The Trumpian Role Reversal
How "left wing" thought emulates conservatives and how conservatives sound like liberals
The Trumpian Role Reversal
By
David Gottfried
Trump and his “left” opposition have changed places with each other.
I propose that Trumpians, in many ways, sound the way liberals sounded only a few years ago, and that anti Trumpians often sound like the conservatives of a few years ago.
First, let me state that I despise Donald Trump. He is not only a psychotic, as evidenced by his delusions of grandeur (consider his supremely loony tweet “I am a very stable genius”) but he is also psychopathic as he has no conscience as he boasts about his ability to shoot people at random on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
However, the arguments posed by the Left are not only dreary and dull but also sound like Willian Safire and Norman Podhoretz leftovers.
Trump’s belief in “Alternative Facts” is a reiteration of the post modernist theory posited by leftists in academia
First, anti trumpers have emphatically said that there is such a thing as the truth, and that there is only one truth which of course is what MSNBC has divined, and that the Trumpians believe in lies
However, don’t people on the left remember that not too long ago there was a field called post modernism which was virtually entirely left wing. The post modernists said that truth was eternally debatable and elastic and that the truth was simply what the dominant parties in society wanted you to believe. If we once believed that women had to be subordinate to men, we believed this so-called truth because men told us to believe it. Now, the Trumpians seem to be parroting the old theories of the post modernists. They tell us that if we believe in certain liberal theories it is because the leading lords and ladies of the Eastern Establishment and the bi coastal, bisexual media have told us to believe those liberal theories. The liberals, meanwhile, have the mien of utterly shocked dowagers who have seen porn, holding that the idea that truth can be up for debate heralds debauchery, degradation and social disintegration.
Valid Scientific Ideas are not Crystal Clear Concepts which are above debate
Liberals also seem hidebound when they talk about science. I can’t believe they believe what they are saying. They simply can’t be that stupid.
The liberals say that they support science, that science is as clear as sparkling water, that science is never debatable and that science is whatever the stodgy and supercilious pages of the New York Times say it is. I suppose it never occurred to them that a true scientist is not someone who bows to customary concepts or hoary superstition but rather someone who analyzes life through a powerful and merciless lens and doesn’t curtsy like a coward before stultifying convention. Very simply, the history of science shows that yesterday’s gold standard soon becomes dog shit. Once it was held that the sun revolved around the earth, once the bright men of medicine said there was no need for hand-washing because microscopic germs did not exist, once leeches were given to sick people and once the New York Times made it clear that homosexuals were disgustingly sick. I believe global warming is real, but really bright people may recall that in the Seventies a national news magazine, either Time or Newsweek, held that we were on the precipice of a new ice age. People have every right to be eternally skeptical.
FAKE NEWS. Anyone who remembers the Gulf of Tonkin incident or the kill counts from Vietnam knows that a lot of news is absolutely, positively fake.
We have also witnessed a great role reversal in our estimation of the FBI, CIA, the Defense Dept., the National Security Council etc. Trump has said that these people are often nuts. He says they are part of the deep state, that they lie all the time and made Russia the great bogeyman of our era. Meanwhile, liberal democrats sometimes seem like latter day John Birchers. They furiously intone, “how can anyone doubt the virtue and the validity of our intelligence services and their prophesies regarding the Russian Bear.”
Years ago, the left doubted what our security services said, and the left was absolutely correct. If you read Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, or the Pentagon Papers, you will learn that for years we thought we were winning the war in Vietnam because for years the military gave us grossly, extraordinarily inflated statistics of our progress. Very simply, men like Maxwell Taylor, General Harkins and so many others pulled numbers of kill counts out of the sky. Indeed, by 1963, shortly before he was assassinated, President Kennedy, according to Halberstam, could not believe what his military was telling him and said that if he wanted to find out what was going on in Vietnam he had to read a good newspaper. Of course, Kennedy had very good reasons to doubt his military experts from the start of his administration. They told him that the Bay of Pigs would be a cake walk.
RUSSIA AND TRUMP: In criticizing alleged American acquiescence to purported Russian aggressiveness, Liberals seem completely ignorant of the map of Europe: Since the Berlin Wall fell, the eastern boundary of Nato has advanced about one thousand miles to the East and Russia is justifiably alarmed.
Today’s liberals, in their hostility toward Russia, evince some of the stupidity that had been the preserve of the right in the last century.
Very simply, they cannot believe that Russian aggressiveness can be the result of anything other than congenital Russian nastiness. (Actually Western hostility to Russia can be traced back to Queen Elizabeth the First, but I won’t bore you with the clash of epistles between her and Tsar Ivan the Terrible)
This is because they know nothing of maps. They do not realize that the Eastern boundary of Nato has moved more than a thousand miles to the East, and closer to the heart of Russia, since the Berlin Wall fell. Once upon a time, Nato extended to the eastern border of West Germany. However, now Nato extends through what was East Germany, all of Poland, the Baltic States of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, all the way up to the gates of what some people call St. Petersberg and others will still call Petrograd or Leningrad. Nato has also absorbed other former Warsaw pact nations, or allies of Russia, further to the South. Russia has every right to be anxious about Western penetration, she has been penetrated before, and in the Thirties the Western Powers condoned and abetted Hitler’s drive to the East and that led to the slaughter of twenty million Russians. I don’t have the energy to do the math, but in World War Two Russia endured something on the order of many 9/11’s every day for three and one half years. But of course the simplistic news media just tell us that Russia is evil, pure evil.
Don’t cry for the Evitas of Eastern Europe
Meanwhile, the Ukraine is exalted as something angelic. Americans, often ignorant of European history, often imagine that every state between Germany and Russia was just a land of darling Babushkas who made different varieties of potato pancakes.
They do not understand that Nazism was not a German phenomenon; it smoldered throughout Europe. Rumania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Hungary, Finland, Vichy France, Italy and Croatia were all allied with Hitler. The Baltic States were crawling with Nazis. The Ukraine and Poland wanted to be Hitler’s obedient allies but Hitler did not want them because he considered them racially inferior because they were Slavs.
Also the idea that Russian interference in the Ukraine is warlike and wrong betrays even more ignorance of history. Yes, Russia took over Crimea in 2014, but Crimea is over 80 percent Russian and has been Russian for at least two centuries and was only given to the Ukraine in the 1950’s, but in the Fifties the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, which was dominated by Russia; hence Russia still controlled the Crimea even when it was, formally, a part of Ukraine. Yes, there are Russian forces in the Eastern Ukraine, but Eastern Ukrainians mostly follow the Eastern Orthodox Church as do Russians and are alienated from the Western Ukraine which is Roman Catholic.
If I am going through this too rapidly it is because there is no time to teach my fellow Americans, who study nothing but football and cheerleading in High School, and nothing but feminism and pseudo intellectual masturbation in college, European history.
In conclusion, let me reiterate that I detest Donald Trump. He has done many horrendous things to the economy and the environment and most people are unaware of his sins because we are too busy talking about the gossipy and frilly part of politics, Ivanka’s jewelry, his orange hair and other stuff that makes the liberal political discourse sound and feel like a women’s lounge.
I just wish the liberal opposition had a little bit more logic and intelligence instead of the sleek, urbane, polished and prissy manners that masquerade as sophistication.