Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › Excellent article: Beyond Lying. Trump's Authoritarian Reality.
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Billy_T.
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November 5, 2016 at 2:45 pm #56901
Billy_TParticipantTo me, this is spot on:
Beyond Lying: Donald Trump’s Authoritarian Reality [The Stone] Jason Stanley THE STONE NOV. 4, 2016
Excerpt:
As the Republican candidate for president in 2016, Donald J. Trump has accomplished many things. He engaged in rhetorical tactics unprecedented in recent American electoral history. He was straightforwardly misogynistic. He repeatedly endorsed obviously false claims. There were frequent open discussions of the intentions behind his many odd comments, retractions, semi-retractions and outright false statements.
On a certain level, the media lacked the vocabulary to describe what was happening. Trump was denounced repeatedly for “lying” and at times the apparently more egregious “bald faced lying.” But that is not a sufficient description. Neither was the charge by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt that Trump was in fact a master of “bullshit,” which is distinct from lying in that the speaker is not just communicating information he knows to be false, but is unconstrained by any consideration of what may or may not be true. While this description is technically true, it is at best terribly misleading. This presidential campaign has revealed that our academic and media class has insufficiently grappled with the problem of mass communication.
Liberal democratic societies by definition have a pluralism of value systems. This poses a problem for the politician seeking to gain office, just as it does for the advertiser seeking to gain customers. The total audience consists of sub-audiences with conflicting value systems. The problem of mass communication in a liberal democracy is that of creating and conveying a maximally appealing message to an audience made up of groups with conflicting value systems.
November 5, 2016 at 2:48 pm #56902Billy_TParticipantThe author could have used all kinds of examples, of course, including Trump’s way of talking about Latino immigrants. But the Trumped up “reality” of America’s inner cities is a good one:
According to Arendt, the “chief disability” of authoritarian propaganda is that “it cannot fulfill this longing of the masses for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense.”
The goal of totalitarian propaganda is to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups. It is openly intended to distort reality, partly as an expression of the leader’s power. Its open distortion of reality is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness.
Donald Trump is trying to define a simple reality as a means to express his power. The goal is to define a reality that justifies his value system, thereby changing the value systems of his audience. Two questions remain: What is the simple reality that Trump is trying to convey? And what is the value system to which this simple story is intended to shift voters to adopt?
Trump regularly says that America’s “inner cities” are filled with Americans who are impoverished, and of African-American descent. According to Trump, these are places of unprecedented horror. In a tweet on Aug. 29, 2016, Trump wrote: “Inner-city crime is reaching record levels. African-Americans will vote for Trump because they know I will stop the slaughter going on!”
This has continued as one of the central themes in his campaign; there is supposedly an unprecedented wave of violent slaughter. In November 2015, Trump tweeted an image of the following statistics about race and murder from 2015, supposedly from a source called the “Crime Statistics Bureau of San Francisco,” which does not appear to exist. It included wildly inaccurate figures that indicated that a large majority of white people killed were being killed by black people.
November 5, 2016 at 2:56 pm #56904Billy_TParticipantI thought it was pretty clear months ago that Trump was an authoritarian conman and fascist. That hasn’t changed. In a way, the Access Hollywood bus video shifted attention away from Trump’s truly sick, demented, authoritarian vision of America, but it’s still there for review. All anyone needs to do is go to the videotape. Read Trump in his own words. See him at his rallies.
No one has to make shit up about Trump to make this point. He does all the work for us. All we need to do is listen to him.
What he’s done is among the lowest, most pernicious, most despicable things in American political history: whipping up white people into a frenzy of hatred and fear against black and brown people, sending them over the top when it comes to their own crazed perceptions of grievance and persecution. By aligning himself with the alt-right, with white supremacy, with the ugliest underbelly of American life, Trump has catapulted the sewer into our living rooms, and has given the most disgusting factions in our country a massive lift.
Trump is an authoritarian, fascist asshole, and America needs to reject him, the alt-right, and everything they stand for, absolutely.
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