[Disclaimer: This post has nothing to do with value judgments or ought questions i.e. what/who is right/wrong. Treat this as an phenomenological analysis. Just because I talk about, and even from the perspective of, different sides of a debate, doesn't mean I favor any of them]
I was listening to Kyle Kulinski's Secular Talk this morning, and chanced upon this clip:
The first three minutes cover the actual news, the rest is Kulinski's commentary. Here's the story in brief. There was an attack that took place in Garland on a Muhammad Cartoon-drawing contest. You'd expect the average politician or intellectual to wholeheartedly condemn the attacks with no ifs or buts. We'd expect this to happen even more in the case of Trump, since his rhetoric has focused a lot on Islamist fundamentalism. However, while not condoning the attack, these are the tweets Trump sent out:
(Tweets taken from here)
As an aside, I have no idea why all of his tweets have such abrupt and dramatic endings. Anyways, here's why I find the story interesting.
Many pundits ascribe Trump's success to his populist campaign and messaging. Given the fact that this man has been a part of the economic establishment for virtually all of his life (and has now chosen Mike Pence as VP), the idea that Trump could conceivably be a populist seems prima facie implausible. However, that Trump's campaign did indeed have threads of populism is hard to argue against- his stance against money in politics, the trade deals, refusing to make a big deal out of transgender bathroom issue- these are things the average person can relate to. Colloquially, of course, populism refers to thinking and acting the way the regular person thinks and acts.
But how does the regular person think and act? Let's try to define this negatively. Intellectuals, pundits, social and political activists usually have well-developed worldviews (if not metaphysical then at least ethical). There's a principle to their thought process, a rigid set of rules which dictate their judgment and action. This level of finesse in thought is something often missing from 'the masses', so to speak. Instead of closely following a code or a fleshed out ethic, the average man usually follows his innate sense of value and judges things at a case-by-case basis. It's this lack of a readily accessible conceptual principle to guide one's actions is what much of populist thought boils down to.
I think this characterizes much of Trump's thought and actions. I'll try to explain this point with the example I opened with. See free speech absolutism is a carefully constructed doctrine, considering factors like the intrinsic value of liberty and possibility of a slippery slope, among other things. But Trump, or the regular masses, don't really have any fleshed out principle to govern their actions. I find it plausible that free speech absolutism may not seem very palatable to most folks. If you ask the man on the street- what's your opinion on the fact that UCLA argued for the rights of KKK members to protest in a minority community? Unless they have a white supremacist ax to grind, their reaction would probably not be very positive. The same applies for allowing the mockery of a highly revered religious figure, especially at times of religiously motivated tension and intolerance. We see glimpses of both of these aspects in the tweets Trump sent out- first, over-the-top satirizing of respected figures isn't a value one should promote to begin with (see his Jesus counterexample), and second, it's counterproductive to let these events happen when they are known to provoke violence. I think these are the exact lines along which the common man on the street would think. It's only when you sit such a person down and educate them about the more abstract issues in the background- like how this would lead to something of a slippery slope which would curb our liberties in an unwarranted and aggressive way- would (might?) you get an ascent to free speech absolutism. It's interesting that in the commentary video I linked to at the beginning of this post, Kulinski makes it sound like any and all good person should readily accept free speech absolutism in all its forms. Punditry has its blind spots. Kulinski is seeing some layers here that the average man doesn't see, and that's what he's not aware of.
I noticed something similar in the exchange between Trump and Chris Matthews about abortion. When Matthews asked Trump whether he would punish the women, after a lot of unsuccessful dodging, Trump had to come out and say- yes, there needs to be some sort of punishment. Of course, Trump later retracted this comment (probably after being told off by the party platform), but when I was listening to the exchange- I sat there thinking, you know what, that seems like the more "common sense" thing to say. I mean if someone believes abortion is no different from murder, then doesn't that make all persons who consent to the procedure legally culpable? It's incredibly difficult to sustain the belief that abortion is murder yet not hold the woman who consents to this accountable. The conservatives disagree, because they have a constructed ideology (which, to their mind, supersedes common sense) which says something else.
Same goes for the transgender bathroom issue, which has been talked about in both sides of the political spectrum. Here again, pundits are seeing too many layers where there aren't any. Trump is going by the lowest common denominator gut in his body. For the average person, even if they have conservative leanings, they would simply fail to see how choice of bathrooms can have that much of an effect in the grand scheme of things. The fact that we're spending so much time discussing bathrooms in a world with its fair share of problems seems absurd. Of course, if at this point in the conversation, our conservative friend were to swoop in and explain to the layman the more abstract and downstream ways in which this can affect his values, maybe the conservatively-minded layman would ascent to the principle. But ceteris paribus, there is no principle to the populist psyche. It doesn't see that many layers, doesn't consider consequences too far removed from what's in front of him.
To the extent he's not accountable to the party platform, all of Trump's actions and judgments are guided by this exact sort of reasoning- a very commonsense sort of gut-feeling. In a way, that's the core of populist thought.
