Chief Big Dark Cloud

“It’s always darkest just before it’s pitch black.” –Mark Shields, PBS’ RNC coverage

The Big Dark Cloud could be the title of Trump’s acceptance speech, more for what it was in itself than for the world it supposedly represented. It was an hour & a quarter harangue of shrill shouting over a projected doom & gloom it claimed itself the antidote to, more accurately the agent of, guaranteed to stoke the nation’s amorphous fears & lynch-mob indignation as self-fulfilling justification of its radical disruptiveness.

The perverse irony is that, were he to get elected, he could very well bring the country & world the very dark cloud he rails at, being partly his own projection–though not his alone, tapping into a substratum of the social psyche easily stirred up. I imagine the extremists he uses as his foil hope for his election to turn a much larger segment of the Islamic world  anti-American, shifting the balance against the west as it polarizes around a Muslim-Christian split rather than around the distinction between violent separatist extremism & pluralist, multi-cultural modernism.

Given the strange electoral climate, & the amount of scattered madness in the world, the strategy of sowing fear, gloom & doom could just work, remaking the atmosphere sufficiently in that direction to get elected–despite its dislocation from the original facts. If so, it will be because of a bad combination of circumstances & the lingering effectiveness of demagogy–starting with repetitive assertion, viscerally delivered.

[The full article is in the “Year of the Fluke” pdf., including the “Way of the Assertion,” & its key example, “I alone can fix it.”]