"It's the false epitome stupid!"
Huh?
Yes, bear with me.
If you are Donald Trump, the decision in Chicago yesterday to drop charges against Smollett creates an irresistible opportunity to exploit the occasion for personal gain. And nothing feeds the need of Team Trump to distract from everything they do like the chance to accuse a black person, immigrant, or minority of something. And the Smollett case could not be better - he is black and gay. Terrific. And this appears to be a case of false victimization. Even better. And he got off - a black person who is not deserving who benefits from favoritism from authorities. Great. Anything else? We are going to investigate - see, we can investigate, too, just like you Democrats do. Perfect.
But there's more. One of the great tools used over and over by Team Trump is the false epitome. Highlighting the Smollett case, which does, in fact, appear to be a miscarriage of justice creates a focus that is intended to represent a far broader case. For those conservatives who like to obsess about these things, this single case provides an opportunity to take this one example as representative of a much more extensive problem.
Smollett was treated initially as a victim, but he was a perpetrator...becomes
They are all claiming to be victims, but they are all perpetrators.
False epitome was at work in Trump's claims that immigrants come here to kill people, often using as examples drivers involved in fatal traffic accidents - as if that is identical to deliberately murdering people.
And, perhaps more importantly, to help any such conservatives hold dearly to that fallacy, Trump acknowledges NO EXCEPTIONS to this rule. "They" must all be bad people. Therefore, Team Trump can never acknowledge, let alone, praise the noble sacrifice of Humayun Khan. Because that threatens the logic of false epitome - if any are good, even noble, maybe others are too...maybe they are just like us in many ways...No, we can't have people thinking like that. In fact, given the opportunity, take down his grieving mother and father.
False epitome is an especially sinister weapon because, like many of Trump's weapons and his endlessly awful behavior, the underlying reality hides in plain sight.
When Trump distracts and attacks with an argument or action that takes a specific case - of his choosing - and unreasonably extrapolates to make a general case that appeals to his followers- traditional journalists are at a loss to identify what is really happening. But, at this point, the rest of us should not be fooled.
Thursday, March 28, 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
"Inevitable Progress"
In "Trump’s America does not care" Robert Kagan presents an interesting analysis of the Trump revolution from the perspective of international diplomacy: "the United States as rogue superpower, neither isolationist nor internationalist, neither withdrawing nor in decline, but active, powerful and entirely out for itself."
Kagan observes that "Trump is not merely neglecting the liberal world order; he is milking it for narrow gain, rapidly destroying the trust and sense of common purpose that have held it together and prevented international chaos for seven decades."
As we have seen over the past two years, the role of the U.S. in the international order has been turned upside down. Common sense dictates that even an election of a Democrat as president in 2020 can not reverse this because once "America First" takes hold and requires a "Me First" or an "Us First" from other nations, excluding the U.S., other countries know they can not count on the U.S. to honor treaties or commitments from one administration to the next.
Kagan states, "Trump’s world is a struggle of all-against-all. There are no relationships based on common values. There are merely transactions determined by power. It is the world that a century ago brought us two world wars."
Kagan writes more expansively on a similar theme in "The strongmen strike back: Authoritarianism has reemerged as the greatest threat to the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. And we have no idea how to confront it."
In this piece he recounts the history of the tension between authoritarianism and liberal democracy over the past several hundred years, with the First World War largely representing a great battle between the two and the Second World War marking the defeat of authoritarians and a "new birth" for liberalism.
Of interest to readers of this blog, Kagan remarks that the authoritarians are succeeding in ways never imagined since the end of the Cold War. He writes:
"It has been decades since liberal democracies took this challenge seriously. The end of the Cold War seemed like indisputable proof of the correctness of the Enlightenment view — the belief in inexorable progress, both moral and scientific, toward the achievement of the physical, spiritual and intellectual freedom of every individual. History was “the progress of the consciousness of freedom,” as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel put it in 1830; or as Francis Fukuyama wrote in "The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992, there were fundamental processes at work dictating 'a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies — in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.'” [emphasis added]
This observation about the current reversal of progress belies "the belief in inexorable progress"on a global scale that mirrors the belief in "Inevitable Progress" expressed as Point #4 of the Six Points keynote page of this blog.
Kagan observes that "Trump is not merely neglecting the liberal world order; he is milking it for narrow gain, rapidly destroying the trust and sense of common purpose that have held it together and prevented international chaos for seven decades."
As we have seen over the past two years, the role of the U.S. in the international order has been turned upside down. Common sense dictates that even an election of a Democrat as president in 2020 can not reverse this because once "America First" takes hold and requires a "Me First" or an "Us First" from other nations, excluding the U.S., other countries know they can not count on the U.S. to honor treaties or commitments from one administration to the next.
Kagan states, "Trump’s world is a struggle of all-against-all. There are no relationships based on common values. There are merely transactions determined by power. It is the world that a century ago brought us two world wars."
Kagan writes more expansively on a similar theme in "The strongmen strike back: Authoritarianism has reemerged as the greatest threat to the liberal democratic world — a profound ideological, as well as strategic, challenge. And we have no idea how to confront it."
In this piece he recounts the history of the tension between authoritarianism and liberal democracy over the past several hundred years, with the First World War largely representing a great battle between the two and the Second World War marking the defeat of authoritarians and a "new birth" for liberalism.
Of interest to readers of this blog, Kagan remarks that the authoritarians are succeeding in ways never imagined since the end of the Cold War. He writes:
"It has been decades since liberal democracies took this challenge seriously. The end of the Cold War seemed like indisputable proof of the correctness of the Enlightenment view — the belief in inexorable progress, both moral and scientific, toward the achievement of the physical, spiritual and intellectual freedom of every individual. History was “the progress of the consciousness of freedom,” as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel put it in 1830; or as Francis Fukuyama wrote in "The End of History and the Last Man” in 1992, there were fundamental processes at work dictating 'a common evolutionary pattern for all human societies — in short, something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy.'” [emphasis added]
This observation about the current reversal of progress belies "the belief in inexorable progress"on a global scale that mirrors the belief in "Inevitable Progress" expressed as Point #4 of the Six Points keynote page of this blog.
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