Obviously we can't all be violinists in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; we cannot all write novels that people can't wait to read; we can't all decide whether the next painting that we are on the brink of achieving for sale for thousands of dollars at a gallery is to be an abstract-expressionist work or a primitive. On the other hand we really do need milk, produce, grain, and (for most people) meat. We need to get our checks in the mail to pay off Chase Manhattan for the underwear that we bought. We need people to deliver the underwear at the store and someone to collect the cash or credit-card data for it. We need our cars repaired, and if we are not to have to pay thousands to get the engines fixed more often than otherwise necessary we need people to change the oil.
Reality is the mind-numbing, dirty, muscle-straining toil. Reality is also the banality of fast-food places and the ugliness of payday loans (Egad!)
High personal achievement comes with a price, and many of us are unwilling to pay the price even before we get started. Some of us lack the needed talent and the opportunity to achieve. Some of us give up when we saw the progress slow. Some of us had to milk the cows or get a job sweeping floors, denying us the chance to live our dreams.
The Right has always recognized a need for toil, but it has typically seen the peon or the prole as less than fully human -- someone whose dreams must be reduced to an animal level of survival. I see Donald Trump no better than the aristocrats of old who saw peasants as little better than livestock or of magnates of the early-industrial era who saw factory workers as machines of flesh instead of such inanimate materials as steel and wood. So the woman in a convenience store angry at people who have things a little better (well, maybe not if one considers the hefty school loans -- unless those workers have cr@ppy jobs and a hefty student loan to pay off!) finds someone who will tear down the middle class and bring it to the same debased level. That is Donald Trump. He's learned the trick of every demagogue from Vladimir Lenin to Francois Duvalier -- run against visible elites on behalf of either some dubious ideal (himself) or on behalf of elites even more exploitative than those that he castigates.
But Donald Trump is not only a plutocrat -- he is the worst sort of plutocrat, a profiteering rentier. If you live in a cheap place to live (like the rural Midwest) you have some distance. He's OK -- until he starts turning loved ones into cannon fodder (as he is talking about with respect to Venezuela). Even if he isn't invested in the provisioners of war he can at least get his ego stroked while President.
He sees himself as a Great Man, much unlike the 'lesser' man that his predecessor was.
Reality is the mind-numbing, dirty, muscle-straining toil. Reality is also the banality of fast-food places and the ugliness of payday loans (Egad!)
High personal achievement comes with a price, and many of us are unwilling to pay the price even before we get started. Some of us lack the needed talent and the opportunity to achieve. Some of us give up when we saw the progress slow. Some of us had to milk the cows or get a job sweeping floors, denying us the chance to live our dreams.
The Right has always recognized a need for toil, but it has typically seen the peon or the prole as less than fully human -- someone whose dreams must be reduced to an animal level of survival. I see Donald Trump no better than the aristocrats of old who saw peasants as little better than livestock or of magnates of the early-industrial era who saw factory workers as machines of flesh instead of such inanimate materials as steel and wood. So the woman in a convenience store angry at people who have things a little better (well, maybe not if one considers the hefty school loans -- unless those workers have cr@ppy jobs and a hefty student loan to pay off!) finds someone who will tear down the middle class and bring it to the same debased level. That is Donald Trump. He's learned the trick of every demagogue from Vladimir Lenin to Francois Duvalier -- run against visible elites on behalf of either some dubious ideal (himself) or on behalf of elites even more exploitative than those that he castigates.
But Donald Trump is not only a plutocrat -- he is the worst sort of plutocrat, a profiteering rentier. If you live in a cheap place to live (like the rural Midwest) you have some distance. He's OK -- until he starts turning loved ones into cannon fodder (as he is talking about with respect to Venezuela). Even if he isn't invested in the provisioners of war he can at least get his ego stroked while President.
He sees himself as a Great Man, much unlike the 'lesser' man that his predecessor was.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.