Republicans when they lose an election: WTF?! The libz stole it from us. Deceased Latin American commies put little genies in the machines that switched Trump votes to Biden. It’s obvious to all who can see! We must storm the Capitol, stop the steal, and kill the traitorous vice president. Or at least take a dump in the corner.
Democrats when they lose an election: Oh, my. This is perfectly terrible. I am disconsolate. Can it really be true that black- and brown-skinned men under the age of 30 do not love us anymore? Whatever are we to do, oh woe, woe, woe, &c.
NPR’s political guy said on the radio this morning that Democrats used to be the party of the working class but now they’re the party of the faculty lounge. Seems to me a slur on the faculty insofar as it does nothing to show that the professors are wrong on the merits.
A journalist who interviewed a lot of Trump voting Latinos reports that it was all versions of, “The economy sucked for me under Biden. Covid shutdowns, inflation, housing costs going up. Entonces—he’s fired. Time for something new.” Entonces must be Spanish for thus and therefore. I demur on the substance of the complaint. If Trump were smart, he’d do nothing but play golf, wait for the public’s perception of the economy to catch up with reality, and then declare that he’d fixed it. Instead, he’ll likely eff it up by keeping his promises—setting off a trade war with tariffs, rounding up low-wage workers (aka essential workers) and deporting them, tax breaks for the rich, all the Trumpean slop.
But what I really dislike is this idea that all a voter need consider is whether he’s better off financially than he was four years ago. It’s as if you could hear the guy in the famous Norman Rockwell painting and he’s saying, “Man, I can’t afford some of the crap I’d like to buy.” It seems then that we have no chance of addressing, for example, the climate crisis. (Trump thinks it’s a “hoax” and Harris hardly mentioned it, unless you count reversing her former opposition to fracking, presumably in order to win Pennsylvania, which she lost.) The inability to address our most pressing problems is a persistent theme. Circa 1850 in the southern part of the U.S., white men perceived that the abolition of slavery would sink their economic boat. It doesn’t follow that abolishing slavery was a poor idea and they were right to seek its preservation and expansion.
In the faculty lounge, they’re familiar with the argument advanced against democracy in Plato’s Republic: the rabble, who care for nothing but their own ease, tomorrow and the day after that, will be easy marks for unvirtuous con men seeking power. What’s needed, therefore, is a statesman who’s devoted his life to the study of philosophy—a “philosopher king.” A self-serving argument for a philosopher to make, and anyway good luck with that in the real world. (Plato, it has been argued, cared so little for the real world that he substituted for it a fanciful one made up by himself.) But the degree to which experience tends to bear out Plato’s criticism of democracy is one way to account for how a fourth-rate entertainer, third-rate businessman, and first-rate scoundrel could also be the twice-elected POTUS.
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