Trump is not a new problem
Trump is a new version of an old problem.
Basically I consider myself an average college educated person and I have no idea what that means. I say that though because I have a point later on to make.
First I still read and am working on one project that in actuality is a very intense study. Much more than I am sure I wanted to undertake, yet as I get older I do not want my brain to rot so I am making the effort. You can find it on Substack along with this blog. In working on that project I am reading quite a bit beyond the book I am studying. I mainly comment as a journal what I learn from the reading about the book. Occasionally I take side trips just to discuss related thoughts and topics in general.
As part of the reading I bought the book “the Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine”. I am not going to discuss St. Augustine’s ideas in this post.
Reading through the introduction there were two paragraphs that hopefully shed some light on my frustration with trying to get people to understand why we need change in our country. Or actually may be helping me understand why no one wants to listen.
Here is part of one paragraph from the introduction to the book mentioned above written by Herbert A. Deane:
“…In quiet times men tend to take for granted the state and the order and security that it provides. After a period of stable government and security for life and property, they are tempted. To regard peace and order as “natural” and “given” and to forget that, to a great extent, they are results of elaborate, delicate contrivance.” This is footnoted and references Thomas Hobbes “Leviathan”
Why it matters to me is that we have been in quiet times so maybe what I have been saying for the last forty years had no interest in the academic world or academia. And I say we have been in quiet times for decades probably starting with the 1950’s. Yes I know we had Vietnam, the protests, the Nixon administration and resignation, the cold war, the post cold war and more. Yet for all that happened most Americans including the working class had a sense of security of life and property. People were able to obtain a decent life for themselves. There was nothing that truly shattered their world view.
So let’s go to the next paragraph in the introduction:
“When, however, men face serious difficulties which the traditional political and social system seems unable to solve, when conflicts between groups, classes, regions, or religious sects within the society become so intense that consensus evaporates, and above all, when a crisis of the most fundamental kind undermines the body politic because traditional beliefs, attitudes, and values no longer command virtually automatic assent from most members of the society, thoughtful men are once more driven to the effort to examine the bases of social and political order and to suggest new answers to the questions of politics.”
Are we at this point? Obviously you know I am going to say we are at some juncture here or I wouldn’t be writing on this topic.
And there are two situations where the body politic is no long receiving assent from most members of society or we are ascending to that point.
One of the two is the AI problem which I am not going to address in this post. It is a problem that will definitely cause us to examen where we are in our society and it is rushing at us faster than we can cope.
The other problem is the more traditional problem of economic and political endeavors. And the Trump problem is not new. He is just the updated version of this problem and that is elitism is taking over the country and the body politic. Trump himself is more the catalyst to the problem than the actual problem. Elitism has been building in this country for a few decades, but not until recently with Trump’s false promises for the working class has it been thrust into our faces with what is really going on with his grift and corruption.
The other way elitism has taken over is how our Congress is controlled by lobbyists and large donors.
Elitism that causes the elitists to try and control all aspects of our lives only for their benefit eventually creates dynamic social change. I think most people are beginning to see we are well into this dynamic playing out.
My anger rests in the fact I saw this coming. And this goes back to me confessing the I am an average college educated person. All the academia stood in their ivory towers and few professed nothing but ignorance about what was happening starting in the 1980’s until now with the slow gradual shift to elitist self-serving policy.
I was not educated enough to ridicule the academic elitists to cut through their need to sound superior to us in what they said was wrong with our country. Their ignorance led to a social revolt of the working class buying into Trump’s nonsense. I just saw that the two parties had created a duopoly that was becoming self-serving for their own power and becoming beholden to an elite class.
And yes I know I was not the only one who saw this coming, but now that we are sitting on the cusp of possible major social change I am mad because I screamed at people there was an easier solution twenty years ago.
I screamed we needed new parties without being able to cut through the morass of people not affected by what was coming. Again it goes back to the “quiet time” when men took for granted the social order.
We see now the hate being played out by the very people losing to the elitists that is directed by the elitist mentality of pitting democrats and republicans as two sides and each side must win. All the while the two sides are actually the same side, the American people. And again this has been pointed out for decades by more capable people. And again this fell on deaf ears by large chunks of academia and politicians because they existed in that quiet time where some semblance of prosperity existed.
And to me, I get angrier because this can be fixed. Our country can regain the quiet time (well except for the AI problem developing) by going back to educating the people what I have been saying. Lose the partisanship in our politics, take money out of our elections, either force the duopoly into developing new leadership and ideas or create new parties to do such. We are still at a point where drastic social upheaval change is not needed. This isn’t going to last much longer though.
And the irony is that the elitists upending our society would still benefit from us reclaiming our (the people’s) interests in our government, economy and society.
As long as we have a market economy there will be rich people/elitists. That isn’t the problem, it is their control of our lives that is the problem. We created a government that can hold that in check. We let the “quiet times” blind us to the need for constant vigilance.
So now I ask you do we let this wonderful country slip into moral decay due to the powerful thinking they are above us? Or do we do our diligence and reclaim the basic and fundamental aspects of our government, society and economy and continue this wonderful experiment called the United States of America?
And yes I am reading St. Augustine’s City of God, yet that did not cause this sudden understanding of our moral decay. I saw this coming in the 1980’s and have been screaming in the woods ever since. My current readings including City of God only make my anger stronger since I am seeing how easy it is to reclaim our lives and it falls on the ignorant ears of our so called intellectuals that are blindly stupid.
I hope we can reclaim it all before the elitists destroy the fabric of us as people and then have AI destroy them.
