Therefore, it has come as a recurrent shock to the press that a man who doesn’t seem even conventionally gifted in English has liberated for democratic consideration so many forbidden ideas.
How did that happen?
First, the artlessness of how Trump frames his proposals exposes the extremism of the globalist ruling class’ emerging ideology of borderlessness.
For instance, when Trump proposes to build a wall, the establishment replies, in so many words, that the entire concept of national borders is outdated and immoral. When Trump says the U.S. should keep out Muslims, the elites reply that it is unconscionable for Americans to have a choice in who gets to immigrate.
Tipsy on their own rhetoric, the mainstream unintentionally reveals how crazy open-borders doctrines are becoming in a century when the U.N. predicts the population of Africa will quadruple to 4 billion.
But second, it’s also because Trump is a salesman without a silver tongue that he feels the need to avoid the usual eloquent obfuscations and boil ideas down to basic realities. He’s just not verbally adept enough to put over the kind of high-status bilge that has colonized our thoughts.
Seven hundred years ago an English friar named William of Ockham gave his name to the traditional Western prejudice that the simplest feasible explanation is most likely to be true.
Six and a half centuries later we went to the moon.
Lately, however, we haven’t really felt all that inclined to figure out how the world works. It’s more important to demonstrate our mastery of socially preferred locutions.
For example, one pressing public-policy question of the day is: What are the main causes of Muslim terrorism? Now, an Ockhamite might surmise that one useful answer is:
Muslims.
But the respectable answer in 2016 isn’t supposed to be anything that blunt. In particular, any acceptable explanation must include the six-syllable word “Islamophobia.” Read on.
* I can tell you by personal experience that Trump talks like a typical New Yorker. Straight to the point with zero tolerance for nonsense and muddy thinking.
* It’s as if I were reading the cultural values of Ellsworth Toohey made real. Donald Trump is not Francisco D’Anconia, he is Howard Roark. That Trump can see the vacuity ( and nakedness ) of elite discourse is a wonderful thing for those who notice reality.
* Race is like Wegener’s theory that Latin America fits in to the side of Africa: so obvious that most people thought it couldn’t be true.
* Scott Adams has done a large amount of damage control for Trump, explaining how Trump really isn’t off-the-cuff or impulsive, but calculated. It’s amazing the Press/Left/Cucks haven’t figured out his style yet. Three points:
1. Trump sees and works towards big-picture end games. He wants a grandiose, beautiful thing—fame, a huge apartment complex, a huge golf course, a huge casino, a gorgeous model girlfriend/wife, the presidency, NAFTA overruled, immigration ended. So he sets out with the goal of getting that desired thing, no matter how outsized the ambition seems.
2. Trump doesn’t want that object after a long delay; he wants it as quickly as possible. He looks for inefficiencies in the system where people waste their time. He thinks people who wait for years just one shot are losers: he wants as many shots as possible for success when he wants it, and lets everyone else judge whether he’s good enough—he always thinks he’s good enough. He doesn’t cut corners, he cuts out the fat. So instead of building his real estate portfolio slowly and making sure critics were assuaged and he built an “image” of a trusted developer with “taste”, he put a building in as quickly as possible to his own liking, because that’s what he wanted.
3. To Trump, the details of getting there are less important than getting there, and he will stroke as many egos as possible to get there. Details are unimportant unless they impede his progress; e.g. he will let a trusted associate worry about how many ladies toilet stalls there are, unless it becomes a feminist loggerhead and he needs to step in and make promises.
That also means that, on an unimportant detail, he’ll reverse course if it hurts him. That’s why he’s not bothering on details of his Mideast policy or his immigration plan or his NAFTA plan—they are end games, and he will get there how he needs to , the details are unimportant, and he knows that losers are the folks who pay attention to the trees and miss the forest. Leaders think big and get smaller people to do the grunt work for him.
Trump’s off-the-cuff style is designed for the 2nd and 3rd parts—get him to the promised goal of #1 as easily and quickly as possible. But the goal is the key, the vision. Trump has a vision –a grandiose vision—of walls, immigration ending, NAFTA redone. When Trump is done with Presidency, whatever will be said of him, they will say he got things done, and the country was different afterwards.
So if Trump’s goal in a Putin negotiation was an arms deal, and he said something too insulting off the cuff, he’d immediately reverse course and possibly apologize (so long as it didn’t weaken him) because the goal was not yet met, and the means to it were unimportant, so reversing his style wouldn’t matter to him. That’s what the Press isn’t getting—Trump’s style is a calculated, battle-tested means to his ends, his visions. It’s a tactic, not a strategy.
Hillary has no vision. She has nothing more than her desire to win the white house because, darn it, she worked her whole life to be the first woman president and get some graft. In Trump’s mind, she’s a loser because she has no grandiose goal outside the presidency and has worked her whole life for this one shot, and then she’s just a rich man’s puppet in the end. That’s a loser. Every speech she makes and word she utters is party of her strategy—which means she can’t reverse course that easily if the strategy isn’t working.
