Three essays clarify 2020's lesser evil election question — Nicky Reid's hammer versus Noam Chomsky's subtlety — with Peter Van Buren's tie-breaker

29 August 2020

Truth is often complicated

More subtle and confusing than we wish.

Regarding 2020's US presidential choices

Below, I quote blogger Nicky Reid's scathing perspective about President Trump's place in American political and cultural history.

Trump, she says, is America. Getting rid of him, she implies, would make no appreciable substantive change. The system is thoroughly rigged with rot.

During her skillful illustration of this viewpoint, Reid dismissively references Professor Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky (for those who do not know) is a "lesser evil" pragmatist. Reid thinks that Chomsky's Biden preference is lunatic, given that both candidates manifest the same, culturally inherent wrongness.

Is she right?

A third essay from Peter Van Buren arguably answers the question.

Nicky Reid's (profane) Trump analysis

Here excerpted — my correction contained in bracketed italics:

[T]he last three bastards made this orange bastard possible, and what has every leftist’s least favorite president done with this bounty of lethal gifts?

He’s fucked it up. He’s fucked everything up. He’s failed to start a single war and he’s tied most of the existing ones into knots with his completely incoherent foreign policy.

He’s reeked [should be "wreaked"] havoc at home, but it’s not like he’s even come close to getting away with it.

Obama deported more Mexicans than Trump probably ever will and he won a fucking Nobel Peace Prize. . . .

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has made the American Empire a laughing stock with his buffoonery and this is the guy who makes Noam Chomsky and Medea Benjamin desperate enough to endorse a century-old white supremacist to defeat him?

Apparently Biden isn’t the only one who’s gone and lost his damn mind over the last four years.

Donald Trump is not the worst president in American history. He’s just not.

What Donald Trump is is the most American president in American history.

[H]e’s the perfect fiendishly decrepit mascot for an empire in free fall. A fat, greedy, pussy-grabbing, Big Mac gobbling, corporate welfare cashing, old shyster on his last grift.

A flatulent, race-baiting, social media trolling, double-dealing, megalomaniac who thinks he’s never looked sexier sprayed Dorito orange and loudly shitting himself on live television.

Donald Trump is America.

He’s Uncle Sam without the airbrushing, and that is precisely why the most evil people in this country, from Barack Obama to Dick Cheney, despise the motherfucker as much as we do, if not more so, because he is them.

He’s them without the charming mask of imperial sanity to hide behind.

He’s Wilson in a Klan hood. He’s Truman giggling like a schoolgirl over Nagasaki.

He’s Bill without the saxophone and Obama without the charming diction.

Donald Trump is America’s mirror, look upon ye mighty and despair.

Ooof.

Reid mentions Professor Noam Chomsky — why?

Recently, Chomsky said that "Trump is worse than Hitler".

That statement came in an interview in which Chomsky indicated (not for the first time) that Joe Biden is the only practicable presidential choice for 2020:

Trump is the most dangerous figure in human history.

Literally, there has been no one else, Hitler or anyone else, who was dedicated to destroying the prospects of human life on Earth in the short term.

We have an individual who stand alone in the world . . . in trying to make the [climate] crisis worse, uncontrollable, destroy human lie on Earth — in order to enrich his rich constituencies of fossil fuel industries and others.

Presumably, from Reid's perspective . . .

. . . Chomsky mistakes American cultural rot for being most dangerously embodied in just one person.

Reid's claim is that Trump perfectly represents the United States' day-to-day operations. We cannot change our pillaging American bent, just by voting Trump out of office.

That's true. But maybe not entirely?

Let's unpack what Chomsky said . . .

. . . as well as what he implies with it.

In this, I ask climate magnitude doubters (I'm one) to reserve immediate judgment.

Although Chomsky thinks that Global Warming is potentially humanity-ending, his "lesser evil" (Biden) voting position does not require an existential climate threat in its support.

This is the subtle, but possibly also mistaken, aspect to this dispute.

So, let's leave aside global warming.

Instead, I draw your attention to President Trump's addiction to fomenting chaos and fragmenting the structures that Humanity has built to self-protect itself over the centuries.

