Fintan O'Toole on America the "pitiful," corrupted by Trump's malignant spectacle

[alwaysinasnit]

https://www.salon.com/2020/05/26/fintan-otoole-on-america-the-pitiful-corrupted-by-trumps-malignant-spectacle/

Chauncey Devega's interview of Fintan O'Toole. Excellent read.

snip...

You have written a great deal about the connections between sadism and politics. What does that relationship look like in practice?

Historian Timothy Snyder uses the language of "sado-populism" to describe this phenomenon. Some examples: Southern whites, who may have been dirt-poor, were given license to inflict pain on black people who were below them in American society. In the Irish context, which is where I'm from, one of the driving factors behind the Northern Ireland conflict was that the ordinary working-class Protestants, who were paid very poorly by UK standards, could feel superior to Catholics. That sense of hierarchy and permission is what Donald Trump plays upon.

Trump's base of support is immovable as long as he can license their contempt for other people. They are not going to betray him. Trump has given his supporters permission to show contempt for other people and they experience that permission as "liberation." Many of them have always wanted to permission to show their contempt, bigotry, racism and the like. When Trump talks about "political correctness" that is what he means.

In Trump's supporters' minds, "political correctness" is stopping them from expressing what they believe to be their superiority over other people, categorized on the basis of their race or gender or their sexual orientation or their foreignness or whatever else it may be. In their minds, Trump's attack on political correctness "allows me to be who I am. Trump is allowing me to express the obvious truth that I am superior to those people." For many of Trump's white supporters, and some others, that is an enormous type of compensation.

snip...

[renate]

1. I read that this morning... what a crappy way to start the day

Everything is terrible. I’m so tired of things being so much worse than they ought to be.

Good article, though!

[abqtommy]

2. Okay, okay...I knew who tRUMP was in 2015 and he has exceeded all my expectations of

the malevolence I knew was coming. While it's nice to have my viewpoint vindicated what's more
important for me is to have some solid plans on how we deal with the mess that is tRUMP.

[smirkymonkey]

3. Thanks, I enjoyed this interview and Mr. O'Toole's perspective.

I seem to have been reading a lot of his articles lately. He just had an article in the WaPo and I have a friend in Ireland who sends me his articles from the Irish Times. He's someone who is well worth following.