Trump: The Caricature

Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, what do you know about the presumptive Republican Presidential candidate, Donald Trump?

AM:  Well, according to our noble and objective mainstream media, Trump is corrupt because of four bankruptcies and infidelities resulting in three marriages; he is a racist because he suggests a Mexican judge might be biased against him in a class action civil suit; and he’s a misogynist because he has said ugly things about Rosie O’Donnell in the past.

IM:   And don’t forget that his rallies are characterized by angry protests.

Old Gadfly:  What do we know about the bankruptcies?

AM:  The bankruptcies were corporate filings, not personal filings.

Old Gadfly:  Is the distinction important?

AM:  Absolutely.  A personal filing would indicate that an individual failed to manage his or her personal finances, such that debt far exceeded revenue (sound like the federal government?).  The major reason liberal democracies have bankruptcy laws is to incentivize business development.  Such actions involve risk, and investors know this.  When a corporation files for bankruptcy a judge examines all the circumstances and works out reorganization arrangements and a just settlement among the stakeholders.  America would not be the most powerful economy in the world without bankruptcy laws.

Old Gadfly:  What do we know about the marriages?

AM:  He’s on good terms with his former wives.  Yet, the media will find all sorts of ways to paint an ugly picture.  A recent GQ interview/article was very subtle in painting a demeaning picture of Melania Trump, a legal immigrant, now US citizen.  Somehow the article missed the fact that Melania has a degree in architecture and is fluent in five languages.  But, on the other hand, the author went to great lengths to uncover “dirt” on Melania’s family from Slovenia.  I wonder if the author would be as thorough on Hillary Clinton’s knowable background.

IM:  And then those who resented the picture painted by the GQ author were called Trump-following neo-Nazis.  The name callers (from such notable sources as the Daily Koz and The Huffington Post) just leaped at the imagined racism because the GQ author is Jewish.  In other words, here is the implied logic:  readers are critical of the GQ author, not because it was a sleazy hit piece, but because she is Jewish.  Those that do not like Jews are anti-Semitic.  Nazis were anti-Semitic.  Therefore, those who criticized the author are neo-Nazis.  Sadly, fellow Copernican drones, who patronize these notable sources, latch on to the manufactured Trump follower neo-Nazi meme.

Old Gadfly:  How about the judge?

AM:  To think the judge is not biased is naïve.  He was nominated to his current position by President Obama.  Consider Elena Kagan, a relatively new Supreme Court Justice, nominated by President Obama.  She served as Solicitor General prior to this appointment.  Remember the birth certificate challenges?  Three of these challenges reached the US Supreme Court.  Kagan played a role getting all three of these cases dismissed.  See here, here, and here.   She was also apparently involved in defending Obamacare through her Solicitor General office (see for example here).  Yet, as a US Supreme Court Justice, she refused to recuse herself from cases dealing with Obamacare.  Pat Buchanan recently analyzed the hypocrisy on racism related to this case.  See here.

IM:    Gentlemen, I know that both of you are graduates of the USAF Academy.  I noticed a recent Atlantic Monthly article that celebrated the institution’s effort to manage diversity.  From reading this article, I learned that the Academy cadets were guided through diversity discussions related to the Ferguson—Black Lives Matter episode by a think tank called Knapsack Institute, affiliated with the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs.  Here is an excerpt from their website:

The name, “The Knapsack Institute” hails from Peggy McIntosh’s renowned article, "White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies,” in which she states:   

"I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was 'meant' to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear, and blank checks." (Peggy McIntosh, 1988 "White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies." Excerpted from Working Paper 189, Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley, MA.)

Old Gadfly:  Of course this is what many Americans are being taught to believe (even at our character building institutions).  This is why social justice is the moral imperative of the progressive community:  to “equalize” through socially constructed identities.  Isn’t this a similar socially constructed phenomenon harking back to the Third Reich?  The protest rallies then are similar to those we see today—Copernican drones hitching their emotional wagons to the charlatans promising hope and change.  Incidentally, Hillary Clinton and Peggy McIntosh are both alumni from Wellesley College.  And, Clinton’s passion for social justice, and the need to identify “opponents,” was documented in her senior thesis, "There Is Only the Fight ,” an analysis of the Saul Alinsky Model.  The goal of Alinsky’s model is political power.   

