Trump: The Radical Academic behind the Victorian Scold.
The Great Political Role Reversal Between Trump and His Liberal Opposition.
By David Gottfried
The political fashionistas of the bisexual, bicoastal chattering classes routinely deride Trump supporters as anti-intellectual, primitive, and probably as illiterate as the Clampett’s, a hillbilly family that dined on possum stew and squirrel within the olfactory reach of the blue bloods of Los Angeles County.
However, odd and ironic as it may seem, many Trump supporters sound like the Leftists of a few decades ago, and many of Today’s leftists sound as insufferably strait-laced as crew-cutted young republicans at a mediocre Midwest University circa 1966.
The Trumpers, and the satellite Trumpers in league with RFK, Jr., have a hippie, romantic, disposition that decries “science,” order, logic and regimentation. Meanwhile, many of today’s liberals exalt and deify “science” with all the religious vehemence of ancient Carthaginians bowing down to the idols which told them to stone four years olds to ensure a good harvest.
I am all for science, but science does not mean blind adherence to the reigning dogmas of today. Very simply, science, like morals, is up for debate. Of course, some things seem fairly incontestable, such as the notion that water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. But most issues, which science passes judgments on, are not that easy to pin down. For example, prior to 1969, medicine and psychiatry in this country stood in
Stalinoid certainty that homosexuality was rank and rabid pathology. Today, homosexuality is considered as healthy and as wholesome as Pete Buttigieg riding his bicycle. In a decade or two, after the inexorable Hegelian dialectic 1 does its dirty work, the cops might close gay bars.
Indeed, there was a time when scientists recognized the stark limitations of science. For example, several decades ago the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle was turning scientific determinists into loud and fiery existentialists as it suggested that we can't use science to predict future events.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle holds that whenever we measure something, we change that very thing we just measured. Ergo, we can’t predict future events just by taking copious measurements because each measurement changes what we sought to measure. (For example, if I get on scale to weigh myself, I burn up energy and hence lose weight. However, in all honesty this example seems like bullshit to me because the amount of weight we will lose while surmounting a scale seems so ridiculously slight.)
Although science has as many doubts and perplexities as TS Elliot’s Poetry, today’s liberals seem to think that science is as constant and wonderfully unambiguous as a clergyman’s unequivocal assertion that Jonah, after having been swallowed by a big fish, came out of the fish alive and ready to tell the church ladies all about it over sweet potato pie and lemonade.
Liberals tell us that science is infallible as science presently tells us that global warming is real. However, liberals conveniently forget that so many scientists subscribed to an antithetical prognosis in the Mid Seventies when either Time or Newsweek bore a front-page headline warning of an imminent ice age.
The same sort of role reversal has taken place with respect to post Modernism.
A couple of decades ago, Leftist academics decried and lampooned the idea that truth is universal and constant; they argued that truth was whatever people in power say is true. At the same time, conservatives, like dour Presbyterian ministers, abhorred the idea that truth and falsehood were malleable, interchangeable playthings of one’s ideological imagination.
But then Trump came along and made post modernism his reigning religion. I will never forget when Trump’s loyal lieutenant, Kellyanne Conway, said that we ought to consider alternative facts.
And so while Democrats say Russia attacked Ukraine, Trump, as creative as a snot-nosed radical student in Columbia in 2005, will tell us, with a straight face, that Ukraine attacked Russia.
I am not a supporter of Trump; indeed, in many of my posts I have likened him to Il Duce, to Der Fuhrer, utter furiousness in human form. However, for various reasons, I have overdosed on conventional, prime time, liberalism, which seems as insipid, mindless and monotonous as highly processed pseudo cheese chock full of carcinogens.
Very simply, I miss the liberalism that once had a heartening, humane suspicion of science and progress. That suspicion went like this:
Science has often made Life a Scabrous Beast
Do you remember Thalidomide
In the 1950’s when Science was as beloved by America as Mother Mary, we coined the adage better living through chemistry. Sometimes we seemed to reason that any new thing had to be good. And so doctors fabricated Thalidomide, designed to free expectant Mothers from morning sickness. The drug was notorious for causing miserable, grievous birth defects.
I knew a “Thalidomide baby” when he was 50. He told me that starting at age 4 he wept inconsolably, every night, over the horror of being alive. After he was fully grown, and over five feet, ten inches in height, his wrists were no more than four inches from his shoulders.
