Trump, Truth, and Will

I do not say Donald Trump is the new Adolph Hitler, but I’m not afraid of making comparisons between the two when appropriate. And I think the most obvious similarity between the Trump movement and the Nazi movement is in the belief of the will over the intellect. While there are many in the Trump camp capable of making cogent arguments and pointing out with clarity and facts the flaws of the Democrats and the mainstream media, the man himself is a walking fountain of untruths, bravado, and meaningless generalities. Hitler created his own brand of truth by tearing apart what generations of thinkers and institutions had struggled to create: a consensus not only of what is right and wrong, but a process through which we work to establish facts and a continually closer approximation of the truth.

Hitler tromped through the historic halls of knowledge like a bull in a china shop, intent on smashing to bits all that did not please him, willing to add new touches to classics works of art in order to make them say what he wanted them to say. Trump is not so brutal, in fact, he is not so bright as to worry about what cultural institutions have to say. He need not worry about such matters anyway because the United States he operates in today has little or nothing in the way of cultural institutions that might stand in his way. America has always been and is even more so at this moment a country of “now”. We are the present without a history, whereas Germany, especially during the rise of Hitler, was rich in tradition with strong institutions.

Nevertheless, we do have our conventions, even if the average American is not very aware of them. We have had the custom where our presidential candidates release their tax returns, but Donald Trump has sidestepped that practice. We have had the custom where presidential candidates treat each other and the office of the presidency with respect, again a practice Trump has disregarded. But Trump does not deviously seduce institutions the way Hitler did with the German Church, he simply avoids them. Trump has neither the temperament nor, frankly, the talent for such work. But while Trump does not actively pollute the existing power structures, he has effectively uprooted those practices we have long observed in our effort to make our politics something more than a naked struggle for victory at any cost. Within those discarded conventions was the implied idea that truth reigned supreme above the fray of battle that was politics, that no matter how dirty politicians were, they at least needed to give lip service to truth and the earnest search for facts.

Not so Trump. The Donald has no respect for facts, so much so that nobody really knows what his political philosophy is or what his policies are going to be. It was the political “struggle”, the will to win, that was of primary importance. The vast gaping holes in his campaign promises were papered over with words like “great”, “unbelievable”, and “bigly”. Supporters like to assume what they haven’t been told is beyond them anyway, the sort of thing only great men such as Trump are capable of understanding. Meanwhile, those who oppose him assume concentration camps and vast foreign intrigues lurk within Trump’s untold plans.

I do not believe Trump has a hidden agenda comparable to Hitler’s, but I do see the preference that Trump and his supporters have for will to triumph over truth, that simply believing something with enough force will make it so, that simply saying something loud enough will conquer competing truths, as though the title “truth” was an honor bestowed upon the winner of some physical competition.

This is the realm Trump is comfortable in, and if the use of the word does not bother you too much, that is where his genius lies.

And that is precisely the arena where those opposed to Trump have chosen to take him on. Democrats, rather than anchoring the whole political struggle in the world of observable phenomena, rather than demonstrate they have a viable alternative to the Trump movement and its approach, have elected to become little Trumps themselves. In short, they have lost their minds, and that does not bode well for the Trump resistance.

The Democrats are attempting to will Donald Trump into being a traitor to his country and a puppet of Vladimir Putin. They have abandoned a desire for fact-based arguments for ones based on the testimony of anonymous sources from agencies that have lied to the American public since their inception. Fervent Democrats are willing to believe anything, quite literally anything, that portrays Trump in a bad light. Their hatred of Donald Trump is illogical, unscientific, and worst of all, ineffectual. It is so bad that Trump supporters are quite literally laughing at them the way they would prefer to be laughing at Trump supporters, that basket of deplorables.

But nobody in the Democratic camp is laughing right now, not after the shellacking they took. Beaten though they were, however, they have yet to learn a lesson. When you get your ass handed to you, whether in a fight or in a political campaign, you do not just jump back into the fray with the same arguments and weapons you used the first time. You stop and ask yourself how the hell everything went so wrong, and you don’t try it again until you have figured it out, or else you’re going to get more of the same.

Let me humbly suggest to you part of your problem. You are fighting Trump with Trump tactics, all the while whining about how horrible Trump is for using such tactics. Your news articles have outrageous headlines screaming accusations that the articles themselves do not support. I saw today an article about a black man being stabbed with a headline saying “Black Man Lynched”. Let me humbly suggest there is a very clear distinction between the two, no matter how emotionally charged an argument is made, no matter how I am accused of being a bigot if I disagree with you. If the media you get your news from is no less shrill or unscrupulous than FOX News, you have lost the moral high ground.