AM:  Most of the public only knows what an aggressive and biased media wants us to know.  Gadfly, recall that in our philosophy course at the Academy, we learned amazingly, in The Republic, that Plato offered an explanation for this progressive behavior in Socrates’ cave allegory.  The public represents slaves chained to the illusions created by the political elite (the media, Hollywood, academia, and government bureaucracies as puppet showmen creating the images tied to the illusions).

 

IM:  Other chains are the variety of public welfare programs, aggravated by a labor participation rate trend that highly corresponds with Obamacare.  Notice the steep decline in the labor participation rate aligns with the implementation of Obamacare.

Old Gadfly:  Only by breaking away from these chains and climbing out of the cave into sunlight can these slaves become liberated by truth.  In reality this is the moral imperative of education—to draw out of each of us the desire for the discernment of truth made possible through the capacity to critically think and to overcome passion and emotion with reason.  Given this imperative, what can we learn about the real Trump?

IM:  I suspect there is much we could and should learn.  Wouldn’t it be ideal for the people, especially those chained to their illusions, such as the notion of white privilege, to keep an open mind in collecting triangulated information to arrive at a reasoned judgment?

Old Gadfly:  Yes it would be ideal.  Getting back to caricatures, what do we know about the misogyny allegations?

AM:  If one has been sufficiently conditioned[1] through political correctness, then it is forbidden to say anything that might be construed as hateful toward a protected class (women are a protected class).  As we witnessed in the Presidential primaries, Trump does not pull punches against women or men.  Regarding pejorative comments toward men, the conditioned believe they represent crassness and a lack of elitist nuance.  Similar comments directed towards women are misogyny.

Old Gadfly:  As modern as our civilization might be, Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek observed (the same year McIntosh published her article cited above) that “mind is not a guide but a product of cultural evolution, and is based more on imitation than on insight or reason.”[2]  This is why manufactured caricatures are so powerful.  Do you remember President Obama’s response to reporters following the first presidential debate, in which Mitt Romney decisively won?  He said, “That was not the real Romney!”  The message here from the puppet showmen is that the Romney we were supposed to believe in was the Romney we have been manufacturing in the public narrative—a wealthy white man who is out of touch with the ordinary American.  To demonstrate how this approach was so successful, there was no public outrage when Harry Reid acknowledged he lied about Romney not paying taxes for 10 years.  Nor, was there any shame by Reid—to the contrary, he boasted, “we won, didn’t we?”

AM:  Our culture has surely evolved since the day we ascended the Academy ramp with the “Bring Me Men . . .” inspiration from Sam Walter Foss’s The Coming American.

Old Gadfly:  Perhaps we’re still searching to understand this evolution and its consequences.  After all, the noted political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, argued a compelling case about America’s decay.  He suggested that a shock is needed to reverse America’s decline. 

IM:  Frankly, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton represent and embrace the conditions leading to the decline—that is, there is ample evidence that they can morally overcome the evils of white male privilege. 

AM:  Is Trump the needed shock?  Are enough Americans ready to embrace such a shock? 

Old Gadfly:  Or, as Jefferson observed in the Declaration of Independence, “experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”  These forms are the softer forms of tyranny, where the elite regulate the masses.  It helps to make this tyranny sufferable when more and more Americans find themselves dependent upon government subsidies—that is, welfare payments made possible by redistributing wealth.

IM:  Venezuelan citizens have reached the insufferable threshold based on this model of governance; but, too many “conditioned” Americans will not associate these circumstances with the socialist “hope and change” promised by Hugo Chavez, and similar promises made by President Obama, and candidates Sanders and Clinton.

Old Gadfly:  Unfortunately, the public narrative caricatures of Sanders and Clinton, manufactured by the political elite puppet showmen, are more flattering.  The American public may need more shock to loosen the chains.   

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[1] Conditioned refers to the two classes—the conditioners and the conditioned—described by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man.

[2] F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit:  The Errors of Socialism, (Chicago, IL:  The University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 21.