Frank's Musings

Voting for Trump in 2024 asserted many voters’  rejection of government’s utility.  They are extreme libertarians who  refuse to acknowledge the validity of any contradictory opinion by third party elites.  In fact, most people also dismiss the usefulness of understanding underlying causes. What’s important to them is how successfully to manipulate things or living beings and achieve happiness.

This is what Trump captures about his supporters—the MAGA crowd.  Its members welcome new scientific discoveries only because they allow the MAGA Crowd to make use of them to improve their lives.  Those who do seek to know underlying causes are driven not by material reward (although they do not reject rewards). Their egos are nourished, rather,  by the satisfaction that comes from solving a problem.

Sometimes, this  class of discoverers is frustrated by the failure of society to recognize and implement its serendipity. It may try to wrest control of government from the hands of the misguided implementers whose philosophy of social Justice they disdain.

For example, in 2024 Kamala Harris appealed to the educated upper and middle classes in hopes that winning their allegiance would automatically reverberate in her favor by means of autochthonous exercise of whatever influence they have on the remaining majority of the nation. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way. What should have been done was to instruct those who responded to her message on how to translate it into compelling guidance for “those who get it done,” i.e. the implementers, in a manner reminiscent of “ This Old House” or the old review, “Popular Mechanics.”

Without successfully instructing the majority of voting Citizens on how their lives benefit from the steady discovery of underlying causes and the continual application of that knowledge to the challenges everyone  faces daily,  demagogues of short-term advantage like Trump can always garner the support of a majority of the voters in a formally liberal democratic society, like ours.