Sunday, 22 December 2024

 


Subject: Cognitive dissonance
 
Am I suffering from cognitive dissonance as I try to cope with the sight of an almost wholly red landscape east to west north to south of the political landscape in America.
The totality of the Trump win is startling, like a hurricane it has swept out the influence of the Democratic Party from all the nooks and crannies from all the homesteads, the rural towns and powerful metropolitan cities. Never has a political ideology (liberalism) been dealt such a blow, is it the end of any alliance with “the other”, an end of meeting someone halfway where only totalitarianism remains.
Liberalism has a lot to answer for with its refusal to accept what might be called ’home grown culture’ for a globalised equivalent, where cultures were homogenised to mean the same thing  but which in fact were the traffic lights people relied upon to distinguish themselves. People don’t like being identified as data held in a computer, they don’t like being analysed and identified by an algorithm.  Their honorific value i’m British you are from Pakistani runs deep in most cultures and whilst the acceptance of differences shouldn’t lead to hostility they are part of the make up by which we use to identify ourselves.
Americans  have long been separate from their European cousins. National yet unique in their Constitution which suspends any idea of empiricism and instead creates an inter-lacing of  statutes which were erected to stop overt control from the top. This fear  of the power of government by an over weaning executive has led to a disparity between State and Federal control in which ‘abortion laws’ are but one of the striking variances. Trump appears to have cut through the internecine warfare of political debate with slogans such as  “ make America great again “ (no matter the cost). The voters bought into it, tired at last of the woolly rhetoric of Democratic Party idealism they trumped instead (no pun intended) for the soil on the boots of the cowboy and an individualists shoot out.
Since the end of the Second World War and the founding of the United Nations “talk, talk” became the modus operandi and it is only in the last decade or so that the bush fires of intolerance have broken out threatening to be beyond the control of even the best firefighter.
Trump will burn back the opposition by financial means, money having become the great accelerant or de accelerant which everyone understands. Trump has little congruence of harm his disruption is likely to bring. He is fixated with self and not the other person but maybe it will be a wake-up call to dislodge the assumption that there is a class who knows what’s best whilst secure in their ivory tower.

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