Theatrical release poster L to R: Harpo, Zeppo, Groucho, Chico – Fair Use
Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot.
– Marx Brothers, Duck Soup
Among the many WTF questions that the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup politics flooding the land since Trump ’24 took office is surely this one: What’s Wrong with the American Voter?
Some runner-up questions: Will there be MAGA after Trump is gone? Will Trump, alive or dead, ever be gone? Can the Democratic Party “unwoke”/”un-DEI” and what would they be then? Does factually/objectively based reportage die for good ? Does the American mind wander off into TikTok? Will Silicon Valley tech-broligarchic BS replace electoral democracy? Will Trump lackeys, propagandists and stooges be brought to trial? Will the Trump nightmare follow the destiny of Shelley’s Ozymandias:
Nothing beside remains
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
I chose first the question of the American voter’s sanity.
To assume that the American voter is as nuts as Trump is would amount to FOX News-like reportage. What you want to begin with is Jean Renoir’s observation that it’s a terrible thing in this world that everyone has their reasons. What is not terrible is when everyone reasons within empirical/rational methodologies, a way of knowing that has served us well since the Enlightenment. Because our reasoning has descended to an uninformed, opinionating, online “liking” level that is deaf to opposing arguments and blind to facts and evidence, we now live in a society in which not only does everyone have his or her “reasons” but each is prepared to employ violence to defend their stupidities.
Why would anyone vote twice for a man who is transparently a bargain store hustler/grifter who learned the trade from his father, who was a bargain store hustler/grifter? The father made his money as a slum landlord and the son made his money off the U.S. Presidency. Before that, he was a bankrupt “thousandaire.” Father and son are not alone as pure products of America, William Carlos Williams’ label in a 1923 poem for Americans lost in a rootless, degraded consumerist culture. What’s surprising, given the long fall of America into such a culture, is that someone like Trump didn’t come along earlier and win the presidency. Twice.
One category of American voters idolizes Trump as a non-ironic, straight-shooting, not mocking“ real product of America,” the America he wants for them and they want. A pure American pursues property, profit and portfolio. As does Trump. Money, power and girls: the Trump/Epstein mission.
What’s the percentage of believers here in this category?
Then there are devoted Trump voters who calculate that he will do more to protect their wealth than any Democrat, regardless of how much he trashes the respectability their wealth gives them. He won’t regulate on behalf of the environment or workers, won’t tax on behalf of the poor, and won’t threaten the control of the health care industry by the private sector, and won’t give unions, the IRS and the public space/sector enough power to counter the ravages of capitalist exploitation. Money will remain speech; corporations will still be persons, and the economics of the greatest good to the fewest are what the Dividend recipient class expect from any Republican candidate, Trump included.
This category of voters is for the stability needed to get debtors, foreign and domestic, to pay and creditors to exploit. Note the absence of a form of government most suitable for this. Democracy will do but oligarchy is better. While Democrats may threaten the status quo, Sanders and Warren for example, Trump is a sure bet. He won’t. Unless and until his Chicolini idiocy becomes threatening of a status quo, which seems to be right about now. This means a wealth class, say one in the East Coast financial sector, may lobby Republican legislators to step away from Trump. However, what level of Trump madcap is more threatening to Dividend Recipients than a once again empowered Democratic Party? There’s a “Get the Wealthy!” storm brewing.
A third category of Trump supporters really do not like Democrats/Liberals/Progressives/Leftists and the un-American, un-Christian things they represent. They do like the way Trump drives these people nuts. Nurtured since Reagan on the mantra of Government as the problem, this lot of voters is solidly behind a Trump who is chain sawing Government agencies and institutions. How the Head of Government who issues Executive Orders like a Stalin, and sends a private mercenary into American streets like a Stalin, is yet not identified as The Government Reagan mocked, is something that makes sense only in a Marx Brothers film. Duck Soup again.