Birth Control and Estrogenic Poisoning
We thought that birth control would save us from over population, and birth control pills, which often contained derivatives of estrogen, were widely used. The increase in female hormones in the environment has lowered male hormone levels and sperm counts in men, increased gynecomastia (man tits) in men, created fish in the Midwest which are unable to reproduce, and could be responsible for an increase in homosexuality and transgenderism. And don’t accuse me of homophobia. I am gay.
When a Madman Like Robert Kennedy Jr. might be right and it might be a bad idea to fight disease
We thought that it was always a good idea to fight disease, except that we forgot that when a body does not fight its own battles, it loses the ability to fight. For example, about ten years ago, a study showed that children from large families were less apt to suffer cancer than children from small families. When a child has plenty of siblings, he is constantly bombarded with the viral ailments that so often afflict children. The more viruses the tot encounters, the more antibodies his immune system will possess to combat disease.
Viruses have been implicated in cancer. (The fact that pollutants may be an incriminating factor in causing cancer does not exculpate viruses; pollutants might weaken tissue and make it more susceptible to the oncogenicity of viruses.) Children from large families have been besieged with more viruses and hence are more apt to have antibodies against viruses, which sometimes cause cancer.
In a way, it was quite plainly explained by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th Century: Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.
Has Medicine and Progress been responsible for more allergies and Autoimmune Diseases
The rise of allergies and autoimmune diseases may, in part, have been triggered by the life-saving gifts of modern medicine. This idea may be validated by apparent increases, in allergies and autoimmune conditions, in various immigrant communities upon traveling from poverty-stricken locales to modern America and its relative prosperity.
In a European shtetl (Yiddish for small town in Eastern Europe), in the 19th century, where people were only just starting to believe in the germ theory of disease (My Grandmother’s three eldest siblings all died of diphtheria in infancy because of unhygienic procedures in the collection and storage of milk) and poverty and malnutrition were severe, one’s immune system had a lot of work to do. The immune system was so busy fighting real diseases that it had no time to cause allergic ailments (in which the immune system gets hysterical over pollen or dust) or auto immune diseases, in which the immune system fights its own body (For example, some forms of arthritis develop because one’s immune system combats one’s joints)
Some doctors, apparently partial to the hypothesis that autoimmune diseases and allergies arise when the body no longer has real, traditional threats to combat, have tried to treat chronic ulcerative intestinal conditions, which are often auto immune diseases, by implanting parasites and/or other pathogens into their patients.
Vaccines: How the Press has thoroughly twisted and confused the subject
Many vaccines have done wonderful things for civilization. However, that does not mean that all vaccines are always wonderful. In 1976, a flu vaccine sickened tens of thousands of Americans with Gillean Barre syndrome (I don’t have the energy to look for the precise spelling of this malady.) When the Salk vaccine for polio was first administered, quite a few patients got polio. (The vaccine was supposed to consist of deactivated polio viruses. However, because of laboratory errors, not all of those viruses had been deactivated.) Furthermore, although the evidence suggests that vaccines are not responsible for autism, there was good reason to suspect it.
Very simply, vaccines often contained a preservative known as thimerosal. This substance contains mercury, a notorious neuro toxin. Mercury is so detrimental to the central nervous system that it was deemed a neuro toxin in 14th century Italy, where hat makers used mercury to make hats (I don’t know how the mercury was employed to make hats). The hat makers became so weird and downright insane that the expression “mad as a hatter” was born.
In any event, it was understandably feared that infants, often bombarded with a succession of vaccines, might suffer an assault of far too much mercury.
Psychiatry: A therapy or a vector disseminating disease
In the first half of the 20th Century, America greeted psychiatry with giddy enthusiasm. Indeed, a spate of stupid movies, with grand actresses who fell in love with gallant psychiatrists, were aired to show the common dumb dolts that psychiatry is the ticket to Nirvana. In “Now, Voyager,” Betty Davis is a nerdy neurotic who dresses for shit even before she has a romantic nervous breakdown, but she becomes as smashing as a belle picking up an Oscar after just two weeks with her doting shrink. In “Snake Pit,” Olivia De Haviland is rescued from insanity by a doctor who nourishes her artistic pretensions and encourages to write.
Clearly, psychiatry became the darling of intellectuals and artists not because of its allegedly good track record, but because of its stunning results in the movies in which every deranged diva becomes a pacific and preening princess, dazzling the intellectual and moral mice at the Oscars.
