Well, if there’s one thing the chattering class isn’t going to do, it’s concede that moderately wealthy white people that like their op-ed pages can be and often are pig-fucking stupid and have a neither-fun-nor-safe interests in power and control over other people.

I live with these people—they should be my tribe, by birthright, but I’m weird and multiculty so they just try and get me to come to parties to be the interesting guy—and they are fucking awful. It’s hard to explain how a wee bit of material success just makes the parts of their brains shut off. They can’t empathize because they have no imagination, they can’t self-examine because the flee self awarness, they cleave to petty power/control games because those don’t require thought or creativity.

Trumpism isn’t an ideology, it’s more like a subconscious attraction to the superficial and the small-spirited, treated as the height of human experience. That which can’t be owned or dominated is upsetting, so everything has to be made hollow and vacuous. If an idea demands a change of perspective, or threatens with the sublime, then it has to be butchered and its innards scooped out, leaving only a manifold to fill with more self-importance and banality.