How are we seeing this daily upheaval of T news, and his jarring tweets, idiotic statements? Is this becoming normalized…?
Although this New Republic article was written two years ago, it is worth noting that these predictors about T are being incorporated into our thinking. We are shocked, yes, and each day a bit more numb to his insane and more autocratic leadership style.
A lot of pundits today on the Sunday shows are discussing how we, constituents, news groups are being slowly boiled, (parable about the frog who slowly boils to death) because we are not noticing that we’re being chununked/head faked into paying more attention to why the Philadelphia Eagles are being disinvited, or ‘where’s Melania?’ or why does T tweet Fake News all the time? Why, because these diversions work…run people down, create news fatigue.
The complicit GOP, giving him a pass believing T is leading us in the right direction or rather getting them what they want by allowing for deregulation of banks, our environmental protections via EPA have been dismantled, because it serves their financial interests, ie Koch money to pay for big campaigns etc.
Next up will be the dismantling of Obamacare with the mandate gone to make it more difficult to get buy in. But because the health issue is the biggest Democratic rallying point, and mid terms are close, this could boomerang for T.
And there is talk of course that Ryan wants to end Medicare, Social Security…because there is no money for it. With the tax relief (see #boon4TheBillionaires) and tax revenue dwindling, it was always planned to get at these entitlements which in itself is a huge discussion.
All these big ticket items (big votes ahead for entitlements, Mueller investigations and pending elections) are already changing the political and economic landscape affecting how citizens participate with government. With T mostly keyed into his poll numbers, and how he’s doing exclusively with them, it never makes sense to the more liberal voters that T will do anything good for the country. And he’s proven he is only out for himself, oh, and Russia. :-0
A lot to think about, right? Any thoughts?
The insidious psychology of normalizing Donald Trump.
Hua Hsu has written an excellent essay in The New Yorker on the issue that has dominated the political conversation since Trump’s election: the creeping normalization of a president-elect who holds hateful views on race, leans authoritarian, and takes pleasure in demeaning women. Hsu notes the dangers in empathizing too strongly with those white voters, downtrodden or otherwise, who propelled Trump to victory, writing, “[I]n the rush to be radically empathetic, and reckon with another’s disaffection, a different kind of normalization occurs: We validate an identity politics that is often rooted in denying other people’s right to the same.”
This sentiment should suffuse the burgeoning politics of opposition to Trump and what he stands for. As Leon Wieseltier wrote in The Washington Post this weekend, “There is no economic analysis that can extenuate bigotry. The scapegoating of otherness by miserable people cannot be justified by their misery.” Wieseltier goes on to argue that those who oppose Trump should not allow their outrage to cool, since this itself is a kind of normalization that will allow Trumpism to infect the body politic. What Hsu and Wieseltier are both expressing, in their different ways, is a desire not to forget the singular awfulness of Trump and the absurdity of him occupying the Oval Office.
But as Democrats begin the necessary process of trying to win back these disaffected white voters, and as President Donald J. Trump starts to become a fact of life, his normalization, to a certain extent, will be inevitable. “Habit weakens all things,” Proust wrote, describing the ways in which time loosens our connection to what we felt in the past and desensitizes us to the world that takes its place. Proust is describing forgotten sensations of pain and love, but the idea easily applies to feelings of revulsion and anger. The tragic part of Trump being elected is that it happened, and even the most vigilant awareness will not keep it from infiltrating who we are.
And the New Yorker article mentioned above, also two years ago.
Americanness is a sponge, not an ethnicity; normalization is a key part of how it works. It resides in the way that we speak, in the ideas that get refined and reworked and encoded in ordinary words until they seem harmless enough. It’s the ability to fit things into a narrative that flatters our ability to reason. Normalization is the process through which wisdom becomes conventional and utopian ideals slam against questions of feasibility. And so we should remain suspicious of efforts to welcome Trumpism into the fold of mainstream American ideas, particularly when normalizing him suggests the privilege to pick and choose, to infer the existence of another’s decency and humanity, to laugh, and to think that, at the end of the day, we all just want the same thing.