Buffoons

Anyone who raises the issues that I have raised in many of my posts with regard to serious voting anomalies and the implication that they are harbingers of voter fraud or other irregularities are termed "conspiracy theorists" or worse by members of the four constituencies. In fact, they accuse anyone who didn't see Donald Trump as Hilter, Jr. of being an uneducated fool who just can't see the "damage" wrought by the evil Trump (you know, a booming economy that actually benefitted the middle class and minorities, no new wars, the beginning of Middle East peace, a government that wasn't as crippled by red tape, fair trade the benefited American workers, needed resistance to China and Iran, fewer government regulations that strangle small businessesw, vaccine development in record time—that "damage").

John Daniel Davidson comments:

With the end of Donald Trump’s presidency fast approaching, we’ve seen a surge of columns and posts asserting that Republicans and Trump supporters have lost touch with reality. After four years of marinating in “falsehoods” and “disinformation”—a term that really just means “information I don’t like”—Trump’s backers are all turned around, we’re told. They believe much that isn’t so.

David Brooks of The New York Times explains that these poor saps, most of whom, he says, are uneducated, uncredentialed people who don’t live in prosperous cities, have retreated to conspiracy theories to explain their misfortune and unhappiness. “People in this precarious state are going to demand stories that will both explain their distrust back to them and also enclose them within a safe community of believers,” he writes. Trump, QAnon, and Alex Jones “rose up to give them those stories and provide that community.”

Over at The New Yorker, editor David Remnick ponders the grave costs of Trump’s “assault on the press and the truth,” asking how many COVID-19 victims “died because they chose to believe the President’s dismissive accounts of the disease rather than what public-health officials were telling the press? Half of Republican voters believe Trump’s charge that the 2020 election was ‘rigged.’ What will be the lasting effects on American democracy of that disinformation campaign?”

These are just representative samples, but across the mainstream commentariat the gist is all the same: if you support Trump, you’re likely a poor person who believes conspiracy theories and is dangerously disconnected from reality, partly because you resent successful people like Messrs. Brooks and Remnick. You live in a fantasyland because it assuages your feelings of inferiority, which are mostly justified. You’re paranoid because you’re powerless, and the alternate reality you’ve constructed for yourself gives you a sense of power and agency in a confusing, unsettled world.

But here’s the thing. Everything these media elites say about Trump supporters can more properly be said about media elites themselves. Who really has been living in a fantasyland these last four years? Is it the ordinary Americans—including a lot of educated, white-collar professionals—who voted for a president they felt would shake up the sclerotic status quo in Washington, or a press corps that perpetuated an actual conspiracy about Trump-Russia collusion for years?

Projection, anyone?

The behavior of the four constituencies over the past four years was so outrageous, so vile, so dishonest, and so wrong that they desperately need to salvage their self-image. How? By demonstrating through condescension, arrogance, and dishonesty that the 70 million people who disagree with them are somehow flawed. Some have gone so far as to recommend (in the style of the infamous Khmer Rouge) that all 70 million need "re-education." Incredible.

The funny thing is that those 70 million now look at the four constituencies for what they are—buffoons who fail far more frequently than they succeed and are wrong far more often than they are right. 

Unable to demonstrate how the many accomplishments of the past administration are a "threat to democracy" they fall back on ad hominem attacks. It makes them feel really, really good and really, really superior. 

They don't have the self-awareness to realize that most of the 70 million are laughing at them.