Slate's Trump Apocalypse Watch. is at 2.5 horseman today, after some scarier polls showing a close race between the front runners.
Why/How is this happening? Andrew Sullivan's first piece for the New York Magazine is an ambitious, fantastic swipe at the state of American democracy and the potential of Trump. America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny -- NYMag "For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right.... In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such."
For Sullivan, "Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato". This however has been lost in recent decades and years as the good of more open communication and the plurality of opinions has come with the bad of people more comfortable expressing and sticking to the extreme positions. "What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form....And what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness."
We then have coming into this a man with the ego to match, and who has managed to continuously succeed in public perception despite his many mistakes in life. Indeed, "When people see themselves as self-made, they tend to be less generous and public-spirited." (Luck Is a Bigger Contributor to Success Than People Give It Credit For - The Atlantic) This is the fallacy of the benevolent American self made man in general, and ironic that the poor, generally white, guy supports such a great example of it.
Sullivan then makes even scarier arguments on the evolution of mass movements to clearly highlight the facist and Nazi parallels. "Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible....But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred."
So, is there nothing to stop this train? Well, before getting too depressed about the political future of these great and special United States, let's take the other point of view that this is a reality TV star who is going to demonstrate that there are actually limits to this trend in modern culture.
Stephen Colbert mourns the Donald Trump apocalypse: “This year’s Republican convention will be the series finale of America” - Salon.com: "An unnamed Trump “campaign source” recently told Politico, “Announcing the vice-presidential nominee before the convention is like announcing the winner of ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ before the final show is on the air.” “It’s an apt metaphor,” Colbert added. “Because this year’s Republican convention will be the series finale of America.”"
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