Make it go away

Why do the establishment plus certain segments of the middle classes hate Donald Trump with such venom? Is it his policies, his actions, his manner or something else?

Presumably it is all of these things but in particular is seems to be his language. Trump knows how to speak the apolitical language of ordinary working people. The language of employment, living standards, traditional values and the adverse trends which are likely to impact those pragmatic concerns. That is to say he speaks the language of those who voted for him where the establishment speaks a purely political language. Trump is leading the long delayed battle between the apolitical and the political.

If we don’t speak or think of something does it go away? Of course it does. If we don’t talk about something within the public domain, where does it go? Where could it go but the sidelines? It fades away like the Cheshire Cat, sometimes disappearing altogether. This is the rationale behind political censorship, political correctness and political language generally – to make apolitical ideas go away.

Not thinking about witchcraft, not taking about it, not invoking it as the cause of natural disasters – these slow but inexorable changes made witchcraft go away. A desirable change we may say.

Honesty is much the same. Not thinking about honesty and what it is, not talking about it, not invoking it as a desirable ideal – these slow but inexorable changes are making honesty go away in the sense that it migrates to the boundaries of public discourse. As an ideal for public discourse it is being supplanted by other criteria. Clearly an undesirable change.

The key arena is the public domain where ideas circulate, grow, shrink, morph into other ideas, become fashionable, unfashionable in the endless evolutionary dance that is human discourse. As propagandists well know; if ideas are squeezed out of the public domain then in a crucially important sense they disappear.

The effect is similar to the decline of languages such as Cornish. As the number of people who speak Cornish declines, the language fades out of the public domain even within Cornwall. It doesn’t disappear completely but becomes increasingly sidelined. Similarly, as the number of people who speak apolitically declines, the language of apolitical discourse could fade from the public domain. It will not disappear but could become increasingly irrelevant.

What we may call the language of apolitical analysis has been going the same way in recent decades. As the number of people who analyse social and economic issues apolitically declines, apolitical analysis fades out of the public domain. It doesn’t disappear but becomes increasingly irrelevant.

Apolitical analysis is the big one. Political classes including political dilettantes such as major celebrities almost always prefer the ease and security of fashionable political mantras over the difficulties and pitfalls of apolitical analysis. They always have. There is little point in addressing such people in apolitical language as they do not understand it, do not approve of it and refuse to answer apolitical speakers in their own language.

If the number of apolitical speakers declines, apolitical analysis will decline in importance but possibly not everywhere. In the developed world there are few major apolitical speakers in the public domain, but Donald Trump suggests there is an untapped demand for plain apolitical speaking. Maybe it will survive him, but an enormous effort will be made to ensure that it doesn’t. Orange man bad – make him go away. It seems to be that primitive.