And what is psychiatry’s real track record. It was tabulated, in black and white, by Eysenck. He found that two thirds of neurotics, without any therapy, got better over time. By contrast, among neurotics who saw psychoanalysts, the success rate was 44 percent.
Hi Tech Tyranny and the Ever Encroaching, Periscopic Internet
We routinely laud the scientific and technological smarts that gave us the internet, but the internet seems to be sewing the seeds of obscenely psychotic emotional and political trends: Marjorie Taylor Greene, a member of Congress, had given us political screeds on a par with the rants of crack addicts in the back wards of Bellevue, telling us that there are fires in the Southwest because Jews, operating lasers in outerspace, have been lighting our arid lands on fire. Although feminism, allegedly, has liberated women, and should be making women happier about being female, the increase in female to male transgenderism is parabolic, and more and more young girls are demanding mastectomies.
Really, do the lords and ladies of Harvard -- who routinely summarize our problems and predilections with a sly and supercilious scowl that seems to say “I have a Phd at Harvard therefore I know more than you” -- have any idea what the fuck is going on or are they so wedded to their preconceived ideological prejudices that they are temperamentally unable to objectively assess any of the things they pontificate upon.
More people than ever before are seeing shrinks, taking meds for emotional infirmities, and at the same time, the suicide rate is increasing, life expectancy stopped rising and in some recent years has fallen, bed-wetting is becoming more prevalent, social security disability claims for white males keeps rising, and Americans, riding Tsunamis of rage and disgust, are belting and beating airline stewards with greater frequency. I don’t care how brilliant psychiatrists purport to be. They are fucking up big time.
The insufferable, incessant Odes to Globalism
The liberal professors of high-minded pomposity tell us that globalism and interconnectedness are somehow inherently good. For some reason, they opine that when one is shorn of one’s natural community (the brood which bred you) and are a discombobulated isolated character thrown together with a multiplicity of creeds and races, good things will result. Of course, good things might result for the capitalist superstar and shmuck whose profits soar when workers are isolated from one another, but what good things occur to that lonely person who is adrift and lost in a world of wholly alien people.
Of course, feeling alienated by so many foreigners who frighten him, he may become militantly nationalistic or even fascist. Also, on a biochemical level things are so much more dangerous: Increased communications means that diseases that once were restricted to one small part of the globe can hitch a plane ride to New York in hours. Not too long ago, AIDS leaped out of the darkest recesses of the African jungle and wreaked havoc in the West and the entire globe. Ebola and Marburg and other ghastly scourges are biding their time, waiting in airports throughout the tropics.
The Hegelian dialectic is a process in which an idea or sentiment will breed its very antithesis
Once again, David, well said and brilliantly structured, richly informative, and, as always, unafraid to prod at orthodoxy from all directions. I absolutely agree with your key observation. the cultural and intellectual role reversal between the Left and Right is one of the most fascinating and underexplored developments of our time. You unpack it with wit, historical depth, and biting insight.
Your reflections on the blind reverence for science, the seductive overreach of psychiatry, and the subtle tyrannies of modern medicine are all astute. I especially appreciated your invocation of Nietzsche and Heisenberg, the philosophical grounding gives your arguments a robust intellectual lineage. Something our former friend Eve would die for lol...
I would add a couple of related points:
1. The Infantilization of the Public in the Name of Safety:
The modern liberal establishment often frames its technocratic overreach as "protecting the public" but this has increasingly resulted in treating citizens like permanent children. The Covid era was a prime example, where nuance and dissent were suppressed not because they were proven false, but because they might confuse or “mislead” the masses. That kind of paternalism undermines both liberty and genuine scientific inquiry.
2. The Rise of Algorithmic Determinism:
While you powerfully critiqued psychiatry and medicine, I think another growing danger is our reliance on data-driven algorithms; in policing, hiring, education, and even sentencing. There's a strange irony in postmodern society surrendering to machine logic. When we fetishize data as inherently objective, we forget that algorithms are constructed by humans with biases, and they often reinforce existing inequalities under the guise of neutrality.
Once again, I enjoyed your provocative essay. Your willingness to challenge sacred cows from all sides is exactly what's needed in an increasingly polarized and shallow intellectual climate. Now you better hope ICE doesnt come for ya......