Frank's Musings

People are afraid not to humor Donald J. Trump.  Why? Because they are gullibly afraid of his power to retaliate in the press and through legal nuisance actions. 

Or is the reason more fundamental?  It’s mystifying how much political power is attributed by the     -press to Trump.  A pretty solid 40% of the voting U.S. public expresses its uncritical support for the antiestablishmentarian views vaunted by this narcissist national figure.  He basks in a delusion of leadership.  His good luck to have inherited vast wealth from a family real estate fortune has hoodwinked greedy bankers and investors into backing a series of marginal and failed schemes.  He fell into the role of an entrepreneurial wizard that allowed him to finance outlandish hotels, casinos, other real estate projects and an enviable lifestyle.  More ominously, he became a symbol for a disenchanted segment of Western society that resents its depressed living conditions compared to those enjoyed by the top stratus of wealthy people.   

There are many reasons for the emergence of a would-be autocrats like Donald J. Trump.  Some are global in scope, explaining the current rise of authoritarian leaders in many proto democratic countries—Orban, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Modi to name a few.  One unifying cause of the vulnerability of advanced societies to exploitation by determined domineers is the worldwide technological revolution.  Populations have been seduced into dependence on convenient sources of information, including unmonitored social media services, as opposed to regulated and conscientiously edited publications and broadcast networks (if not countered by oppressive government-owned news outlets) for the formation of their opinions.  The owners of these channels of communication are motivated by the search for profit or by the need for political acquiescence, not by a desire for critical thought. 

Ultimately, the public allows itself to be so exploited because it is easier to abdicate responsibility for educating themselves to those who are otherwise motivated to do so than to devote the necessary energy to performing that task themselves.  In the end the culture of democracy in the West will be destroyed unless people judge the value of its preservation higher than the value of leisure and self-gratification.   

There was a time when higher values, like faith or justice, dominated the personal goals of comfort and overcoming peer pressure.  Short-term hubris must have been the evil against which religions were originally created.  The prophets who created them possibly just gave up on arguing for a more rational long-term view of the future of the human race.  We have to learn this lesson again every time we make our world more easily exploitable by polemicists like Trump.