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.
