Trump has said he doesn’t have a racist bone in his body. It’s not his bones that are in question, but his brain.
The rise of a country, or its fall, radically reorganises the minds of the individuals who form its constituent parts. Being bounced from one rung of the pecking order to another reshapes personal emotions, warps the lenses of perception, and twists the course of behaviour. When the status of a nation slides, a frustrated electorate looks for someone to blame, preferably a character located conveniently close to home.
Britain’s economic slide in the 1860s was blamed on immorality, America’s slide after WWII manifested itself in 1940s and 50s McCarthyism and anti-intellectualism. In 2016 we in the UK had Brexit, with its scapegoating of the EU and attendant veneration of ignorance. America is in the throes of Trumpism and all that entails. The search for scapegoats happens whenever imports exceed exports and domestic industrial vigour declines in the face of competition.
A rise or fall in the hierarchy of nations has other profound effects on a society’s collective psyche. It transforms the emotions and shared values of the human herd. The nation moving up embraces adventure; the country moving down abandons the strange and buries its head in the familiar. It tries to march backward in time. These shifts in attitude are the result of prewired natural strategies. One of the most basic biological circuits in our animal brain dictates a simple set of alternatives. It makes us conservative in times of difficulty and exploratory when times are good.
Rather than looking into the causes of industrial decline, the conservative mind prefers to wrap itself in the cotton wool of past glories, which were afforded by unique circumstances at a particular time in history that are no longer replicable - in the case of the UK, coal, steam power, slaves, tobacco, sugar and an empire; in the case of the USA, almost limitless land, slaves, cotton, tobacco, immigration and the need for products to supply those immigrants.
Our problem in the UK is that we have been singularly unable to capitalise on our inventions, allowing the Germans, Americans and Japanese to turn our innovations into commercially successful products consumers want to buy. Believing that hamstring ourselves by leaving the level playing field of the EU will somehow increase our international competitiveness is a dogma rarely heard outside the confines of a religious establishment and matched only by the religious fundamentalist who ignores all and any evidence. It's blind faith that the past can mysteriously be resurrected without the fundamentals that made the past a success in the first place, while ignoring reality and barriers to success today.
Brexit is like finding that the care home you're about to book your aged mother into has failed its inspection and smells of urine and stale cabbage, while being told to believe in the transformative abilities of the unqualified and surly staff - after all, we won two world wars (with the aid of countless allies and would have lost without them).
At best, scapegoating is a nasty business. At worst, it is a sluggish form of suicide.
The rise of a country, or its fall, radically reorganises the minds of the individuals who form its constituent parts. Being bounced from one rung of the pecking order to another reshapes personal emotions, warps the lenses of perception, and twists the course of behaviour. When the status of a nation slides, a frustrated electorate looks for someone to blame, preferably a character located conveniently close to home.
Britain’s economic slide in the 1860s was blamed on immorality, America’s slide after WWII manifested itself in 1940s and 50s McCarthyism and anti-intellectualism. In 2016 we in the UK had Brexit, with its scapegoating of the EU and attendant veneration of ignorance. America is in the throes of Trumpism and all that entails. The search for scapegoats happens whenever imports exceed exports and domestic industrial vigour declines in the face of competition.
A rise or fall in the hierarchy of nations has other profound effects on a society’s collective psyche. It transforms the emotions and shared values of the human herd. The nation moving up embraces adventure; the country moving down abandons the strange and buries its head in the familiar. It tries to march backward in time. These shifts in attitude are the result of prewired natural strategies. One of the most basic biological circuits in our animal brain dictates a simple set of alternatives. It makes us conservative in times of difficulty and exploratory when times are good.
Rather than looking into the causes of industrial decline, the conservative mind prefers to wrap itself in the cotton wool of past glories, which were afforded by unique circumstances at a particular time in history that are no longer replicable - in the case of the UK, coal, steam power, slaves, tobacco, sugar and an empire; in the case of the USA, almost limitless land, slaves, cotton, tobacco, immigration and the need for products to supply those immigrants.
Our problem in the UK is that we have been singularly unable to capitalise on our inventions, allowing the Germans, Americans and Japanese to turn our innovations into commercially successful products consumers want to buy. Believing that hamstring ourselves by leaving the level playing field of the EU will somehow increase our international competitiveness is a dogma rarely heard outside the confines of a religious establishment and matched only by the religious fundamentalist who ignores all and any evidence. It's blind faith that the past can mysteriously be resurrected without the fundamentals that made the past a success in the first place, while ignoring reality and barriers to success today.
Brexit is like finding that the care home you're about to book your aged mother into has failed its inspection and smells of urine and stale cabbage, while being told to believe in the transformative abilities of the unqualified and surly staff - after all, we won two world wars (with the aid of countless allies and would have lost without them).
At best, scapegoating is a nasty business. At worst, it is a sluggish form of suicide.
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