DONALD TRUMP’S DEBT TO THE NEW LEFT

DONALD TRUMP’S DEBT TO THE NEW LEFT

By

David Gottfried

Donald Trump, and the Tea Party which spawned him, exhibit the same disordered thought that afflicted the New Left of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The New Left concocted ways of thinking which liberated it from logic and gave us a laugh. Donald Trump and his antecedents in the Tea Party have also shredded logical thinking, and they have given us a potpourri of perverse thought and patent paranoia. First, I will review some of the more outlandish examples of New Left cognition:

In the Sixties, the Left had many valid complaints, but they complained about things in a very stupid way and their stupidity led to the backlash that eventually gave us Ronald Reagan. The first manifestation of this disorder that comes to mind was a poetry reading on a radical radio station in New York City known as WBAI. In the poetry reading, people expressed their thoughts regarding a teacher’s strike featuring black parents blaming Jewish teachers for their children’s failure to learn to read. One girl read a poem regarding the Jewish President of the Teacher’s Union. It went like this: “Hey you Jewboy, with that yamaka on your head, oh how I wish you would drop dead.”

The looniness of the left came into full bloom with the poet Allen Ginsburg, who, during the course of a demonstration at the Pentagon, against the Vietnam War, claimed that he would use mystical incantations and Eastern spirituality to levitate the building. Needless to say, the building stayed put and people kept dying in Vietnam, and this decadent, Western version of Leftist politics kept the Left weak and muted. When I was in college, I liked Allen Ginsburg because I was told, by my professors, that he was brilliant and radical. However, the more I read Allen Ginsburg, the more I found him wanting. In one of his poems, he had a line – which had nothing to do with any of the lines which preceded it -- which said, “I want to suck the cocks of the Grandfathers of Iowa.” And then it hit me: Ginsburg doesn’t really want to spur the left to success or to express art. He is really trying to say: Look at me. I am such a sick little faggot. Isn’t my revolution funny. As such, his vision of a gay revolution was a failure. He was like one of those gay men, in the Pre-AIDS era, who thought that each additional sexually transmitted disease was a political statement or a mark of rebellion against the machine. He would never have dreamed of fighting for gay marriage.

The unfocussed style of New Left cognition gave us the purple prose of the intelligentsia which saw physical disease lurking behind politics they frowned upon. Susan Sontag shouted out, in 1968, that the white race was the cancer of human history. (Like Norman Podhoretz on the right, she was always very adept at crafting comments which were in sync with the reigning political orthodoxy. In 1981, after Reagan was elected, she made a sharp turn to the right.) Undoubtedly, white people have been responsible for a tremendous amount of tragedy and butchery, but are we really the only bad guys on the planet? What about the Golden Horde of Genghis Khan; he did not exactly offer sweetness and light. What about the Mamelukes of Egypt, or the Barbary Pirates of North Africa, who periodically kidnapped Christians from Europe and made them slaves at the mercy of Muslim masters. I suppose Sontag, ever aspiring to be the chicest intellectual bitch on the block, knew that a fair discussion of man’s warlike impulses wouldn’t go over well with the understandably febrile left of 1968. Also, Sontag, in claiming that white racism was a cancer, violated the injunction, she promulgated in “Illness as Metaphor,” that we should not liken social and political problems to physical disease.

The new left also had a lot of fun at a cabaret called Mc McCarthy’s. Elated by anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy’s success in the New Hampshire primary, a group of affluent liberals established a club, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, named after their groovy candidate, where they could drink all night. Obviously, it was a lot more fun to get drunk at a club than to campaign in a primary state far from New York. This class of people, for the most part, were not affected by the Vietnam War they claimed to ardently oppose; most of them were too old for the War, and if they had children, those kids were in college, which entitled them to a student deferment. (Outside of the South, the only white people who fought were poor white people.) For these wealthy parasites, the revolution of the sixties was a phenomenon bearing fun, and their alleged political rage was, in large measure, a way of having fun and making believe that they were tough.

