The Second Coming Of Donald Trump - Inaugurating The Devil

The Left has never understood Donald Trump.  While his supporters cheer the former president at every whistle stop, his opponents are befuddled.  How can this be? How can such an insurrectionist, immoral being even be considered for office? How can the country possibly consider such an imposter? The man is an an unholy inversion, a corrosive, invasive evil - as arrogant, determined, and powerful as Milton's Satan. 

 

Of course he is none of those things and only a bigtime version of all Americans. He is a macho, arm-candy squiring, lassoing, Wild West, mean streets opportunist, and they are low-brow, gun-rack, coon-hunting, bar-fighters.  The impulses are the same, only the scenario, the characters, and the set are different. Given other circumstances Trump would be beating people up in an Irish bar. 

No one cares whether or not he has been brought before the courts. Show trials, witch hunting, political side shows and nothing more. Donald Trump is a 'the check's in the mail, 'so sue me' American, and his outbursts are cheered.

Every courtroom act, every vaudevillian hat trick, every absurd allegation is a vote-getter. His supporters - and most Americans - vote not for pretense but for down-and-dirty resolution to problems. Of course he exaggerated the value of his real estate properties; of course he paid off his chippy; and of course with bombast and chutzpah he challenged the politburo.  What to expect from a man who thrived in the biggest, toughest, most ungovernable market in the world, New York?

The Left has an inchoate fear of a man whose doubles have been around since 1776.  Bill Poole, the Butcher of the Five Points of mid-19th century New York, was a bloody Genghis Khan, slaughtering his way to rule and absolute control.  He had no compassion, not an ounce of remorse or contrition, a hero to the 'natives' and implacable enemy to the Irish newcomers.  A heartless, soulless butcher, but no different than any leader for whom good and evil are irrelevant concepts, as useless as integrity, honesty, and truth. 

 

Without historical perspective, ambition is labelled as anti-communitarian, power is ipso facto manipulative and destructive, and militancy anti-democratic.  The Left has pulled their branding irons out of the fire and tried to fix the sign of the Devil on Donald Trump. 

Progressives cry 'Integrity, honesty, truth' as though these were theirs alone; but such values have always been cherry-picked, relative values for personal benefit; but Trump is the honest one, say his supporters, calling out the moral and social indignities of the Left. 

The truth has validity only when taken in the context of history.  If war and military resolution to territorial conflicts has been common to all human societies since the first settlements, then war is the truth and peace the fiction.

"Why can't we give peace a chance?", asked a woman appalled at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, going on to indict Israel for war crimes, genocide, and inhumanity but shocked and nonplussed at the suggestion that peace has been unknown to human society since the clubs and axes of the Pleistocene and always will be.  There will be no Armageddon at the hands of either Hamas, Isis, or Israel - just a struggle royal over territory and resources as it has always been. 

Donald Trump is a true Machiavellian, trusting only history's lessons and not the baseless claims of Utopians.  History has been clear about sexual determinism, social inequality, diversity, and opportunity.  There are and always have been two sexes to perpetuate the human race. Inequality based on circumstance, genetics, chance, and classical social dynamics will always characterize all societies.  Societies become more or less homogeneous as the world market dictates - supply and demand has no color bar nor political inclusiveness.  Opportunity is a matter for individual enterprise, itself conditioned by intelligence, character, and will.

 

There are the assumptions that resonate with Trump's legions.  It takes no white papers, conference records, minutes of meetings, or academic deliberations to clarify them.  One need not debate veracity, inherent value, or meaning. 

At a recent international conference on Artificial Intelligence, an argument erupted between Noam Chomsky, brain pioneer and advocate of innate learning abilities and the head of research at Google.  What are the determinants of AI, the group was asked.  Chomsky insisted that only by understanding the workings of the human brain could one possibly develop exogenously intelligent programs.  Nonsense, said the Google man.  With enough collected data on what people say and how they say it, intelligence can be recreated.  Millions of bits of language in a thousand languages in ten thousand ways will be the only expression of intelligence needed to create artificially intelligent programs.

Data is nothing but history; and history is the only truth and the only reality; so Donald Trump is the smartest man in the room.  Leave idealistic sophistry aside.  The truth is in front of your nose. 

Alexander Hamilton argued extensively with Thomas Jefferson about the structure and organization of the new democratic system of the Republic.  The people cannot be trusted to make logical, intelligent decisions, Hamilton argued, so an intellectual buffer, a Senate of wise men, had to be installed.  Jefferson understood that logic and exegesis were not the only aspects of intelligence to be considered.  Majority rule meant more than policy. 

He was right, and Ronald Reagan was his heir.  Give the people only the incontrovertible, hard facts of history, and let those be the determining factors of governance. Enough with faux idealism - the idealism of hope has no place in competitive geopolitics; and Donald Trump and his supporters understand this completely.  Will such a dismissal of progressivism lead to a more no-holds-barred ethos? Of course, but an abandonment of false hopes and a return to the hard-rock foundations of the country will not be immoral, only amoral - the code of history. 

All this, say progressives, is beside the point.  Donald Trump is a manipulator, a snake-in-the-grass, a Tantric destroyer, a hobgoblin, all show and no substance, devoid of a moral center, a dangerous man; and in so describing and automatically dismissing this quintessentially American man, they misunderstand Americans and America and history itself.  

Politics is one thing - it is not hard to see how Left and Right are at odds - but the political philosophies of progressive idealism and conservative historicism are diametrically opposed.  Yet it is still hard to understand how the Left cannot see how fundamental the divide is, and how logic is not in play.  The convictions of the Right are visceral.  They have adopted and incorporated the simple lessons of history and taken them on as political policy.  Received wisdom? Yes, perhaps, but since it is based on history, its wisdom is not illogical nor fantasy. 

So Donald Trump will win in November because of this historical and cultural relevance.  He was the first real American President, a spectacular combination of low bourgeoisie, Machiavellian enterprise, and Kantian determinism, and will be again.