The prescient among you recognize that I am about to wander over into Burkean Conservative Land. Meaning that humanity-stabilizing structures have merit, even when they are grossly imperfect.

The point here is that our most narcissistic and avaricious of American Presidents has already proven himself not to care a bit about anything that does not immediately offer him Plunder and Ego Gratification.

He is a political Shiva (the Hindu god of destruction).

Nothing is sacred to him. No amount of previous human effort in attempting to build and construct defenses against our Darkest Demons serves to dissuade him from recklessly lashing out with his Ego-driven wrecking ball.

It is rationally fair to characterize Trump as someone who measures his worth via the accumulated mass of what he could (and still can) splinter to fragments.

In this sense, he really is worse than Hitler. Who, for all his reprehensibility, believed in (and acted upon) a few human constructs larger than just himself. Those, to humanity's detriment, were just not broadly encompassing enough to pass even primitive moral muster in a modern age.

The fact that Trump lacks even Hitler's limited moral compass says something even darker about Trump.

President Trump is Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" on metaphorically meth-spiked steroids.

Another key point about Trump — his genius for eliciting chaotic human darkness

It is true (as Nicky Reid says) that Trump is not competent — or determined enough — to directly emulate Hitler's militarized destruction of millions and millions of lives.

What she arguably overlooks is Trump's spectacular genius for — consistently, flawlessly and ceaselessly — dragging out the worst of human nature. And then, letting those unconstrained storms go wherever they will.

He sets these fires — and contagions — loose to sweep merciless paths of American self-destruction, everywhere that his erratic self-involvement impulsively directs him to.

Trumps' Twitter behavior is psychiatrically indicative, as well as culturally and toxically addictive.

President Trump is not only symbol of America's lost soul. He is instigator in Satanizing it still further.

This impressively loathsome personal quality is what Chomsky is (implicitly) pointing to.

Trump personally demonstrates the mindless loosing of Universal Id upon a hapless world.

From Chomsky's perspective, Trump's talent for stimulating demon-like behavior threatens to further dehumanize the already worst in us.

Trump's destructive qualities, upon reflection — and exactly as Professor Chomsky concludes — might make the 2020 election choice an easy moral question.

Chomsky's strategic logic is that it is best to get rid of the biggest Looming Danger (Trump), before going to work on the slightly more malleable, less-tuned one (Biden).

Chomsky's appraisal of Trump's dangerousness has arguable merit.

But still . . .

The moral? — Is voting for Biden (awful though he is) . . .

. . . better than leaving Trump's genius for exponentializing Banal Evil, while in presidential office?

Nicky Reid could still be right. In my view:

Voting for Biden just sweeps the United States' pillaging "shit" under the floorboards, where (better camouflaged) it will slyly finish consuming the American soul. Like termitic roach-rats.

And figuratively speaking, next week — rather than tomorrow — Oligarchy will finally reign Shiva-like supreme — anyway.

A third essay implicitly supports that prediction.

This is Peter Van Buren's masterful expose of the Democratic Party's cesspit cynicism. In it, Van Buren skillfully demonstrates that Biden (and the Democratic hierarchy) are just as demonically twisted as Trump is:

Peter Van Buren, The Most Cynical Campaign In History, American Conservative (25 August 2020)

My own conclusion is that it does not matter a whit, which of these two presidential tickets we vote for.

The United States, as a democratic republic, has been over for some time. The predatory impulses of America's elites have overwhelmed us.

The real question is how we proceed from this point.

Having a plan to reverse these harms is the priority issue. The enemy is the same that it has always been, exactly the one that Nicky Reid points to.

So . . .

How we going to fix our Predatory Oligarchy — once we have stopped allowing ourselves to be distracted by non-essential nonsense — like the virtually identical evil embodied in both November 2020 presidential choices?

A People unwilling to think and work for Liberty does not stay free.

PeteFree.com

Three essays clarify 2020's lesser evil election question — Nicky Reid's hammer versus Noam Chomsky's subtlety — with Peter Van Buren's tie-breaker