The flight from logic was even more pronounced among the tea party and its successor movement of slavish followers of Donald Trump. Although the New Left made many zany comments, its policy proposals – end Imperialism, aid the poor, free young people from conformity and sexual repression – were largely consistent. However, the Tea Party and the Trumpians had absolutely no idea what they were saying.

The tea party’s biggest complaint was the federal deficit. Of course, none of the ignoramuses in the tea party could explain how they were personally aggrieved by the debt, and they certainly were merrily oblivious to the sage pronouncements of John Maynard Keynes who explained why federal deficits, at certain times, were good for the economy. When the tea party followers morphed into slaves of Donald Trump, they were not the least bit worried about the enormous budget deficits created by Trump’s reckless tax cuts for the super-rich. Actually, I would wager good money that Trumpians, who were wholly complacent about the ballooning federal deficit, had no memory of their strident opposition to the much smaller deficit of the Obama years. But as I said, logic is not their forte. Rather, their political feelings are storms of sheer emotion, incited by the maestro of their minds, Donald Trump. They have no coherent political ideas; they have only gusts of hate and hysteria.

Trumpian lapses in logic go far beyond inconsistency in public policy. Often, the ideas of Trumpians are surely the rantings of people confined to asylums for the mentally ill. In fact, they are crazier than most mentally ill people. The garden variety paranoid schizophrenic usually does not harbor elaborate delusions that anarchically throw together disparate facts regarding politics, sex and blood into make believe monsters that will eat your children. Ordinary schizophrenics simply are convinced that people are out to get them. But the Trumpians are no ordinary schizophrenics.

The Qanon madmen, you probably know, believe that leading democrats, and celebrities, capture children to satisfy their pedophilia. They also got it into their tiny little warped minds that the children are held captive in the basement of a pizzeria in Washington DC. (The culpability of a pizza parlor was established because someone said, in Hillary Clinton’s Podesta e mails, that he wanted to go out for pizza. How can anyone but a person fulminating with malignant psychotic disease believe that a desire to eat pizza translates into a belief that a certain Washington DC pizza parlor is filled with child sex slaves ?) Since Hillary Clinton is the demonic dominatrix and queen bee who rules the world – and is ready to plunge her stinger into one’s penis – some Q anon loons believe that Hillary sucks the blood of the child sex slaves.

And let’s not forget their garbage can of delusions regarding covid 19.

Although the psychotic reasoning of Trumpians resembles the reasoning of the more colorful components of the New left, the resemblance ends there.

First, the New Left proffered very cogent criticisms of our dastardly policies in Southeast Asia, exploitive hyper-capitalism and racism. The tea party and the Trumpians. by contrast, are just a more malignant and updated version of Archie Bunker.

Second, the New Left was, in many ways, politically impotent. The Trumpians are politically deadly and captured the Whitehouse in 2016.

Recently, on youtube, I witnessed an episode of “Firing line,” a program hosted by the arch conservative William Buckley, in which Allen Ginsburg was a guest. Buckley felt free to give Ginsberg airtime because he knew Ginsberg was no threat to the social and political order. He was just a fey, frivolous fairy who would only make radicalism look that much more ridiculous and ultimately more unpopular and doomed to failure.

Actually, many of the agents of the New Left probably knew that some of what they said was nonsense. Perhaps, they only said the most outlandish things to get media attention, which they would not have gotten with a sober piece of advocacy for the left-wing position. Through their nuttiness, they used the media. However, the media got the last laugh. The irrational reasoning of the left made them look stupid and ultimately buried them. The Trumpians, by contrast, appear to believe their lies and have claimed the citadel of American power. Hopefully, they will be vanquished in a few days when America votes, but their loss of the Whitehouse won’t stop their rampages of wrath through the wintry, Covid-blighted American night.