The extent to which the United States has been reduced to a state of Trump is a direct product of all of the TV all of us watched cannot be overestimated. He, as Reagan before him, was 100% a product of the entertainment industry in terms of their public, political manifestation. Both of them were and are total fakes created by Hollywood and, in Trump's case, the New York City media, shit-level, NY Post right up to the Big Gray Drab and the broadcast and local cabloid TV and hate-talk-shock-jock radio was even worse.
If the United States were a reading country, it might have gotten bad but it would not have gotten as bad as this. In the Trumpification of the United States I think we are seeing the real life results of the untillectualization of the People when they go from a state of functional literacy to post-literacy that is worse than the illiteracy of previous eras. The media is a machine that creates lies and illusions and purposeful lies and illusions on behalf of those who own and control it, the rich. I think we are at a point where we do, in fact, find out what happens to a people who don't know the truth which would have made them free, but who, instead, buy the lie and the lie kills them.
The naive view of freedom as preached by the ACLU, the lawyers and legal scholars of the "civil liberties" industry, popular culture, perhaps starting in the 1920s but accelerating after WWII, has been given the test of time and the results are Trump. The modernist amoralization of "enlightenment," whose definition of "freedom" is one we all imbibed from our childhoods turns out to produce consumer-corporate-fascist oppression. That modernism, a child of 18th century materialism refuses to acknowledge that there is good and there is evil and if you don't actively promote the good and discourage the evil, evil, being far more attractive for those so enticed than such things as being unselfish and doing the hard work to determine the truth.
The idiocy of the truncated, ambiguous language First and other amendments to the Constitution assumes that if you just let nature take its course, the truth will win, the correct morality, which cannot be defined and determined with the rules of mathematics and the physical sciences would emerge as if by magic, was stupid. It was put into place by men whose own lives and means of making money and fomenting and winning a war certainly contained the lessons disproving that. As I've noted, the great historian Paul Finkelman has documented the extent to which the most powerful of them really didn't want to deal with a Bill of Rights, and they did a rather bad job of crafting one. I suspect that a lot of them finding religion unstylish in their time, didn't want to have to really grapple with what that really means. I think a lot of them didn't want to have to think too hard about their slaveholding and murderous land grabbing ambitions in terms of morality.
But democracy of the only kind that is worth fighting for, egalitarian democracy is, itself a moral position that must be taken with a full commitment to its rightness or it is not really believed in at all. It must be held with the assertion that it and its prerequisite moral bases must be promoted over those positions which attack and corrode it no matter what those are. Ideologies of inequality, ideologies of moral indifference and amorality and immorality - which are empowered by lies being permitted an which are inevitably opposed to equality cannot be tolerated in the way the ACLU-Warren Court read the First Amendment. When that is done in the age of modern, mass media and post-literacy, the catestrophic results, such as we see, today, are inevitable.
Any legal, civic or intellectual claim that we must allow lies and bigotry their say, to allow anti-democratic ideologies and the promotion of inequality, such as has reigned for the past fifty-five years, has gotten its test of time and the results are the descent into fascism we have now. It is failed, it destroys the very thing that it claimed to be based in, the promotion of freedom.
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