As usual an outstanding konspiracy korner and comments. I have been watching these first weeks of the Trump era with great interest, and especially how it is being reported by the mainstream media.
Looking outside of the MSM, I ran across an article by Abi Wilkinson in the Jacobin magazine. (More about how I found it in a moment.) The article is entitled The Specter of Democracy. It starts with an insightful deconstruction of a New Yorker cartoon, but here is the quotation that got me to read the whole thing.
“That nobody could possibly do a better job than the professionals is a core belief of elite liberalism. Suspicious of mass democracy and emboldened by the fall of the Soviet Union, elite liberals came to assume that we’d reached the end of history—that every other social order had been tried and proven inferior. Capitalist democracy, stewarded by sharp, well-intentioned experts, had allegedly emerged from the scrum as the unquestioned victor. For people like this, it’s been hard to understand the increasing rejection of the political and economic consensus as anything other than an outbreak of irrationality and self-sabotage. While there may be room to fine tune, why would anyone want to tear down or significantly alter something as good as what we’ve got? If politics is about nothing more than the effective administration of the current system … experience and technical expertise are the primary requirements.”
One of the outgrowths of the Enlightenment was the idea that the scientific method when applied to social and political systems would triumph in the same way the hard sciences of physics and chemistry had triumphed in explaining the physical world. For example, Henri de Saint-Simon envisioned a government run by bankers, lawyers, accountants, and other such technocrats/experts – a government controlled by the central planning of a small elite. It is an idea that has thrived (up to now) in late 20th and early 21st century America. Its foundation is the belief that there is one set of Truths, all in harmony with each other, merely waiting to be discovered, and technocratic scientism is the way to do it. To oppose this is irrational, because what rational person rejects the Truth that will lead to Utopia?
Trump is not a technocrat, nor a scientific manager. From their point of view he undoubtedly is a disturber of the peace, a purveyor of irrationality and self-sabotage threatening a carefully constructed world order.
A rather breathless Politico article a few days ago described how Trump is making all these executive orders without consulting anyone in the agencies, or any lawyers, or anyone with any real knowledge of the rules and procedures and protocols, (Obama sure didn’t do it that way) and golly what a mess. The managerial elite are in fear for their professional lives, and they are going down (if they go down) swinging. But I give Trump a puncher’s chance all the same.
Not being a regular reader of the extreme left wing socialist/Marxist press, I ran across the excerpt from Abi’s article quoted above in a blog called zeroanthropology.net by a Canadian anthropology professor named Maximillian Forte. In May, shortly after Trump won the nomination, he wrote an article predicting Trump’s victory in the election, citing 12 reasons, which, given the event, now seem pretty well-argued. The quotation from Abi came in a post entitled The Dying Days of Liberalism, which is a thorough trashing of HRC, not something you want to read without your blood pressure medication if you are an HRC fan.