Every day there’s an assault on reason in the neighborhood, yours or mine. In Central Asia parents hide disabled children so their non-disabled offspring will be attractive for arranged marriages. Reason seldom prevails over local economics. Thomas Jefferson understood slavery made him rich even as he venerated reason.
Hypocrisy flourishes where economies of suborned dignity are the norm. American conservatives talk of the US constitution using the term “originalism” thereby making no secret of their false virtue where racial equality or human rights are concerned. The American constitution was written by slave owners and their feckless northern apologists. Disdain is never a secret, it’s just tricked out with piety and the kind of candy coated earnestness we saw from Amy Coney Barrett.
There are plural assaults on reason of course: the arranged slaughter of Kashoggi; children caged; refugee camps; environmental looting from the rainforests of Brazil to Lapland, legislation to jail homosexuals in the Dakotas–the list is nearly inexhaustible not only because economies of scale triumph over dignity but because as the globe dies the resource fights are about theft on steroids.
What sells? Delegetimancy. But only for the powerful. Trump’s rhetorical employment of Mexican rapists, the GOP’s histrionics about socialists–(Biden is coming to destroy your suburb) all are incitements to hate the neighbors.
Since Trump is running on no observable platform and since he’s got no catchy slogan (Make America Great Again and Again isn’t cutting it) he should just cry out from his balcony, “Hate Your Neighbors!” There’s plenty of money to still be made.
Planet of the Blind 