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Showing posts with the label Trumpism

Popeye Trumpism and the Pitfalls of Authenticity

As disconcerting as the election of Trump was, nothing is more telling than the fact that authenticity is coming back into the lexicon of everyday use, courtesy of the populist right and the crypto-rightism of figures like Alex Jones.   When Hillary said she was two different people in public and in private she might in fact have been sincere, pointing out a simple truth.   In fact most of us act differently in front of different people. We are a different person in front of our friends or in front of our parents.   The same goes for the public and private spheres.   We not only act differently, we speak differently without realizing that we do so.   That Trump is seen as authentic because he seems to be the same person everywhere he appears, only shows how perfectly he plays his part in public.   Are we to assume that President Trump will be the same person as Apprentice Trump, the boardroom Trump, and the bedroom Trump? I can only surmise that Trump’s election is taking humanity b

Did Somebody Say Fascism? Shadefreude and Hannah Arendt on the American Election of Donald Trump

In 1950 Hannah Arendt wrote these words in the preface to her book The Origins of Totalitarianism “Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecendented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. Never has our future been more unpredictable, n