Here's what Trump later went on to say on Fox & Friends about the drawing Muhammad issue. See if you can find a very simple, commonsense thread of reasoning in this. I believe this neatly substantiates my analysis.
I was listening to Kyle Kulinski's Secular Talk this morning, and chanced upon this clip:
The first three minutes cover the actual news, the rest is Kulinski's commentary. Here's the story in brief. There was an attack that took place in Garland on a Muhammad Cartoon-drawing contest. You'd expect the average politician or intellectual to wholeheartedly condemn the attacks with no ifs or buts. We'd expect this to happen even more in the case of Trump, since his rhetoric has focused a lot on Islamist fundamentalism. However, while not condoning the attack, these are the tweets Trump sent out:
(Tweets taken from here)
As an aside, I have no idea why all of his tweets have such abrupt and dramatic endings. Anyways, here's why I find the story interesting.
Many pundits ascribe Trump's success to his populist campaign and messaging. Given the fact that this man has been a part of the economic establishment for virtually all of his life (and has now chosen Mike Pence as VP), the idea that Trump could conceivably be a populist seems prima facie implausible. However, that Trump's campaign did indeed have threads of populism is hard to argue against- his stance against money in politics, the trade deals, refusing to make a big deal out of transgender bathroom issue- these are things the average person can relate to. Colloquially, of course, populism refers to thinking and acting the way the regular person thinks and acts.
But how does the regular person think and act? Let's try to define this negatively. Intellectuals, pundits, social and political activists usually have well-developed worldviews (if not metaphysical then at least ethical). There's a principle to their thought process, a rigid set of rules which dictate their judgment and action. This level of finesse in thought is something often missing from 'the masses', so to speak. Instead of closely following a code or a fleshed out ethic, the average man usually follows his innate sense of value and judges things at a case-by-case basis. It's this lack of a readily accessible conceptual principle to guide one's actions is what much of populist thought boils down to.
I think this characterizes much of Trump's thought and actions. I'll try to explain this point with the example I opened with. See free speech absolutism is a carefully constructed doctrine, considering factors like the intrinsic value of liberty and possibility of a slippery slope, among other things. But Trump, or the regular masses, don't really have any fleshed out principle to govern their actions. I find it plausible that free speech absolutism may not seem very palatable to most folks. If you ask the man on the street- what's your opinion on the fact that UCLA argued for the rights of KKK members to protest in a minority community? Unless they have a white supremacist ax to grind, their reaction would probably not be very positive. The same applies for allowing the mockery of a highly revered religious figure, especially at times of religiously motivated tension and intolerance. We see glimpses of both of these aspects in the tweets Trump sent out- first, over-the-top satirizing of respected figures isn't a value one should promote to begin with (see his Jesus counterexample), and second, it's counterproductive to let these events happen when they are known to provoke violence. I think these are the exact lines along which the common man on the street would think. It's only when you sit such a person down and educate them about the more abstract issues in the background- like how this would lead to something of a slippery slope which would curb our liberties in an unwarranted and aggressive way- would (might?) you get an ascent to free speech absolutism. It's interesting that in the commentary video I linked to at the beginning of this post, Kulinski makes it sound like any and all good person should readily accept free speech absolutism in all its forms. Punditry has its blind spots. Kulinski is seeing some layers here that the average man doesn't see, and that's what he's not aware of.
I noticed something similar in the exchange between Trump and Chris Matthews about abortion. When Matthews asked Trump whether he would punish the women, after a lot of unsuccessful dodging, Trump had to come out and say- yes, there needs to be some sort of punishment. Of course, Trump later retracted this comment (probably after being told off by the party platform), but when I was listening to the exchange- I sat there thinking, you know what, that seems like the more "common sense" thing to say. I mean if someone believes abortion is no different from murder, then doesn't that make all persons who consent to the procedure legally culpable? It's incredibly difficult to sustain the belief that abortion is murder yet not hold the woman who consents to this accountable. The conservatives disagree, because they have a constructed ideology (which, to their mind, supersedes common sense) which says something else.
Same goes for the transgender bathroom issue, which has been talked about in both sides of the political spectrum. Here again, pundits are seeing too many layers where there aren't any. Trump is going by the lowest common denominator gut in his body. For the average person, even if they have conservative leanings, they would simply fail to see how choice of bathrooms can have that much of an effect in the grand scheme of things. The fact that we're spending so much time discussing bathrooms in a world with its fair share of problems seems absurd. Of course, if at this point in the conversation, our conservative friend were to swoop in and explain to the layman the more abstract and downstream ways in which this can affect his values, maybe the conservatively-minded layman would ascent to the principle. But ceteris paribus, there is no principle to the populist psyche. It doesn't see that many layers, doesn't consider consequences too far removed from what's in front of him.
To the extent he's not accountable to the party platform, all of Trump's actions and judgments are guided by this exact sort of reasoning- a very commonsense sort of gut-feeling. In a way, that's the core of populist thought.
Here's what Trump later went on to say on Fox & Friends about the drawing Muhammad issue. See if you can find a very simple, commonsense thread of reasoning in this. I believe this neatly substantiates my analysis.