Donald Trump, by his mere presence, is an attack on this worldview. Trump is a tyrant. As Aristotle observed all of that many years ago, autocracy is all about autocracy. When a tyrant has power, there is no rule of law, there is no governing order. Only the whims of the tyrant. Only his excessive desire to have more than his fair share of things.
Under political tyranny, external laws become authoritarian. Even when Trump does not use state power, when he is only campaigning, Trump still uses cultural power. Under cultural tyranny, inner values also become arbitrary – based on his whims and whims.
The categories by which we measure the world have lost their meaning — cruelty and kindness, integrity and corruption, honesty and dishonesty, generosity and selfishness. High intellectual values begin to seem believable and absurd, unrelated to the current situation. Trump’s mere presence has spread his counter-evangelism: Humans are fundamentally selfish; raw power that governs the world. All that matters is winning and losing. Under his influence, people subtly and subtly develop more nihilistic thoughts.
Trump has corroded the Republican Party in this way. Let me focus on one value that Trump has dismissed: the idea that there must be some connection between the beliefs you have in your head and the words that come out of your mouth. If you say something you don’t believe, you should at least feel guilty about your hypocritical behavior.
At least I’ve heard Republicans privately express their guilt when they openly support someone they despise. That guilt seems to have disappeared. Even the contempt disappeared. Many Republicans have turned off ethics faculty, apparently concluding that personal ethics doesn’t matter.
Trump’s corrosive influence extends beyond his party. Any stable social order depends on a sense of legitimacy. This is the belief and belief that those who have been empowered have the right to rule. They use power for the common good.
Trump also attacks this value. Prosecutors do not serve the rule of law, he asserts, but are Joe Biden’s political pawns. The public servants are nothing but agents of the “underground state” to bring down Trump. This skepticism has become widespread in our society. Proper skepticism about our institutions has turned into endemic distrust, a morbid skepticism that says: I’m in the game; it’s corrupt all the way down.
