Squirrel-Hair, his devotees, the death of decency, and the likelihood that we're already in a state of chaos

A piece by Heather MacDonald at City Journal and the comment thread underneath it follow a pattern that has by now become predictable: the contour of the piece itself is such that the first paragraph acknowledges the understandable reasons for Squirrel-Hair's overwhelming of the campaign-cycle process. Indeed, she realizes that anybody whose frustration with the "Republican establishment," a term with a rather fluid definition but that broadly connotes the population at risk for what we here at LITD call Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, has boiled over into rage has to "take a fiendish delight" in said establishment getting its clock cleaned. The table thus set, she launches into her main point, the point evidenced in her title ("Coarsener-in-Chief"). She presents a cogent and masterfully articulated argument. Then comes the barrage from S-H's slavish devotees of all-caps salutes to their savior, ad hominem denunciations of MacDonald, and distractions of the "oh-yeah-well-look-at-what-Obama-has-done-to-this-country" variety.

Her main point:

Trump’s conservative supporters should consider at least this: his likely effect on civilized mores. Trump is the most gratuitously nasty public figure that this country has seen in living memory. He is the very definition of a bully: at every opportunity to kick someone when he’s down, Trump takes it, while shamelessly trumpeting his own dominance. Long after former Texas governor Rick Perry had withdrawn from the primary race, Trump was still sneering at Perry’s glasses and intelligence during campaign rallies and gloating about how he had forced Perry’s withdrawal. New York governor George Pataki held out longer in the campaign, but he was never a threat to Trump. Yet nearly every Trump stump speech still includes a mean-spirited reference to this nonentity. Trump followers defend his penchant for ceaseless, obsessive attack on the ground that he lashes out only when he has himself been criticized. But there is virtue in proportionality. Trump escalates a conventional campaign sally into the excuse for nonstop, self-aggrandizing war. 

Trump is the embodiment of what the Italians call “maleducato”—poorly raised, ill-bred. Indeed, judging by the results, his upbringing seems to have involved no check whatsoever on the crudest male instincts for aggression and humiliation. Trump is unfailingly personal in his attacks. Nor is his comportment merely a refusal to be politically correct. Trump was on solid ground when he responded to Fox News’s Megyn Kelly during the first Republican debate that he had no time for political correctness. A repudiation of political correctness means truth-telling, however. Trump’s personal sneers are not truth-telling but merely the self-indulgent gestures of someone who makes no effort to control his desire to humiliate. 

And now for an example of that distraction I mentioned. Actually, a number this commenter's points about the Most Equal Comrade are spot-on, but what do they have to do with what we can predict about a S-H presidency based on the incoherence of what S-H has been saying on the campaign trail?

Just where were your comments about civility when the current president showed no concern for the values that many Americans hold dear? You think the president hasn’t divided the nation and destroyed civility when he shows no concern for Americans who oppose abortion? Who oppose selective prosecution? Who oppose accepting mores that counter their religious beliefs? Who oppose the act of discrediting our Supreme Court in the face of our nation? Who oppose judgement over our police officers without at the least due process? Who oppose his condemnation when we voice legitimate opposition to Islamic values that most of the world find repugnant? Who speaks in judgement upon many Americans, but watches while thousands of Muslims and Christians are killed in the most reprehensible way? Who stands up for Islamic principles, but at best remains absent in the face of morals Christians find dear? And you claim that Donald Trump, a man who isn't even president yet and is running a campaign against an aggressive field of establishments, never mind a recalcitrant media, that he'll damage civility in our society? Is this analogous to something like that crazy actor Ronald Reagan who definitely won’t match up to much more than Hollywood’s Bedtime for Bonzo? Your article is pure garbage!

And that last line is a nice Squirrel-Hair-esque touch.

And here comes the comment with the all-caps crescendo:

Americans have longed for a president who has the balls to speak for us against the Open Borders Perpetual Mass Third World Imminvasion Monoparty-Duopoly that has been forcing us to submit to and to pay for our demographic replacement, against the NAFTA-GATT-TPP Globalists who have sold us out to foreign powers and global financial elites, and against the poison of political correctness: President Donald Trump.

If truth told coarsely is what it will take to change course to get the wind back in our American sails, then let there be such coarseness - and the more of it, the better for us and for redemption of what's left of what used to be our country.

FIGHT BACK WITH DONALD TRUMP! TAKE BACK OUR COUNTRY! 

And here comes the unvarnished populist angle, replete with the f-bomb:

Oh Lordy, another RINO gets the vapors over Trump. Let me help you out, lady.

"Last year, a group of young “reform conservatives” crafted wonky proposals involving arcane tax credits and the like in the name of winning a broader, middle-class base of Republican voters. None of it matters, it turns out, compared with the attraction of someone bellowing that America is going to be great and is going to win again, as guaranteed by the fact that the speaker himself is great and a big, big winner."

Translated: A bunch of young "conservative" eggheads tried to devise a more palatable GOP smorgasbord to attract more middle class voters and richly failed just like all the other egghead thinktanks on "our" side for the past 30 years.  

Trump swings opens the door and declares the decimated manufacturing base, globalist controlled trade deals, sky high corporate taxes, and unfettered illegal immigration are f***ing the middle class. Is it any wonder why Trump is Trumping the useless eggheads? Not only that, but winning back huge swaths of the blue collar/union types?

And this gives sophisticates at the Manhattan Institute & National Review the heebie jeebies, who have been content to offer up useless "moderates" like Dole, GWB, McCain and Mitt and think that's a good thing.

Here are a couple of the ad hominem variety:

Your opinion does not matter Heather! You have an agenda!

"nasty" ? 

And to think you count for a journalist of some kind..NOT 

And . . .

Can you believe, a relatively insignificant writer like Heather rips TRUMP then pens a vicious, mean girl, spiteful, ugly article like this one! Maybe Heather needs to check out her own upbringing before she attacks TRUMP'S. TRUMP will be POTUS! Deal with it Heather...

A question arises: Is it maybe time to just admit to becoming inured to this pattern and move on to matters that don't seem so inevitable? The old wisdom-to-distinguish-between-what-I-can-and-cannot-change mindset?

I say no; otherwise, I wouldn't be bothering to write this blog post. Still, to consider the possibility that such is the advisable course is to recognize something - a very bracing something - that is definitely true: post-America is splintered, scared and enraged. None of the splinters that "comprise" the nation at this moment is in any mood for polite discourse, much less wonkish position papers or calm proceduralism.

We are at that pre-revolutionary moment pollster Pat Caddell has been foreseeing for a while.

Consider how long - in political terms, certainly - it is until early November. The Most Equal Comrade is by no means done making a mockery of the Constitution and imposing on us all manner of tyranny. The global economy is not likely to suddenly take off and usher in an era of general prosperity and excitement. Post-America's various enemies and adversaries, either on their own or in some kind of collaboration, are likely to present us with more than one, more than two, startling moments in which the vulnerability to which our planned decline has led will horrify us. And, of course, we are by no means done with the twists and turns of the political level of it all. For one thing, Hillionaire is going to get in more trouble, not less.

And even if Squirrel-Hair runs the table, we shall see his support base, and various kinds of opposition to it, morph into forms we cannot presently predict.

So brace yourselves for an unforgettable 2016.

 And, if you find it exhilarating, thank one vulgar, bombastic, narcissistic, unprincipled carnival barker from New York. His decision to step onto the stage had much to do with tipping the balance.

Actually, here's a more apt metaphor. What he decided to do was set off a dirty bomb in your living room.