not kill his candidacy.
"It’s...why the itch to believe that the moment has come when everything starts to unravel must be viewed warily.
"There’s a deeper question...Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did.(1) They came down to his level. White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality. They made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge. So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American today? Who are we, goddamit? What have we become?
"Trump was a symptom, not a cause. The problem is way deeper than him.
"...the insidious malignancy of Trump...will not be extirpated overnight."
All true, but not all of the truth. We analyze this as a domestic concern--"Americans elected Trump." "Who are we, goddamit?"--at our peril. We should not forget,
We
Were
Attacked
Russian dezinformatsiya influenced the Lowlifes. The 2016 campaign was so foreign to uninfluenced Americans that we did not recognize it as foreign, as Russian. Look at the way politics is practiced in Russia. Now look at how politics has been practiced in America since 2015. Trump's racist nationalist rhetoric was right out of the Russian political playbook. The plays were sent in to the Lowlifes by Bannon and Breitbart and Fox. It was hidden in plain sight from the rest of us who do not read or watch Breitbart and Fox. I did not know what Breitbart was until my-brother-the-klansman sent me one of their propaganda pieces as legitimate news. I got Breitbart confused with the Daily Beast. I had never heard of Steve Bannon. We, the Uninfluenced, missed the "dog whistles," they rang tinny in our ears but we didn't know at the time that it was Russian tin making that ring. We didn't understand the message. The Lowlifes, who had long been eagerly lapping up what they were now being spoon fed, got it. That tinny ring was music in their ears.
Putin and his disinformationists did their homework. They analyzed the American electorate with precision. The seeds of an authoritarian, racist, nationalist politics could not have found more fertile ground than in White America: the isolationist paranoia of the Declaration of Independence, the steady mutation of constitutional Republican democracy into mobocracy, the embedment of slavery in that same Constitution, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, Civil War, the paranoia-messianic type of the Great Awakenings, unreconstructed Reconstruction, the Klan, Jim Crow, the Dixiecrats, McCarthyism, The Authoritarian Personality, the Civil Rights movement, the Southern Strategy, the browning of America, culminating in the first "Blackish" POTUS. That is who we are goddamit. "The problem is way deeper than Trump" indeed! The roots run back to America's founding.
But I ask Roger Cohen and all diagnosticians of this "insidious malignancy" this: Given that that is who we are and always have been, why did the Catastrophe happen in 2016? The answer is:
We
Were
Attacked
