South Carolina

How to state forthrightly what is happening without sounding like an irrelevant whiner? It's an important question, because what we're witnessing here is the descent of the final darkness over Western civilization, and the fact that the momentum is obviously with the charlatan and the national-security-endangering criminal among those vying for the office that, if held with requisite seriousness, could probably prevent the fate awaiting us, reinforces the point. To the Laura Ingraham-types who say, "The tide's sweeping away you purist twerps," the response is that which our parents gave us when we were making the argument that all the kids were doing something that, although we couldn't see it, was really dumb: If all the kids were going to leap off a cliff like lemmings, would you join them?

By the time Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind came out in 1987, the rot of the American soul was well underway. Twenty years later, in 2007, in her book Death of the Grown-Up, Diana West delved into the indications from the mid-twentieth century that it was occurring. The movie and music industries of the period saw the rise of a generation with unprecedented wads of spending cash in its pockets, and indulged its self-importance with primitive music and stories the theme of which was that that generation had a uniquely complex set of problems and therefore an understandable alienation and rage. Without turning this into a parlor game, it seems reasonable to argue that one could see it coming with the 1913 Armory Show and the advent of dada. Maybe we could go back to Nietzsche, maybe to Marx. Maybe to the Jacobins. In any event, the ideas that "society" is a swirl of impersonal forces, that everything is relative, and that everybody has a price have bestowed upon us an entrenched cynicism and bitterness and and a stone-cold core to our souls.

West was right to focus on us boomers. We have turned modern culture into a rock and roll circus. Subsequent generations just assume that everything keeps getting more and more over-the-top: "art," packaging, marketing, technology, sport, even ever-more feeble attempts at serious thought. Loud and wild are the standards to which anything must rise. And consider that the two figures specified in the first paragraph of this post, Donald Trump (the charlatan), and Hillary Clinton (the national-security-endangering criminal) are first-wave boomers, each having been born in 1946.

And so dumbed-down generalizations carry the day.

The latest proof comes from last night:

At the Marriott, I asked Trump voters the most basic question: Why did you pick Trump over the other guys?

"The big reason is honesty," said Lori Jagla, of Woodward, S.C. "The more I hear everyone else going, 'Isn't he going too far?' the more [I think], 'No, you just wait, you get into America, and it's not too far. It's what we're thinking.'"

"Doesn't mince words," said Angela Griffin, of Spartanburg.
"I don't even care what his views are, I just care that there's a better chance that he's going to do what he says than the other guys," said Robert Daughenbaugh, of Mauldin. "I mean, you know they're all liars. End of story. They're all liars."

It's not that Trump's supporters agree with everything he has to say. They don't. It's that they see strong statements from Trump as proof of strong conviction on his part, and when he says something that causes his critics to go nuts, they see that as proof that Trump is saying not just something that needs  to be said but something that he himself believes. So they view him more strongly than ever as an honest man who tells it like it is.

As we know, Europe's already way out in front of us on this. The malaise it feels over its economic and demographic decline, combined with the understandable rage over the influx of utterly foreign hordes from crumbled lands (overwhelmingly young, male and harboring views of sexuality worthy of feral minks), has led to the rise of movements and parties that dispense with consistent ideology and instead exist to storm citadels and bring institutions crashing down.

But we are catching up fast. The results from the Palmetto State greatly accelerated our pace.

The main question seems to be whether our final schlonging will come from within or without.