His tweets are classic fool behavior. They are raw, ridiculous and frequently self-destructive. He takes on an icon of the official culture and he throws mud at it. The point is not the message of the tweet. It’s to symbolically upend hierarchy, to be oppositional.
.. The sad part is that so many people treat Trump’s tweets as if they are arguments when in fact they are carnival.
.. They contribute to carnival culture.
.. The first problem with today’s carnival culture is that there’s an ocean of sadism lurking just below the surface. The second is that it’s not real. It doesn’t really address the inequalities that give rise to it. It’s just combative display.
Bannon Versus Trump
The populist ethno-nationalists in the Trump White House do not believe in this order. Their critique — which is simultaneously moral, religious, economic, political and racial — is nicely summarized in the remarks Steve Bannon made to a Vatican conference in 2014.
Once there was a collection of Judeo-Christian nation-states, Bannon argued, that practiced a humane form of biblical capitalism and fostered culturally coherent communities. But in the past few decades, the party of Davos — with its globalism, relativism, pluralism and diversity — has sapped away the moral foundations of this Judeo-Christian way of life.
Humane capitalism has been replaced by the savage capitalism that brought us the financial crisis. National democracy has been replaced by a crony-capitalist network of global elites. Traditional virtue has been replaced by abortion and gay marriage. Sovereign nation-states are being replaced by hapless multilateral organizations like the E.U.
.. In this view, Putin is a valuable ally precisely because he also seeks to replace the multiracial, multilingual global order with strong nation-states. Putin ardently defends traditional values. He knows how to take the fight to radical Islam.
It’s actually interesting to read Donald Trump’s ideologist, Bannon, next to Putin’s ideologist Alexander Dugin. It’s like going back to the 20th century and reading two versions of Marxism.
One is American Christian and the other orthodox Russian, but both have grandiose, sweeping theories of world history, both believe we’re in an apocalyptic clash of civilizations, both seamlessly combine economic, moral and political analysis.
.. “We must create strategic alliances to overthrow the present order of things,” Dugin has written, “of which the core could be described as human rights, anti-hierarchy and political correctness — everything that is the face of the Beast, the Antichrist.”
Shields and Brooks on Trump’s unprecedented transition
President-elect Donald Trump made headlines this week for his reference to a possible arms race and his involvement in U.S. foreign policy prior to taking office. Judy Woodruff speaks with syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks about whether Mr. Trump’s strategy is to keep people “off balance,” as well as potential conflicts of interest within his Cabinet.
Does David Brooks Think Barack Obama Is the Answer?
David Brooks returned yesterday to his prediction of a coming political divide between the forces of “open” versus “closed.”
.. Rather than “open” and “closed,” I suggested, perhaps the real divide is between those who want to push ahead with what Brooks calls opening and those who want to slow down and correct course. We might even call the Openers “progressive.”
.. Are such communities best created through individual initiative and enterprise or large government interventions? Here, Brooks has apparently decided that large government interventions are the way to go.
.. To distinguish it, we should replace his “individual” and “social” labels on this community-building axis with “bottom-up” and “top-down.”
.. But government has no track record of accomplishing any of the tasks he would demand of it here. All the risk in this approach gets placed on those falling furthest behind and least equipped to manage it.
.. What Brooks wants to sell as “open/social” he should properly label “progressive/top-down.” Unsurprisingly, then, it happens to align almost precisely with the agenda of Barack Obama over the past eight years.