It has been a full decade since *Bleep* rode down that golden escalator and into U.S. and world history. It has been an eye-opening, anxiety-riddled, and at times horrifying experience. And his social rampage is still charging ‘full steam ahead’ and shows no sign of slowing down.
It’s been an awful but painfully edifying experience. As we close out the first full decade of ‘Trumpism’, it seems like a good time to (try to) describe and explain exactly what I/we have learned from this… mess.
Most Americans seem to have learned… nothing!
First, I’ll dispense with the ‘we’ part. It seems that ‘we,’ meaning most Americans, have learned nothing over the past ten years. Hell, we just voluntarily re-elected a convicted felon and expert con man who put the country through hell for four years.
Worse, he repeatedly denied he lost the 2020 election, pushed fraudulent ‘fraud’ claims, and fomented an insurrection to try to overthrow the government and the election! WE then proceeded to absolve or even lionize this seditious menace — and soon gave him the keys to the kingdom again!
Whaaat?!?
So, the first thing I learned is that many, many Americans are dumb as dirt; are easily misled; focus only on their own so-called ‘prosperity’; and have the morals of pit vipers. While I had already known this, to a degree, the past decade turned my qualms about our ‘American mentality’ into utter disgust and repulsion. I even wrote an essay last year titled ‘Our American Cult of Defiant Ignorance’ — which became my most successful article ever on Medium.
The sad and terrifying thing is that we are SO dumb and misinformed that we are, indeed, proud of it — and resist all efforts to educate or enlighten us. That’s the ‘defiant’ part. It’s not for nothing that the phrase ‘ignorant, and proud of it!’ has become a weird fixture of American life.
Disruptive social movements are NOT all ‘equal’
From the demonstrable ‘fact’ of Americans’ prideful ignorance flows another crucial and unsettling learning: not all social movements/ disruptions are created equal. I lived through the intense social changes and disruptions of the 60s and 70s, and the main difference between the rapid-fire social disruptions then and now lies in their intent.
The intent of most of the protests and social changes of the 60s and 70s was to expand the ‘American Dream’ to include many more Americans, try to ensure equality and equal opportunity for all Americans, and end the war in Vietnam and the military draft. The purpose was to save lives and expand democracy, tolerance, and inclusiveness.
Fast forward to this past decade, and it’s clear that most of *Bleep’s* and MAGA’s disruptions and planned chaos have the opposite intent. They truly want to ‘burn it all down,’ disrupt and cripple liberal democracy, and create an oppressive White Christian supremacist nation.
They do not want equal opportunity for all, nor do they want full racial, religious, or even sexual equality. Their purpose is to limit or undo democracy, tolerance, equality, and inclusiveness — and this odious intention is celebrated in their relentless attacks on DEI policies and programs.
Clearly, *Bleep* and MAGA have no use for, or tolerance of, racial and sexual diversity, equity, social justice, or inclusiveness. Thus, they are traitors to every founding ideal that the U.S. claims to pursue and embody. The ‘land of the free’? I don’t think so.
Democracy can only survive as an ongoing ’act of faith’
Another crucial ‘lesson’ from this past decade is that modern liberal democracy is a fragile and wonderful creation and depends entirely on the good faith ‘buy-in’ of its citizens. That is, liberal democracy can only function or work as intended when almost all citizens agree on its goals, methods, and institutions and work together to uphold them.
Despite many ongoing social and moral disagreements, in the past an underlying foundation of basic trust in our form of governing was always a crucial ‘given.’ With this foundation in place, Americans could utilize our institutions and political processes to hash things out and come to some consensus.
But, no more. One of the most pernicious and damaging effects of *Bleep’s* endless lies and distortions is a deep loss of faith and trust in our basic institutions. Due to his, MAGA’s, and Fox News’ chaos-inducing ability to spread lies, disinformation, and fraudulent claims of ‘fraud,’ many millions of us have lost all faith in our system of government and social systems.
*Bleep* and his sycophantic media followers have engaged in a vast, prolonged, and very effective campaign to undermine and destroy Americans’ trust in crucial democratic institutions like voting, our election systems, our ‘free press,’ the media, our public health system, and our courts and justice system. Their overt, relentless attacks have greatly undermined our liberal democracy and thrust the U.S. into the ranks of weak ‘backsliding democracies.’
What is the main lesson to be derived from this debacle? It’s that NO society can survive prolonged, devious attacks and malicious subversion from within. Once basic public trust and faith are deeply eroded, it’s very difficult to build them back and regain them.
Lesson: It’s far easier to destroy and wreck a society than it is to build a decent one. ‘Burning it all down’ is not an admirable social goal. Rather, it’s incredibly dangerous and traitorous.
Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash
How to undermine truth and create a vicious ‘alternate reality’
Another painful lesson I’ve learned over this decade is this: it’s incredibly easy to undermine the very notion of ‘truth.’ This lesson is intimately related to the previous one about loss of faith in our government and society, but it’s so crucial that it demands separate examination.
When a society allows and defends people’s ‘freedom’ to say and do almost anything, one of the most unfortunate and perverse results is the increasing loss of our freedoms. I’ve written extensively about the fatal contradictions inherent in our ‘free speech’ ideals, but never before has the U.S. — and the world — been subjected to such a catastrophic deluge of ‘politicized’ lies, disinformation, and deceptive manipulation.
In areas as diverse as climate change, racial justice, economic policy, public health, science, and vaccines, right-leaning Americans have been swamped by — and gotten ‘trapped’ in — an endless torrent of right-wing lies, rage, innuendo, and savage sarcasm.
Proven science about climate change and vaccines, for instance, has been vilified and mocked, to the point that most right-leaning Americans now believe manipulative, scheming commentators and politicians over non-partisan, fair-minded reporters, scientists, teachers, and doctors. It’s even become ‘fashionable’ to vilify and ruthlessly attack historians, librarians, public health officials, and judges who dare to rule against *Bleep.*
This is, without any exaggeration, a deepening societal disaster. When people don’t know the difference between truth and lies or between overt manipulation and good-faith communication and reporting, civilization is in huge trouble. Worse, when our citizens start calling for faithful public servants to be tried and put to death — as happened frequently to many election and public health officials and judges — ‘civilized’ society is hanging on by a mere thread.
And again, *Bleep* and his MAGA hordes intentionally foment all these horrid social shifts. Why? It’s quite simple. The accelerating destruction of people’s faith in truth, elections, factual news, and our free press has been quite purposeful. It weakens democracy and supports authoritarianism and a full autocratic takeover of the U.S.
The deliberate destruction of ‘truth’ allows the bullies, tyrants, racists, and brutal demagogues to redefine reality as they wish. It clears the way for them to take over, strip away many of our precious rights and freedoms, and do whatever they want with and to our nation, our people, and our planet.
Their deliberate destruction of ‘truth’ turns the majority of us into unwitting, dumbed-down patsies who are too confused, ignorant, or overwhelmed to fight back.
It’s a simple matter to undermine and take down a society
The last ‘lesson’ I want to focus on — and there are many more, but I want to keep this essay fairly short — is this: how unbelievably easy it is to manipulate, undermine, and wreck an entire huge nation.
Largely due to our too-lax (suicidal?) free speech laws and guidelines, *Bleep*, MAGA, and aggressive right-wing media have brazenly attacked the foundations of our entire society and form of government for well over a decade (their seditious attacks intensified greatly during Obama’s presidency, starting with *Bleep’s* absurd but highly influential ‘Birther’ conspiracy).
Liberal democracy depends completely on the active participation of well-informed, caring citizens. But in the U.S., our voting rate has been pathetic, hovering around 50–60%, while our citizens are usually not very socially involved or well-informed. And that was already true before the *Bleep*/MAGA disinformation, denial, and mistrust deluge began.
Over the past decade, these issues and problems have gotten immeasurably worse. The level of ignorance, denial (of science, facts, verified voting totals, etc.), paranoia, distrust, and outright delusion has skyrocketed. And the sad, horrifying truth is that this ugly devolution and mental/moral collapse was deliberately engineered.
History will see this manufactured collapse as one of the greatest feats of public propaganda and mental/emotional ‘programming’ ever undertaken and accomplished anywhere, in any society on earth.
This mental and moral collapse is surely one of the most repellent and dangerous public effects of ‘Trumpism.’ It is perhaps the primary cautionary tale/lesson we should take away from this benighted spectacle.
But sadly, indeed horrifically, we almost certainly won’t. We won’t learn this lesson or ‘take away’ the proper conclusions — because the entire thrust of the past decade has been to disable American’s trust, mental acuity, and reasoning abilities and replace these crucial functions with paranoia, mistrust, rabid partisan beliefs, and overt denial of truth, science, and factual information.
America has truly been under intensive, coordinated attack from within — via prolonged right-wing ‘information warfare.’ This attack was SO successful that it has stripped away many Americans’ inner morality, trust, ‘bullshit detectors,’ and reasoning abilities. Thus, there are far fewer citizens now who still have the mental and moral strength to directly and effectively challenge the seditionists, demagogues, and wannabe tyrants.
Which was, of course, the intention all along.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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