MIA: Part One- Politics of Being A Loser and a Jerk

 Health issues have kept me posting of late, a lethargy that kept me from catching up with myself. It has already put me behind schedule today. Therefore, this will be short.

Sometimes I find The New Republic tiresome in its persistent urgency. Not that I disagree with them, but they overwhelm me. 

That said, Trump Has Become What He Most Despises: A Loser is a piece that caught me with its thesis that fascism needs losers. It made sense by the time I finished the essay. Then I decided to put it out here, hoping whoever is reading this blog will read the essay in full.

 A loser is often not someone who is actually left behind, nor is it someone who simply failed at something. Failure is a part of life; it can even be the first step on the path to success. Instead, a loser is one who thinks in terms of winners and losers at all—and who believes that they have not received the status and rewards to which they feel entitled. They always seem slighted by the world at large, which has cheated and denied them things that they think belong to them by virtue of their supposed innate superiority.

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Losers do not actually care about the reality of winning and losing. Instead they care about the perception of success and failure. Trump, who is hardly the wealthiest New York real estate mogul nor the most successful, always insisted that he was the biggest and the best. “Show me someone without an ego, and I’ll show you a loser,” Trump once wrote in a 2004 book. To that end, he has covered the White House in tacky gold ornaments and plans to build a giant triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, despite having won no wars (and having lost at least one of them).

Most importantly, losers internalize their own self-perception and seek to reinforce it in the world. They are drawn to hierarchy, and are therefore hostile to America’s fundamentally egalitarian ethos. A stratified society gives them a clearer sense of their inferiors, which is usually bound together with their perceptions of race, sex, genetics, or some other apparently inborn trait. Racism is the most familiar redoubt for the loser, since it provides what they think as highly visible proof of their own supposed superiority.

Which makes me think of all this as wholly anti-American. I was raised to think competence and achievements prove character, and that character is what creates superiority. True superiority knows it comes from work, and the superior person knows anyone else can be just as good as them. No greatness without humility.

I have never been comfortable with the whininess of American conservatives. They cannot persuade us of their views, so now they want to demean the American people.

The essential American myth is found in The Great Stone Face. 

I have always thought of Trump as a man who defecates on his doorstep and expects someone else to clean up the mess. As President, he is defecating on us. The TNR essay does not undermine my opinion:

The goal of Trumpism, it could be said, is to create losers of us all. The political and economic project’s goal is not to materially improve its adherents’ lives. Instead, it is to create a sense of social order for some people that offers an aesthetic sense of improvement, even as one’s standard of living declines in real terms. These illusory gains can only go so far. Or as one frustrated Trump voter told reporters during Trump’s first-term trade war with China in 2019, “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Chuck Todd points out how this defecating on us is now working on the world stage, although Mr. Todd frames it as a matter of making us look like jerks.

 

 It is up to the American people to lead themselves out of this mess. 

Now, I need to get on with my life. More later, as soon as I can.

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