More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
hardly anyone is asked to explain their opinions these days; to outline not just what they believe, but why.
In short, people are not being challenged to justify their views, or to explain why they think what they do.
issues pointed out would ignite a bizarre appeal to victimhood. The idea that ‘freedom of speech’ somehow equates with a freedom to spout undiluted, often inflammatory nonsense without being contradicted or called out is currently more popular on both sides of the Atlantic than at any other point in living memory. I believe it boils down to a simpler truth than many of us are prepared to admit to: some people are determined to believe in the fundamental badness of others. They choose to.
To fully understand Trump and his supporters you need, I think, to actually feel that your whole life is somehow somebody else’s fault, that the status and respect you consider your due have somehow been denied you by gay people or black people or Mexicans or feminists.
Take an angry person, tell them you feel their pain, give them a target for their anger and help them to switch off their brain. It’s not complicated. Present them with a slogan to chant, without ever insisting that they explain what it means, and give them an utterly bogus, entirely self-serving version of events to support their delusional fury.
And that, I think, is where we are now. Truth has been completely and deliberately debased by the most powerful man on the planet, a man whose entire life has been spent persuading poorer people to enrich him further by acting against their own interests. But Trump, for me, is more symptom than disease. His political success was made possible by creating an environment of fear and loathing into which he could insert himself as saviour and protector.
We need a complete reversal of the idea that every argument has two equal sides, that every question is debatable and that every story needs to be ‘balanced’.