Trump’s words are like an MMA fighter who switches from jabs to kicks to takedowns when needed versus different opponents, all with the end goal of being champion. Hillary’s MMA style is to continuously use the “proper” footwork and technique all the time, which works on most because she is on steroids, but can’t handle adaptation.
* Funny how, if you go to a top university or upper middle-class neighborhood, you see people of different races and cultures getting along just fine. White people and Asians in Vancouver get along just fine. What do they have in common? That they are well-educated, civilized and intelligent. The whites and Asians in Vancouver tend to be both average. Race doesen’t matter. Nationality doesen’t matter. What matters are individual people and how conscientious, intelligent and reasonable they are. This is what matters. From what I have observed, intelligent and well-educated people of different ethnic backgrounds get along just fine. The reason why open borders “doesent work” is because plebs of all races tend to be barbarians who judge each other based on irrational prejudices and are so intolerant that they are willing to use violence on each other instead of just being civil and tolerating each other. So maybe you’re right, Sailer. Maybe open borders doesen’t work, but that is not because open borders “can’t” work, but simply because most people are not up to haut-bourgeoise standards of civility and tolerance. Don’t blame the “doctrine” for the failure: blame the shittiness of most human beings.
And the elite is “pushing” globalization? Funny that a lot of national elites are actually suffering from Globalization and want a protected market. Riddle me that? Globalization has made only a minority of the rich richer. Most of the gains in wealth happened to the middle classed of First World nations and the poor of Third World nations. The biggest losers have been the lower classes from developed nations, because those jobs got outsourced to the Third World, and many rich people who lost their businesses when the markets were opened and they had to compete against more formidable foreign competitors. Most of the rich are actually against Globalization. Trust me, they don’t like international competition. They would much rather face as few competitors as possible and charge more for what they produce. Yes, the very poor have been hurt by globalization in the First World. But don’t pretend like “globalization” hasn’t benefitted Americans: Americans today have a significantly higher PPP per capita than they did in 1995 even if you adjust for inflation.
Also, Globalization is not something that is being “pushed” by anyone: it is the result of massive advancements in communications and transport technology over the past quarter century. The World has simply become smaller than it used to be. Deal with it! Complaining about this won’t change that.
* Trump comes off as cogent and highly normal in his weekly appearances on O’Reilly and tonight was no different — although after this past week of media tattooing we’re now supposed to think that he’s insane.
But the transcripts don’t read nice and smooth. His verbal tic of self-interruption of nearly every sentence is off-putting in print. But it works as a conversational style. Only partly accurate to describe him as “inarticulate” because he’s been launching memorable rhetorical broadsides for a whole year and dominating the national political conversation.
I go back to the Pacino Vegas boss character in Ocean’s 11 reboot: “I move fast and I slice.”
Trump slices in words and deeds. That’s why he’s hated.
* Steve, this really hits the nail on the head. It is incredibly strange seeing conservative intelligentsia fall into the ‘smooth talker’ language as well. A politician who is articulate should be the highest virtue we demand they seem to suggest. If they lie to us, that’s ok, they do it with such great style. Look at the crease!! It seems the entire intellectual class would happily submit to an articulate invader who could put together a flowing sentence lasting upwards of a minute. Perhaps there is a strong correlation to bookishness and a subconscious craving for dictatorship….or maybe it does boil down to a desire to separate themselves from the unwashed masses.
* Anyone who writes all day thinks the social hierarchy should be based on articulateness. The funny thing is, what counts as articulate is just a set of cliches and tropes that jibe with conventional wisdom. Thus, Dan Quayle is considered moron because of his occasional grammar goofs, where Jesse Jackson is a silver-tongued advocate for the oppressed, even though Jackson’s grammar is far worse.
* Trump is one of only a very small handful of people who can access the greater public via the airwaves. This means he has the ability to project a message of his choosing into to public discourse that is unfiltered by the media. Once it reaches critical mass, the media spin is rendered ineffective. The media’s greatest trick is excluding what or whom it does not like. Much of what if produces is junk but it does not matter because there is no competition.
One of the great lessons from this election that nobody is learning, or really relearning, is that the airwaves are public and we would be served by having much greater public access. Trump and his billions short circuited the regular process. This used to be a staple of leftist politics a la the days of Ralph Nader, but that is now out of fashion. The left made its peace to serve multiculturalism and now has to live with it. It should be noted that the Bernie-Butt-Bros movement to overturn the campaign finance laws is really about preventing certain groups from having their say but they are not trying to open it up for everyone, something that would be very dangerous for them if someone on the alt-right (like Trump) were ever to gain access.
