July 18, 2019
By Jonathan M. Feldman
Donald Trump’s formula for success is to combine “refractions of truth” with lies. The dogmatic left only says that he “lies.” That is too obvious for comment, but some fetishize this fact. That’s #sad. What is a “refraction of truth”? It is a discourse that looks like the truth, a kind of ersatz truth, it is not the truth but has resemblances to it and sounds like it, but it is swimming in a sea of lies. The most effective propaganda has elements of truth as the wisest persons have explained to me and as I have read in the work of the leading scholars on propaganda. But, no, the Left will not have that because they believe that they have a monopoly on the truth, which they do not. The idea that the Left cannot make mistakes and represents a kind of singular truth comes from the influence of a bastardized version of Christianity and a similarly bastardized version of Marxism.
If Donald Trump really were an empowered fascist, as opposed to a fascist-leaning politician, he would not be operating with a parliamentary opposition, there would be police or military raids on The New York Times, and dissenters would be arrested (rather than simply ridiculed). The Left wants to demonize Trump in part because he is powerful and they are weak. There is no need to demonize someone who is already a demon. That’s overkill in my book.
Rather than demonize Trump, the key project should be to get rid of him. So I salute the gang of four who said that responding to Trump in a certain way would simply displace the messages needed. Yet, using profanities against Trump and deploying the language of “concentration camp” certainly provided Trump with ammunition. Another thing that does this is the word “socialism” which after all is so ambiguous and so maligned as to have very little effective meaning. Political, economic and media democracy have far more meaning and are very hard to demonize.
Trump controls much of the news cycle and the left does not. The best way to defeat Trump is to show that he is weakening the United States, has not sufficiently promoted wealth and the country’s ability to compete in strategic industries and to raise key questions about healthcare and other maladies that weaken peoples’ standard of living and sense of security. There is no doubt that the planet is heading towards ecocide, but not getting rid of Trump is going to accelerate that trajectory. If the enlightened aristocracy which influences the global norms was serious, they would organize a global telethon to raise a billion dollars to purchase advertising throughout the U.S. that exposed all of Trump’s economic failures, the area on which many an election turns.
To defeat Trump, simply recycling messages that Left people want to hear rather than winning over a fraction of Trump voters is the necessity. That is basically a truism connected to the electoral college (a kind of throwback to the days of slavery and monarchy but nevertheless a reality that won’t be gone soon). The truism violates the training and indoctrination many have received by self-selected reading, social bubbles, indoctrination by the university system, and the like. The lack of empathy for a fraction of the voters Trump won is part of a kind of professional-managerial conceit which many persons marginalized and hurt by Trump do not share. Many persons will not vote for a Democrat who they believe will lose to Trump. Of course, this logic led to the disastrous nomination of Hillary Clinton, one of the worst candidates in Democratic Party history who nevertheless got a popular majority but lost to a shrewd and unethical snake oil salesman. Nevertheless, there is something logical about this logic, i.e. the idea that symbolic victories are not real victories.
A politics defined by feeling good rather than winning is a disaster that will entice many, very much like the Faustian bargain and pacts with the devil that have shaped the course of history. I have no doubt, however, that more radical Democrats actually have a better chance at winning the presidency if they attune their messages correctly.
Basically, by ceding Trump the nationalist card, the Left has made a tremendous mistake. Elizabeth Warren, by linking economics and a newly defined patriotism is on the right track as is Sanders in many of his approaches. Sanders needs to study manufacturing, the economic base, and green transformation more thoroughly, however. He should be touring factories and factory towns and identifying the ones that Trump failed to save.
The limits to certain forms of New Left discourse, identity politics and the like can be studied in great detail here: https://www.globalteachin.com/…/the-final-stages-of-new-left…. This kind of discourse will empower the right over and over.
