There was a sort of general relief when we realized that Donald Trump would lose his re-election.
Many expected him to lose, not so much because of the mediocrity of his ideas as the stupid nature of his style of government. In other words, the way of mistreating and frying even those closest to his neighbors, his permanent war diplomacy, not to mention a diplomatic war in which the president was possible, without any mediation from any adviser, without being intervened in Congress, not even tangentially, in the wee hours of the morning, suddenly threatening the fundamental foundations of the very peaceful coexistence between nations.
At first, it was as if this behavior without previous examples, without reference points (“guidelines”), always exposed to the individual whim of a lonely man at night, risked leaving us lost. And, in fact, it was constantly anxious behavior. It seemed that his main motivation was to leave the American voter in dire need of a psychiatric consultation.
Now this situation had its counterparts. For example, friends would wake up the next day, run around on social media, and already inundated with presidential slurs the night before.
Then people would echo, comment, compose memes of all kinds, and also call their friends to try and figure out what the social or just human significance of what was going on was.
Either way, the point is, when it was realized that Trump had lost, a sort of great wave of relief circulated. Reality could have been a struggle, but not forever. It was possible to go back to the chroniclers we were most used to, more reasonable beings, unwilling to start a world conflict every week. In fact, columnists unwilling to start a global conflict every week, who typically write texts longer than a tweet, have returned to the internet.
It was as if suddenly, on Facebook, a brutal comic book conversation like “zab bing bang bung klung” had been replaced by the paused conversation and sotto voce of a college club: “You took the time to consider yourself by chance … Did you see the irony of the situation … Basically, the president was saying things very close to what … “.
Now we had to wait a week and inevitably started to miss it. That thing about getting up, turning on the coffee maker, and looking at the phone with some suspicion: is it? Another week and this mistrust has become boring: the press is afraid.
In less than a month, readers with a keen eye for political news, the American political debate, “administrative news” between Albany and New York, wondered if it was not time to migrate to a site. Far-left or right-wing web, whatever, in short, someone who greets me early in the morning with the absolute certainty that Hillary is drinking blood every day. And he’s part of a massive conspiracy movement that wants to turn the world into a child abuse cabal. It is the tip of the iceberg of the vast imaginary QAnon universe.
What does this show? 1) Trump’s policy was show business with enormous success and therefore great competence. He could terrify us for the silly things he would make up, but he didn’t bother anyone, and that was the most important thing. 2) There is a relationship between not being bored as a political strategy and putting ideas (not even mine) in the center of the public arena but the brutal loneliness of myself at 3 a.m. rethinking the world and using ice cream.
We prefer the confrontation between “characters” to a debate between ideas. Of course, the problem with character politics is that they are much more interested in the murder than the talk, the coup, than the electoral debate. Basically, it’s a movement that’s been in the air for a long time. As Hofstadter said in his founding essay of 1964, we are faced with the “paranoid style in politics”, not just the American one. And, in fact, the policy was geared more toward murder (John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Bob Kennedy, Herzog, etc.) than conviction.
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