![]() ‘Barack Obama was elected on the shoulders of an incipient movement that he allowed to languish once he became president.’ Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty Images The Paris climate accord, the Iran nuclear deal, relations with Cuba, financial regulation, fuel efficiency standards, power plant emissions, methane emissions, student debt relief, the Keystone XL pipeline decision – all these and more have been reversed, and Obama’s single biggest achievement, the Affordable Care Act, survives by the grace of a dead man’s vote. “It will be as if Obama had never been president,” one commentator predicted after Trump’s victory, a haunting prophecy that’s come a long way toward being fulfilled. Joe McCarthy had his army hearings there will come a similar moment that shocks the country into mass loathing for Trump, but until then many lives will be lost and many more permanently wrecked. The accumulation of one too many realities. What will break the spell? Time – ripeness is all. ![]() It’s strong magic indeed that can sell this as a boon to working people while good, affordable health care, a living wage, collective bargaining, and a system of higher education that doesn’t sentence the country’s youth to years of debt servitude, get lost in the swamps of Trump’s voodoo mind-meld. The defining accomplishment thus far of Trump’s fake-populist presidency has been enormous tax cuts for corporations and the 1%, triggering enormous stock buybacks that further benefit the 1%, and the rest of us hardly at all. For it to happen we had to revert to the psychology of the serf who’s too brainwashed or lazy to conjure something better. Rare is the army or police force strong enough to force that. #Trumpand putin mind meld freeThe system is rigged! And God knows Hillary Clinton was probably the least likely Democrat in the land to fix it, but then and now many millions of Americans seem perfectly willing to consign their fates to the billionaires and centi-millionaires who spent the past several decades rigging the system, which included corralling us into wage peonage in the name of the almighty free market. Photograph: Thorne Andersonīut give Trump this: he offered one fierce, consistent truth over the course of his campaign. They may well have plucked certain strings in the national psyche – played us like a dimestore ukulele – but we were keen to be plucked.īen Fountain. Putin didn’t do it, nor the trolls in St Petersburg with their zillions of busy bots. Learning essential stuff is as much a discipline as going to the gym or sticking to a diet, and an excellent antidote for the modern condition of being numb and dumb. They allow us the mental space to absorb, reflect, evaluate at our own pace. Not that books are sacrosanct by any means, but they’re quiet. This could be as profoundly simple and radical as going to the library every few weeks, checking out a couple of books on history, and reading them, as opposed to taking every post that Google and Facebook steer our way as the gospel truth. Taking it as a given that “meaningful individual agency” requires applying our brains, our experience, our memories, and requires as well making a sustained, good-faith effort to inform ourselves of our reality. Do we really want to be free? Are we up to the job of exercising our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with meaningful individual agency?ĭonald Trump greets the crowd as he arrives for a rally in Billings, Montana, on 6 September. ![]() ![]() Closer to our own time we can look to the mind magic of Senator Joe McCarthy, or more localized warlocks like Pappy O’Daniel of Texas, spellbinding demagogues whose stories call into question the premise of the entire democratic project. The country is caught in a kind of spell, which is a florid way of saying we’re in the throes of a dire psychological phenomenon whose precedent goes at least as far back as the Salem witch trials. Trump is a new breed of political Superman who eats kryptonite for breakfast his enemies pile it on and he just gets stronger. It’s not even that he’s Teflon to all this he thrives on it. Satire, derision, insult, scorn, all these bounce off his bones of steel like so many ping-pong balls. The dry language of the law has been just as useless, the sworn testimony, the jury verdicts, the admissions of guilt from disgraced former advisers and operatives. Appeals to Christian morality as expressed in the Beatitudes haven’t worked. Fact-based argument, rational analysis, empirical proofs haven’t stopped him, nor have stark demonstrations of his laughably obvious lies. Is there anything left to say that would stop it? Think of the hundreds of millions of words that have been thrown at him the last three years, every kind of rhetorical tool and tack has been brought to bear, and still he powers on. ![]()
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