Final Answer: Trump or the Republic? By Jonathan Chait
In 1994, Alan Sokal, a
professor of physics at New York University, submitted an article to Social
Text, a journal of cultural studies. In the article, titled “Transgressing
the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Sokal
proposed that physical reality was nothing more than a social construct. The
article mocked as “the dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony
over the Western intellectual outlook” the notion that “there exists an
external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being
and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are encoded in
‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can obtain reliable, albeit
imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws by hewing to the ‘objective’
procedures and epistemological strictures prescribed by the (so-called)
scientific method.”
Sokal’s argument was a
parody of reasoning. In fact, as Sokal later revealed, it was intended to be absurd.
Sokal had grown concerned about a postmodernist literary theory that denied
objective truth taking hold within certain left-wing precincts of the academy.
His goal in publishing the article was to expose both the extremism of the
theory and the lack of intellectual standards of the people who safeguarded it
in prestigious journals like Social Text.
My initial response to
Donald Trump’s campaign was to see him as a living, breathing Sokal hoax on the
Republican Party. Here was a “candidate” stretching all of the features of
modern Republican politics — the disdain for objective truth, the substitute of
bluster for logic and detail, the appeal to ethnocentrism — past the point of
parody. It remained unclear for a very long time if Trump actually wanted to
win the presidency. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that he stood any chance.
Even if he could somehow capture the nomination, his unsuitability for office
was so overt that I believed the party Establishment would never allow him to
win. He was a cartoon dictator, a comic demonstration of his party’s
pathologies and the depths to which standards of political discourse had sunk
in a party used to worshiping the likes of Dubya and Sarah Palin. This was part
of the reason why, for a while, I wanted him to win the nomination. By winning the
nomination and then inevitably losing, Trump would demonstrate everything
liberals had been saying about the Republican Party more powerfully than we
could in a thousand columns.
By March, my point of view had changed. The main piece of evidence that
turned me around was a rediscovered interview Trump gave to Playboy in
1990, in which he had praised the Chinese government for its crackdown in
Tiananmen Square the previous year. The comments fit in with a long-standing
pattern of praise he had offered to various dictators for their ruthlessness.
I’ve mentioned this frequently because, while every Trump critic has their own
favorite evidence, this, to me, encapsulates his most alarming trait. Through
every iteration of his political profile — left-ish to far-right, pro-Democrat
and Republican — and every issue flip-flop, from “core” beliefs on trade and
immigration to abortion and everything else, Trump has never wavered in his
belief that strong leaders dominate and put down their opponents. He’s never
had any externally driven motive to say these things. He genuinely believes it.
More recently, another
belief of mine has fallen by the wayside: that even if Trump managed to eke out
a majority of delegates, the Republican elite would simply never give him the
cooperation he would need to win. I suspected simple self-interest would
dictate this. Trump is poison to the constituencies Republicans will need to
win to stay viable in the long run, and allowing the party to be associated with
him will have long-term costs. What’s more, a Trump presidency would likely
court catastrophic blowback for the party. Not to mention, I assumed a
significant number of Republicans, whatever their substantive policy
disagreements with liberals, would recoil from Trump out of sincere loyalty to
the republican form of government. And some conservatives have. A handful of
elected Republicans, like Ben Sasse, have withheld endorsements. Conservatives
like Ross Douthat and David Frum (“The vote you cast is for the republic and
the Constitution”) have defended a vote for Clinton as essential to preserve
the sanctity of the democratic system from an American Putin.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/final-answer-trump-or-the-republic.html
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