I recommend this essay by William Davies, which is a lengthier and deeper discussion of the phenomenon I've been trying to get a hold of here, to wit the conquest of America by unreality. He labels the central problem stupidity, which is fair enough. I have also identified insanity, mendacity and narcissistic personality disorder as key, and in fact they are synergistic and to a large extent overlapping.
Davies asserts that the advent of the first Dump administration occasioned a panic over truth. As he puts it, "The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the United States but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal.”"
The second coming, however, has occasioned a different diagnosis.
To many of us, the central problem is that we live not so much in a time of lies, as one of stupidity. . . . Trump’s lying is no less constant or blatant than in 2016, but by now it feels familiar, already priced in. . . . Still, at least two aspects of his second administration are newly and undoubtedly “stupid.” One is shambolic incompetence of a degree that led an Atlantic journalist to be accidentally added to a Signal group chat about US military operations, a group whose other members included the vice president and the secretary of defense . . . . A second is an incomprehensible determination to press ahead with policies — such as tariffs and the defunding of medical research — that will do deep harm without any apparent gain, even for Trump’s backers and clients, still less his voters. The spectacle of a prominent vaccine skeptic and wellness crank as secretary of health and human services goes beyond an abandonment of truth; it feels like an assault on human progress. Bans on fluoride in tap water, passed by legislators in Utah and Florida at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s behest, mark a new hostility to the very concept of public use values. The escalation from Trump One to Trump Two has seen irrationality spread from the deliberative public sphere to flood the veins of government.
What seems to baffle Davies, as it does me, is why so many powerful institutional actors are failing to fight back. Handing the asylum over to the insane doesn't evidently benefit anyone, yet the corporate media reflexively, relentlessly try to translate the insanity into some arguable version of sense. Corporate executives and wealthy shareholders do like deregulation and tax cuts, but they can't possibly countenance the catastrophic damage to the economy that is happening right now, even though the New York Times won't tell you about it. As Davies concludes,
[I]t’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible. Trumpian stupidity isn’t an emergent side effect of smart people’s failure to take control; it is imposed and enforced.
He goes on to talk about Immanuel Kant and Hanna Arendt, but I don't think he ever does manage to explain it all. Yes, the fascist program depends on disconnecting the people from reality, so there is a discernible motive for all this on the part of the cabal that controls Dump and the government. But why are so many others going along with it?
