Understanding and Disabling the Cult of Trump, Part II

The historical and social developments which enabled the rise of the cult of Trump I trace back to the 1960s. Drs. Oliver and Shaver wrote in the Harvard Educational Review of the concept, “The missing community.”They pointed out how self-serving special interest groups were rapidly eroding locally based senses of communities in which people of different philosophical and political perspectives worked in a civil and respectful manner to try to serve the community as a whole. Instead, those interests were creating regional and countrywide interest communities which had little regard for what was good for all.

Then came Reagan with his focus on deregulation and “supply side economics.” Those developments served only special interests and the wealthy. That was followed by the efforts of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, and Dick Armee to change the nature of the political landscape to outright uncivil war. The focus of the Republicans became to destroy the enemy, rather than to serve our country and people as a whole. Mitch McConnell followed with his focus on unending obstruction to insure that government did not work as it should, so that he could say, “See, I told you that big government did not work.”.

Early in the 21str century we saw several terribly damaging developments in media. First Murdoch established the first nationwide propaganda machines disguised as “Fox News.” With its combination of outright lies and propagandistic slants designed to attract a dissatisfied white and poorly educated whit working class,, Fox fueled social animus and chaos. Following in short order were the various conspiracy theory promulgator and outright anti-government and anti-democracy internet channel platforms designed to fuel, if not incite violence against government.

Add to that the various social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. They all started out as free flowing exchange platforms with few limits on posting. They all quickly found out that deliberately false, aggressive, Ideological rants, and hate speech earned them money, so initially placed virtually no limits on such posts. While some efforts have been made to clean up posts since then, the attempts have been feeble, sabotaged by those platforms for profit..