welcome to usaapay.com

2020-

2020-11-11 k
And as for the Left? Harris describes them this way: “Pure sanctimony. Pure judgment. You are not good enough. You’re guilty, not only for your own sins, but for the sins of your fathers . . . Tear down those statues and bend the f—king knee.”

The Left’s Algorithmic America

Wokeness is an ideology that unites two of the unlikeliest allies ever in defense of it: high school girls, and software engineers.

Donald Trump may or may not prevail in his battle to secure reelection. To his supporters, it appears that fraudulent city machines are churning out reams of false ballots designed to secure a victory for his opponents that they did not earn, but which the establishment is nevertheless determined to grant them. To his opponents, Trump is waging a pathetic rearguard fight against a repudiation of his personal repulsiveness that so thoroughly disgusted persuadable voters that they would not reelect him despite four years of improving personal circumstances and a reelection agenda with which they otherwise would have agreed.

Whoever turns out to be correct—and there is evidence for both that only the courts will be able to sift through—it is time we take stock of something more important: that is, the sheer absurdity of what has happened over the past four years.

Even if Trump prevails in his reelection bid, this election has shown something important: he can bleed. He is not an unstoppable voice of nascent fascism in America, nor is he an indomitable force of vengeance against liberals who are begging constantly to be owned. He is a mortal man and a normal politician who can lose states he won, and win votes he lost in the past election. He is not a Putinesque autocrat who can fix the vote in advance, suppress it out of existence, or strongarm his way to a second term by calling in the military. He is a phenomenally persuasive, and deeply polarizing man, who nevertheless refused to install an authoritarian regime even when confronted with a deadly pandemic that would have given him a ready-made excuse to do so, and who refused to send in the military to quell violent protests out of respect for federalism, despite having every reason to disregard it.

Whatever you think of his decisions in those cases, this is not the résumé of a budding fascist. Whatever authoritarianism liberals and NeverTrumpers hear in the president’s words, his actions are those of a man who respects and abides by process: in short, those of a small-l liberal, albeit one who sang from a more populist and nationalist arrangement of the standard American political hymnal.

Even within the American tradition, Trump does not rank in even the top-10 most authoritarian presidents America has had. There have been no Jacksonian rebukes of court decisions against him, no Wilsonian censorship of the press, no FDR-style wartime central planning, no Obama-style weaponization of intelligence services against his opponents, no Nixonian Saturday Night massacres, not even any Theodore Roosevelt-style trust=busting (much to the consternation of his many muzzled supporters).

Trump has governed much as you would expect a former reality star and real estate mogul to do: with a focus on interpersonal, economically driven deal-making at home and abroad, and a modest domestic agenda given the flavor of radicalism by his attention-grabbing antics to promote it.

And yet, despite being ultimately only a loudmouth with a relatively modest set of disagreements with the governing GOP consensus, Trump ended up as something much more alarming in our public consciousness: that is, he has ended his first term as nothing more or less than a Rorschach test for the anxieties of liberal America.

Future generations will look back on the first Trump term and marvel that a four-year-long moral panic about latent bigotry of all kinds was touched off among America’s supposedly most enlightened class because an insurgent reality star was able to defeat a perpetually unpopular candidate in an election he was forecast incorrectly to lose. So great was that moral panic, in fact, that during his reelection bid, large numbers of college-educated white voters lied even to pollsters about who they were voting for rather than risk disgrace and professional destruction for admitting their real preference.

Let me say that again: huge swathes of Americans felt powerless to express their beliefs and to advocate their preferred system of government and were sometimes even forcibly prevented from doing so by corporate fiat because a reality TV star was elected president.
...
One take by fervent anti-Trumper and Left-atheist Sam Harris offers a very good clue. Indeed, next to Michael Moore, Harris may have offered the single most cogent explanation of Trump’s appeal of the past four years. To quote him:

“One thing that Trump never communicates, and cannot possibly communicate, is a sense of his moral superiority. The man is totally without sanctimony. Even when his every utterance is purposed for self-aggrandizement. Even when he appears to be denigrating his supporters. Even when he is calling himself a genius. He is never actually communicating that is better than you, more enlightened, more decent. Because he’s not, and everyone knows it. The man is just a bundle of sin and gore, and never pretends to be anything more. Perhaps most importantly, he never aspires to be anything more. And because of this, because he is never really judging you—he can’t possibly judge you—he offers a truly safe space for human frailty, and hypocrisy, and self-doubt. He offers what no priest can credibly offer: a total expiation of shame. His personal shamelessness is a kind of spiritual balm. Trump is fat Jesus. He’s grab-them-by-the-pussy Jesus. He’s I’ll-eat-nothing-but-cheeseburgers-if-I-want-to Jesus. He’s I-want-to-punch-them-in-the-face Jesus. He’s go-back-to-your-shithole-countries Jesus. He’s no apologies Jesus.”

...
Which brings us back to Sam Harris’ observation about Trump: that he is a man who wholly eschews moral sanctimony. Since the beginning of conservatism in America, those on the Right have railed against the Left’s tendency to view humankind as perfectible and malleable. Silicon Valley’s Algorithmic America, which attempts to immanentize the eschaton at the point of an .exe, cannot tolerate a president who not only refuses to be perfected but who also refuses to believe that anyone else needs to be, because he does not have a totalizing view of perfection.

When you want to make the world perfect in a way a computer would recognize, a free society—and a leader who prefers freedom to algorithmically-driven utopia—is a design flaw. That anyone would prefer that design flaw is as irrational as someone preferring Windows 98 to Windows 11. Or preferring the old Facebook layout to the new one. Or preferring the old Twitter moderation rules.

Yet despite Silicon Valley’s relentless attempt to perfect their products, people do prefer old operating systems, old website layouts, and old site rules. Whoever wins this election, let us hope that enough of our fellow citizens still prefer America’s old, imperfect operating system—the United States Constitution—to repel the inevitable attempt to run the Woke Anti-Racism Virus Scanner on our minds. (read more)

______________________

Permission is hereby granted to any and all to copy and paste any entry on this page and convey it electronically along with its URL,
______________________