Sunday, August 30, 2020

The Explainable Mystery of Donald Trump

Donald Trump plays a lot of golf. That must be where he learned how to win a US election. In golf, it's not important  how many yards your longest stroke is. All that matters is how few of those short little strokes it takes you to sink the putt. 
photo credit: New York Times
     
    Donald Trump's long game in the realm of US politics may leave a lot to be desired. His foreign policy is aimless at best, his response to the Covid19 pandemic decidedly anemic. He cannot articulate constitutional understanding with any decency or paint a portrait of democracy in the broad strokes of moral principle and reasoned debate. Yet he cannot be criticized about his long-term vision for America by a scale not measurable in years but generations, because he doesn't have any. He doesn't need any. In three and a half years in the Whitehouse, America has spoiled Donald J. Trump to say and believe whatever he wants--and to skip validation for any of it. It's not that he thinks small, but America allows him--even expects him--to do so. He has effectively conditioned America to appreciate his lesser  skills at governance by enuring them to lower expectations. It's hard to say if that is a defect or a stroke of genius. But he knows that the prize of golf lies in making your best with the least effort in shooting the smallest of balls into the smallest of holes. He can leave the long game to the big swingers, he'll settle for sinking his putt ahead of all the other players once he gets to the green.  


In campaign terms,  Donald Trump knows that winning in November doesn't call for "going high." It calls for going all the way down low. If America yearns for the prose and poetry of genteel politics, they can listen to Barack Obama. But he is not on the ballot this November. 
So why should Trump waste any time and effort competing with literary elegance he could never even hope to equal?  He must stick to what he does best--"putting it out there"--whether that "it" is feasible or not.  Liberal America thinks Donald Trump's conscience ought to be weighed down by his unprecedented propensity to lie. In fact, he doesn't care--and worse, he never did.  Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters as people who belonged to the basket of deplorables. Some pundits think this cost her the elections. I don't agree--she won the elections, just not the presidency. What really lost her the presidency was not underestimating the intelligence of the Trump cult, but overestimating the intelligence and political savvy of the liberal demographics. The only thing that Donald Trump said that hasn't proven to be a lie yet was the bit of him shooting someone on Fifth Avenue and never losing one supporter. The truth of that  grimly confident declaration has not changed. American deaths to Covid19 is fast creeping beyond 180,000 and for the most part the people most outraged by this abominable Trump failure are those who have never liked him in the first place. So don't expect Trump to grow an intellectual curiousity overnight--or for the next 60 days 'til election day. Look to him to keep heaping up those short slogans and wild ideas not capable of proof or worthy of credulity but very effective at one thing: keeping fact-checkers vainly busy until they get it. You can't keep following a skunk all day telling him he stinks, especially when it's your provocation that keeps triggering the squirt. 

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON


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Can we really still debate if no one can be wrong?

can think of one reason why apathy thrives in democratic spaces: often it is the enlightened, ironically, who is convinced that ignorance is bliss. In many democratic societies that adhere to the values of free speech and free debate, there is a misguided belief that grading ideas is undemocratic. Ideas are not equal. They span the whole spectrum from the valid to the absurd, from the benign to the downright dangerous. But somehow it is considered politically incorrect to regard one idea as superior (or inferior) to another. 

     So how else can dialogue achieve anything meaningful except for valid to overcome farce? One of the tragedies of modern dialogue is the discarding of the universal truth standard. Truth is coerced to concede  that its antithesis is not falsity but alternative truth. To hold two kinds of truth is not the anomaly itself, but the insistence that at the end of the day you don’t have to choose between these two. For debate to resolve anything, the disinterested listener must make a choice which truth to believe. He cannot demur from making a choice  as being the proper way to observe neutrality. 

    When  all is said and done, debate does not aim to achieve neutrality. Debate aims to persuade opposition to yield its position. If it doesn’t achieve this goal, debate did not fail--only persuasion did. But when both sides of a debate agree to respect each other and to leave each other unchanged in the end, they launched their effort to persuade fully accepting the  ultimate futility of the exercise. Then each one ponders the question, why did we debate at all in the first place? 

    Human philosophy grew because the thinkers of antiquity recognized that ideas must either flourish or perish. You are either wrong and your antagonist right, or vice versa, but you can neither be both wrong or both right. It is naive to think otherwise, but the tragic thing is that this naivete can be so arrogant. It can insist that anybody claiming to be right is evil in the eyes of one who is wrong but who has the right to be wrong. Permit an idea so weak it could not defend itself against the onslaught of reason to stand in the court of true debate and you grant it the convenient excuse not to engage. You validate the pointless modern political school of thought that truth and error can coexist.

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON


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