As it is their wont, the Democratic Party tells us the government can help solve our problems. This is a pickle they won’t get out of post-Trump because the iconoclastic spirit runs deep in the American mass psyche, alongside a love of weapons and automobiles, and the icon they want to break is the Federal Government. See, January 6, 2020.
A fourth category of voters who would vote for Trump over any Democrat are those who don’t like atheist Democrats willing to legalize Leda marrying the Swan, aborting what could have a life, chaperoning adolescent boys into girls and vice versa, insisting on the separation of church and State, which is translated as keeping Jesus out of the classroom and the body politic, and then DEI, which is supporting a troublesome, threatening diversity, seeking a socialist economic equity, and a blind inclusion that upsets meritocracy.
Note that neither very Christian Democrats, Raphael Warnock nor James Talerico, are popular among Christian Republicans. But Donald J. Trump is.
If you define a secular society as one that doesn’t let Jesus get in the way of making a profit, then the U.S.A. is a very secular society. Not the case in 1976 when the born-again Jimmy Carter was elected as an antidote to Mr. Evil, Nixon. But the jump back to greed and not Jesus that Reagan inaugurated is red hot and on obscene display now, triggering an anti-wealth starter fire.
Trump stepped all over the Reagan devout as well as the Jesus devout and has gotten away with it. In the first situation, Trump simply played a dislike of the foreign to bring the xenophobic nativists to him while he grifts and cons domestically and globally. And clearly his personal life is a profanation in the eyes of the Lord, Ezekiel, but he’s still the guy who reversed Roe. His personal evangelist, Pastor Paula White-Cain, avows that to oppose Trump is like opposing God. That’s total Duck Soup “Hail, Hail Freedonia!”
Here is a group who would vote for Trump a third time. He knows it.
A category of American voters that will not vanish when Trump does is the Loser category, those who are losing in a Monopoly game in which money and property have already been won. A new player faces conditions on the board that are confusing, frustrating and angering. Hate and violence proceed.
Redistributive and distributive politics are not possibilities but accusations made by Republicans against Democrats, who have always been intimidated by such attacks. A charge of socialism is enough to get Democrats to pledge allegiance to capitalism.
Right now, there is a greater chance that this Loser group will once again vote for a Destroyer of Whatever You Got than an advocate for a calm return to reason and sanity, or, an advocate of overhauling an economic system that brings the greatest good to the smallest number.
Social democrat, Mayor Mamdani won the election by speaking not for the winning class but speaking for those who have been diminished by the stochastic and exclusionary formulation of what winning and losing are. Re-directing the angry Loser vote from lusting to put a chain saw to the Federal Government to what Mamdani is targeting – a plutocratic-friendly economic system – involves first a Democratic party re-directing itself. The question is: Is there passion to topple a wealth class that uses its billions to live like Louis XVI in a country that once aspired to be egalitarian? I’m not alone in observing that there is. And it is that possibility which will drive a defending vote by the Dividend Class for a Republican in 2028, regardless of what new Chicolini the Republicans run.
Will conspiracies be a thing if how power is used against the Losers remains opaque? Will a presidential candidate who asserts power to be employed to destroy the bastions of power, always directed at Big Government and not Wild West Capitalism — Trump’s successful tactic — once again win over this Loser class of voters? We have just witnessed Trump and Musk run through the U.S. Government Manual like a Mafia hit list.
Because the reasons of the Loser class are not reasonable but fester in their passions, and those passions have been kept on the boil on Fox and social media while fact-based media is mocked, how to decathect them as part of a Democratic Party plan is not now a plan out there for review.
To the question: What Is Wrong with the American Voter? I would say that some 80% of them have been more wronged than wrong. I would focus on conditions that bring each of these categories of voters into existence. Though part of our illness is a reduction of forces, factors and influences to a personal level because the autonomy of the individual is such a potent element in the American mass psyche, we need to withdraw from that. After all, the culmination of that illusion is sitting now in the Oval Office, a gold gilded chair perhaps.
