Same tradition, different groups…
This Comment of the Day alerted me to a despicable aspect of national polarization being sent into hyper-drive by the web. It concludes, “It’s terrible,” and I agree.
I was just defriended by someone else on Facebook. I know why. I’ve been pointing out and dissecting the repetitive anti-Trump derangement when it turns up on my timeline. As usual, however, whoever this was didn’t have the guts and common courtesy to tell me that he or she was metaphorically slapping me in the face. Others, equally cowardly, just block my posts from their feed, or me from seeing theirs. Such individuals voluntarily create a bubble and actively seek to close off their minds. They should be ashamed of themselves, and when I get the chance, I’ll tell them so.
Here is Jeff Valentine’s Comment of the Day from the weekend’s Open Forum. It depressed me so much that I took this long to read it again. If you want to end up with a nation of armed camps, this is the way to do it.
Jack recently wrote about the tipping point where he may need to vote for Trump based on the Democrat’s various vile decisions.
I read it and wondered aloud, “What the Hell took you so long, Jack.” I was there within a year after the last election.
They really have disgusted me for the last three years.
It gets, actually, significantly worse. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere- my marriage fell apart. I am a full time custodial Dad, so I, out of necessity, use the awful apps for dating- Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Facebook Match. The number of women (and possibly men too- I don’t play for both teams as they say)- who say things like “Swipe left if you voted for Trump” or “Trumpsters Get Lost” or “Republicans need not apply” would appall you.
I always accommodate them. (Except one time- and she was gorgeous and I was feeling low that night- DON’T JUDGE ME! Okay, you can judge me. I felt sick about it after. These are BAD people). Really, the way this has permeated to the mundane and every day life is terrifying. Notably, I have yet to see a single conservative say “If you voted for Hilary, swipe left.” The worst I have seen is “If you’re a snowflake who doesn’t support the police, swipe left.” And I only saw that once. I would say the “swipe left for Trump” happens about ten percent of the time. It’s pretty scary. And incredibly arrogant. And sickening. And it’s bad for America.
Well, they have turned this life long moderate into a life-long conservative. So, they’re doing a good job, I guess.
It’s absolutely terrible.
Ethics Alarms 
Of course, I reached the tipping point many years ago.
Nice to have company here in the hinterlands.
Congrats on the COTD!
Oh, it’s the men too. Believe me.
I can believe that. A very good friend from high school, arguably my best friend from high school, has gone so loony anti-Trump (to the point of being pro-Iranian mullahs(!) when given the choice between them and Trump), I blocked receiving his facebook posts. He’s a former Navy pilot and instructor and airline pilot. I think he considers himself part of the knowledged elite that is being attacked by an idiotic doofus. He’s outraged. I’m amazed Jack engages with these sorts of people. In any event, yes, I completely agree, there are tons of out of their mind guys running around.
Can confirm that you do see those type of descriptions on dating apps. They always make me chuckle of how ridiculous they are. When I’m bored, I should respond to one such person and ask them if this exclusion is part of the peace, love, tolerance and diversity that they oh so preach. That will make me chuckle as well.
No Trumpsters need apply! Yes I’ve seen this before. Usually it goes with women who describe themselves as hopelessly romantic and interested in romantic getaways.
Man, that’s frightening. A significant part of the country, particularly single women, are so self-absorbed that they can’t even tolerate the least divergence from their views, even in a date.
When I was dating, the question of politics never came up. Ever. All the women I dated or were in relationships with never once mentioned politics, even during election time, and not one of them ever voted that I know of. I never seriously discussed politics with a woman in my life until I was married.
Times have changed. For the worse. Much, much worse.
The prejudice, or the ‘preference’, of someone who does not want to associate with a ‘Republican’ or a Trump-liker, is not the same as ethnic prejudice. You could argue that ethnic prejudice is genuinely unfair. You could not make the case, given what is at stake, that anti-Trump prejudice, for those who have it, is not fully rational and from their perspective necessary.
