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Cynicism and populism are two things that the Left wants more of under the mistaken belief that this helps the Left-in truth both always help the Right. Regarding cynicism, Shadi Hamid had a recent very interesting piece about cynicism. But I think he’s too optimistic about a populism of the Left.
As for cynicism, it’s very interesting actually. Hillary Clinton in her recent best seller What Happened? discusses public cynicism that is no doubt at an all time high currently.
“Instead of admitting mistakes, he lashes out, demeans, and insults others—often projecting by accusing others of doing what he himself has done or is about to do. So if he knows that the Donald J. Trump Foundation is little more than a personal piggy bank, he’ll turn around and accuse, with no evidence, the well-respected Clinton Foundation of being corrupt.”
“There’s a method to this madness. For Trump, if everyone’s down in the mud with him, then he’s no dirtier than anyone else. He doesn’t have to do better if everyone else does worse. I think that’s why he seems to relish humiliating people around him. And it’s why he must have been delighted when Marco Rubio tried to match him in slinging crude personal insults during the primaries. Of course, it hurt Rubio much more than Trump. As Bill likes to say, never wrestle a pig in the mud. They have cloven hooves, which give them superior traction, and they love getting dirty. Sadly, Trump’s strategy works. When people start believing that all politicians are liars and crooks, the truly corrupt escape scrutiny, and cynicism grows.”
Location 666.
Cynicism helps the worst among us as many people come to believe ‘Trump is terrible but they’re all pretty bad so what’s the difference?
UPDATE: What is striking is the extent to which has normalized him the recently to the point that unless he’s shown to be guilty of criminal collusion with the Russian government beyond a reasonable doubt then basically nothing matters. What I’ve noticed is that whenever yet another bombshell story about Trump hits the MSM:
1. Doesn’t allow the story to breath for 10 seconds without reading his lie filled tweet or comment.
2. Then they right away attempt to normalize him by relativizing everything-the fact that he is an outlier is totally obscured. Note it was the opposite with Emailgate-with that the MSM would never allow any attempt to compare what she did with what anyone else has done-obviously when you make the comparison private email has been used by many government officials not to mention Jared Kushner’s #WhatsApping MBS, which he deleted-and government email has often been so poor and unreliable that it’s understandable but no nuance was allowed to intrude.
Then on a second order of magnitude the worst among us are helped by what Gary Sick identified above: people tend to be unwilling to imagine the truly worst crimes. A lot of time what gets people fired up the most is petty crimes, petty corruption, petty examples of apparent ‘self dealing.’
And we saw this in 2016 where the really great offenses of Trump were ignored for the petty real or imagined offenses of Hillary Clinton.
The Clinton Foundation was pilloried-and is still being so as the Little Rock FBI is for some very odd reason investigating it again-probably at Trump’s direction though as the record shows you don’t have to look very hard to find anti Clinton agents at the FBI-while the fact that Trump used his own phony foundation to pay a bribe to then Florida AG Pam Bondi to drop a case against Trump U got scant coverage as I wrote about in 2016.
Trump-Russia is potentially the worst crime in our history. We must follow the facts where they lead but if they do lead to the quite plausible possibility that collusion did happen it will be a political more than a legal decision what we do next.
We must not allow a failure of imagination or nerve allow such a great crime to go unpunished. Nothing less than the integrity of our democratic system of government is on the line.
UPDATE: However, in other chapters (A, B) I develop the idea that a lot of the cynicism comes from the fact that the GOP keeps rigging elections and getting away with it. Ford pardoning Nixon far from healing America actually exacerbated cynicism as did Obama’s misguided decision to let the Bush -Cheney criminals off the hook-a big reason for the rise of the Berner Left was outrage in 2009-2010 that the Democrats chose not to prosecute either Bush-Cheney criminals or those who engaged in the financial malfeasance leading up to the financial crisis and Great Recession. Then there was Bill Clinton’s downright masochistic decision to end the Bush-Reagan investigations regarding Irangate in 1993-with these legitimate investigations ended there was plenty of time for the GOP’s illegitimate investigations into Whitewater, Vince Foster, Travelgate, and, yes, 140 hours on the Clinton’s Christmas list.