Democrats have abandoned skepticism for emotional zeal. Your cause has become a religious one, with a decidedly fundamentalist tinge. You have no tolerance for those who venture to disagree with you and in that sense you have begun to resemble that which you rail against. Many of you look down on those uneducated whites with the same hatred and sense of superiority that I see in the worst of Trump supporters. If you do not see it, let me assure you that I have, and that those who support Trump and those inclined to support Trump have as well. I have heard liberals defend NAFTA by saying those who have lost their jobs should stop whining and get an education. I have seen all the cruelty, callousness, and nastiness from the right played out in the behavior of the left, with a dose of moral superiority added to the mix.

Accompanying the fear and hatred of Democrats is a feeling of total incomprehension. Only a few short months ago your biggest concern seemed to be allowing transgenders to pee where they wanted, now you’re living in a world far from the one you thought you knew. An entire segment of the population apparently has priorities that were different than yours, a substantial minority of Americans of whom you know nothing. And knowing nothing about someone permits you to project your deepest fears onto them.

Let me summarize for you: you fear, you hate, and you do not understand. In short, you are guilty of all the motivating behaviors you accuse Trump and his supporter of possessing. You have become that which you despise, with the added cherry of hypocrisy to top it off. That is why you have lost and will continue to lose.

This is not to say that there is not a lot wrong and a lot to fear from a Trump presidency, nor does it justify the hatred and fear that fuels much of it. But the answer to hatred, ignorance and fear is not to combat it with the same. Truth is a powerful weapon, but it is one that has been slowly slipping through the fingers of what we call the left here in America for a long time. Truth compromised is a broken sword. The sword of truth must be forged carefully by earnest artisans in order for it to be an effective weapon, and we have left the task to the makers of cheap trinkets.

People have lost faith in truth because its name has so long been used as a cover for marketers, advertisers, and crooked politicians. Nowhere in society today is it exhibited as it should be. It must be taken from the hands of those who abuse and sully her. It must be given a proper scrubbing and placed in an appropriate setting. Because truth in all its glory is an awesome sight to see indeed. It will rally the masses to its cause. It has no need for window dressing.

But even truth may not be enough. Will, too, may be necessary. To combat the power that is waged against truth, power may be required to defend it. But I am talking about a different kind of power than what is now being employed, what Gandhi and King called “soul power”. It is the power that comes from the conviction of one’s beliefs and the willingness to put them into practice. It is a resistance without hate, though it does require strength. It requires even more strength than physical power, because it requires you to have power not only over your enemy but also yourself. It requires loving your enemies

And there the battle is laid out for you. It is not merely a battle of intellects but a battle of power as well. You know this to be true deep within you, which is why your emotions are outstripping your reasoning. You are gearing up for battle, but you have armed yourself with the weapons of the enemy. Should you join the fray in such a manner, you will only prove that truth is insufficient and not your true motivator. You will justify by your own behavior that force alone is a fitting arbiter of justice, that truth in the end is only that which is presented most powerfully.

Humans are capable of acting according to their baser desires, or their loftier aspirations. They are motivated both by fear and by trust, by hatred and by love. You have to give them an alternative to fear, greed, and hatred. The contrast must be made so that there is no doubting what the choice is. Half-truths and words spoken in anger rather than in honesty only make it harder to see the choices we have to make. Truth must once again be placed upon the pedestal on which it belongs.

Given a clear choice, people will choose the brighter path, I firmly believe that to be true. But allow doubt to sink in, blur the lines so that no one is certain what truth or justice really is, and they will retreat into their baser natures. Even if you believed that the choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was a clear one, it’s obvious that enough other people did not, people who are in different circumstances than you. One choice now is to retreat into fear, to constrict your view of the world until it only encompasses what is best for you and those most like you. You have a choice to accept hatred and irrationality to guide you, just as you have a choice to see the other as the enemy. If so, I believe the darker forces of human nature have won. To choose the narrative that there is an “us” and a “them”, to believe that there is a darkness in the souls of others you cannot touch with light, is to become part of the problem and not the solution.

The way has been set out for you, the way forward, the noble path. People such as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King have shown that the answer to hatred and ignorance is not hatred and ignorance but love and understanding. Hell, two thousand years ago, the path was made quite clear. There is no mousey middle, at least not one powerful enough to oppose that which is darkest within us. The choice is war or peace, the choice is seeing others as enemies or as brothers and sisters. The choice is an all-inclusive US or a sinister and destructive belief in a THEM. In the end you must choose, because the middle ground you attempt to stake is unstable and has allowed you to slide to the opposite end than the one you allege to support. If you choose to make war against a THEM, you inevitably become that which you most despise.