Depending on who is making the analysis, Trump is interpreted in different ways. No one on this blog, as I have seen it, has an *accurate assessment* of who and what Trump is and why a segment of the Establishment is so opposed to him, and why he is such a polarizing figure. If I say ‘no one accurately assesses him’ it is not an insult. It is that on the whole you-plural have a very queer, a very incomplete understanding, of what is going on in America. Your idealism keeps you from *accurate seeing*. You cannot see the whole picture. You definitely will not to see the full picture of the dissident position. You remain in a translucent foggy middle. It’s like eyeglasses that only allow you to see 5 feet in front. After that, all is fuzzy.
What Trump represents is a white underclass and ‘the American worker’ who is being replaced. These are people who have had subtracted from them the critical capacity to *see* and analyze their situation. They do not have the conceptual skill to *see* the whole picture. Honestly, they could not be relied on to say ‘what is happening to them’ and why. Yet they feel it, and they live it.
They have been dumbed-down. They witness, they experience, the life-blood being sucked from them by parasitical structures that have been established and largely wielded against them by a (often) ‘Republican’ establishment (Steve Bannon speaks, very directly, about this). This is an aspect<of The Swamp. Trump was elected, in a fluke, but a demographic that is on its way out and are ‘replaced’. This is the meaning of the work The Dispossessed Majority. (Yes, yes, I know: unthinkable thought).
Those who perpetrate this are ‘perpetrators-collaborators’ in a very ugly, and a very cynical process. But there is not one among *you* who sees it, names it, and takes some sort of stand against it. Why? Because your ‘America’ is a ‘propositional America’. America is an ‘idea’. Thus, you could technically ‘replace’ all those whose fathers made America with other, undifferentiated human matter, and they could replace everyone, like a small outsourced cog fitting into the machinery of the nation. [In fact though, ‘Americanism’ has been substantially erased and even rewritten, but that is another topic.]
Just as there is a Great Replacement (Renaud Camus writes about it) going on in France — and his argument is thoroughly coherent and is not *racist* in any degree, it is elegant , clear and refined — a similar and related process is taking place in America. If you are white, your ‘whiteness’ is under attack. And you do not have the conceptual tools to defend yourselves, and so you don’t. You can’t really. Why? You cannot bring yourself to *see* in accurate terms. You certainly could not come out and say it. (You’d be crushed). You fib to yourself — elaborate self-deception with a strange psychological underpinning, is the way I understand it — and you sort of intellectually beguile others to keep them from seeing truthfully, accurately (Steve Witherspoon is the most obvious example of this: a pure instance).
So, turning back to the matter at hand. Do you really think it improper if a person makes it clear that they want nothing to do with someone associated with Trump and deplorablism? What ‘deplorable’ meant is someone from the white working class: a forgotten class for whom the NYTs has only surly contempt. That is 99% of those who mass to his rallies. [Where they are (in my opinion) rather beguiled by a Trickster since Trump cannot be trusted].
If you take the side of Trump, and of ‘the Republicans’, you are taking the side of the losing end of American history as America is morphed. A sort of approaching twilight. Trump embodies the wounded American in many ways. He does not know himself. He is not articulate. He fights against his self and tears his self up. He is a strangely tragical figure: like the white working class of Americans who are being and will continue to be pushed out and down. You must understand this in a larger context: by studying Europe and the same ‘collaborator-perpetrators’ that are creating a different, but a parallel, outcome there. It is an outcome of a bizarre turn in liberalism. Camus speaks of the shift gaining momentum in the 1970s. And then the ideology perfected itself insidiously.
You make it seem as if people are positing their dislike of ‘plaid’ or a certain color, or perhaps an eating establishment or a hair-style, and on that basis do not want such people ‘to apply’. That would be ridiculous. But this is very different. This is truly consequential.
I would argue that if Trump could really be Trump, if Trump really understood himself, that he would see things more as I am explaining them. I think though that many do *see* Trump as he cannot see himself (for example Coulter or Buchanan — and these are not indecent people by any means, but they are not collaborators and perpetrators of dispossession, and refuse to go willingly down). And those on the maniacal and drunk Progressive Left — the democratic swell — definitely see Trump for what he is: that class that they wish to see disappear and to be disempowered. They state that openly. It is all plain and clear.
::: sigh :::