Fools or Bastards?

 A while ago, I wrote in this space, “Trump’s beloved rural “uneducated” are overwhelming the base for the dumbing-down of the Republican Party and they are undeniably the people Trump can ‘fool all of the time’ in any subject. Based on their current ownership of the Republican Party we should all be calling them “the Know Nothing Party” because they proudly know nothing of use about any subject and their wishes and dreams exactly mirror the ‘policies’ of that mid-1800s political movement: religious nonsense (you might notice a conflict between #1 and #10 in their platform), ‘Americans must rule America’ (and they don’t mean native Americans), states’ rights (except when the states disagree with the Know Nothings), increased naturalization obstacles, and the usual goofy white male ‘supremacy’ crap.” Living in rural America has biased me toward believing that the majority of the Trump and Republican voters are inbred morons. 

Closer to the Edge, a Substack page that I follow regularly, had a different take in an essay titled “The Idol of Rot”: Trump “does not lead his followers; he reflects them. Every jeer, every chant, every violent outburst is the sound of America talking to itself through a mouthful of glass. They don’t worship him—they worship the permission he grants to stop pretending they care. He offers absolution for hatred, indulgence for cruelty, and calls it patriotism. He is the unholy child of greed and grievance, the mascot of a generation allergic to shame, the influencer of an empire addicted to attention. He takes their hate, repackages it with a logo, and sells it back to them at a profit. And while the cameras roll, democracy gasps for air, dying not with a bang but with a brand deal.” I recommend that you read the whole essay and if you have a different opinion I would welcome hearing it. 

I’m not sure which perspective is more harsh: Americans have downbred into a nation of gullible fools or we’ve finally shown ourselves to be the vicious, heartless, greedy sons-of-bitches the rest of the world has always known us to be?  And if you don’t believe the rest of the world has long despised, feared, distrusted, and even hated what the United States of America has come to stand for, you don’t get out much. 

Trump’s 2024 election cemented those feelings from one end of the globe to the other.  Countries that might have once imagined the United States had a chance of being something at least a little bit of what we’ve claimed, now think we’ve lost the formula.  As Rufus Wainwright sang, “You took advantage of a world that loved you well. I’m so tired of America.”  After World War II, it seemed from the inside and the outside of this country that we might become a role model for the parts of the world that still needed role models.  From the inside, our fascist countrymen started working immediately to dampen those hopes.  Joe McCarthy was the poster child for driving that disappointment, but Donald Trump’s vicious mentor, Roy Cohen, kept at it his whole life and he had plenty of help.  Nixon and that branch of the Republican Party made treason into a political tool and those same awful people populated Ronald Reagan’s pack of incompetent criminals and started the disassembly of anything resembling democracy and progress on all of those “American Way” ideals.  G.W. Bush set new records in political corruption but he was a piker compared to Trump I and, now, Trump II.  Today, corruption is the primary function of all three branches of the federal government and they have plans to expand those activities into every aspect of life in this country.  If The Mob had taken over Washington, D.C. the effect would be no different than what Republicans have done. 

As a friend of mine observed on November 5, 2024, “The country will never recover from this and be the same place, at least in our lifetimes.”  Someone at NASA said the mass, uninformed firings at that institution were “an extinction event” for American space science and much of Musk’s damage to the FDA, CDC, and the rest of the federal government’s scientific and healthcare agencies would take several generations to repair, if we were inclined to be a serious nation again.  The damage to our national security and national law enforcement agencies has to make the country’s enemies practically delirious with the possibilities for terrorism, cyber-crime, and China is moving quickly to replace the US as the dominant world power.  Catching up would take a concentrated national effort and I don’t think we have that in us today. 

The question I wanted to ask with this essay was “Are we a nation of fools or evil bastards?”  Thinking about it, I have come to the conclusion that is a false choice.  We could be both.