Disgust

Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty.

William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust

The aesthetic component of politics tends to be under-rated by self-consciously rational observers, but Donald Trump has managed to make it the most inescapable fact about himself and his political movement.

Donald Trump is disgusting. He is physically disgusting: the sight of a nearly 80-year-old man primping himself into a grotesque parody of his youthful appearance for hours every morning, like some sort of fascist Norma Desmond, would be disgusting in any circumstance, but is especially so in his case, given his cult’s worship of the completely delusional virility they project onto him.

His sexual habits are disgusting: you can visualize his encounter with Stormy Daniels, while his latest wife was home with their newborn child, without any unnecessary details provided by a family blog.

He is disgusting to any person who is capable of thinking and/or talking coherently, since he can do neither. His public remarks are invariably cleaned up by the media, but if you watch a broadcast or read a transcript, you will be disgusted by his inability to make even minimal sense, unless of course you are in his cult, where “feeling” what their god-emperor says transcends all rational considerations.

He is morally disgusting in every possible and impossible way. He is the only person of historical importance in modern times at least of whom it is impossible to say one positive thing. He has no redeeming characteristic of any kind, except for the purely negative ones of humiliating and betraying his most obsequious followers.

Perhaps his single most disgusting characteristic is that he has revealed not so much how evil a good portion of the American public is, but how profoundly, disgustingly, stupid we are as a polity. Donald Trump was re-elected because the American public is too ignorant, too lazy, too gullible, too childish, to pay attention to anything like the most basic details about political life. They (We the People) re-elected this utterly worthless shambolic parody of a human being to the most powerful political office in the world because the cost of certain foodstuffs had risen a bit more than they would have liked in the previous three years, and because the thought of a trans volleyball player at a college in Idaho was discomfiting to them.

These are people who are incapable of minimally rational thought about anything important, not so much because they are naturally stupid, although many of them are, but because they have been stupefied by a culture that is designed to turn them into mindless manipulable consumers, as they scroll through the videos and like things on Facebook.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism