Respectful Conversations

 I’m struggling between impulses. I am working with a group of Harrisonburg citizens to create a forum of respectful conversations among people with divergent socio-political positions. We will have eight participants, loosely representing people who vote Republican and those who vote Democrat. 

Of the eight, I suspect several, including myself, resist being nailed to the wall as a Republican or Democrat. Our purpose in these conversations is to search for common belief-systems rather than identify ourselves as warriors for the opposition. We hope these conversations can be a model for community conversations—and for the young adults who are listening to how we comport ourselves in these contentious times. 

I am close friends with several people who see socio-political systems differently than I do. I meet one of them, a pickleball friend, weekly for coffee. She is one of my best friends. We specifically refrain from argument, a highly overrated genre. We work in our conversations to locate places on which we agree. 

I think we make friends and find a way of moving forward by locating those places rather than shifting to argument, a way of talking to convince others to see the world as we do. Sometimes arguments work, but mostly they do not. They drive participants more firmly into their corners.

I am, however, in this Op-ed, shifting to argument, a transgression I allow myself because my readers are removed and the danger to our democracy seems immanent. As someone who has read and partially understood Descartes, I can’t help but question my perception that our economy has been threatened by Trump’s tariff policies, echoing President Hoover’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 that triggered the depression; his deportation policies disappearing into El Salvador prisons immigrants and potentially citizens nabbed off the streets; the ways in which he has thumbed his nose at courts and threatened judges; his attacks on educational institutions, threatening to defund them and revoke their non-profit status if they don’t adhere to his notions of what should be taught; his weaponization (classical irony) of the justice department to attack institutions, law firms, and individuals who have dared to hold him to account; and, to my mind, most egregiously, blaming Zelenskyy for the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

These charges against the Trump Administration are partisan. This is how I have interpreted the first four months of the Trump Administration. Then the doubts leak in—Descartes in action. I can’t divorce myself from my experiences and consequent interpretations of political actions. “I think, therefore I am.” Going outside that claim invites trouble.

Let me begin with my pseudo identification as a Democrat. With the current foci of the Democratic Party, I’m there. The party values diversity, equality, community. Its history as a party is less than sanguine on these issues, but in the current iteration, that’s where the Democratic Party lays its hat. 

The Republican Party has inherited the humanist tradition prioritizing individual achievement and diminished government interference (this again goes back to Descartes and Rousseau). Democrats a-historically imagine themselves as humanists, which I am not. A Teddy Roosevelt fan, I think we need a government to mitigate the power of the rapacious billionaire class. 

I wonder about these people like Trump, Musk, and Bezos who, while professing to be followers of Jesus, think they need unfettered billions while there are approximately 38 million poverty-class people in the United States, let alone trillions in countries like Sudan. A consequence of the Citizen’s United legislation, these billionaires seem to be the people controlling what used to be our democracy. I have no idea of what leads to their obsession with power and wealth—and to the MAGA-hatters who want to be like them.

At the risk of oversimplifying, I imagine two groups of Trump supporters. There are the MAGA hats people. And there are the others like the people I know. They see the world differently than I do, which brings me back to our Respectful Conversations Project. I am fascinated by the way in which people of clear intelligence (yes, including myself here) can look at the same object and see it so differently.

Putin's Perisitoid

 Putin’s Parasitoids

Under the veil of communism, Putin is trying to globalize kleptocracy, autocratic systems through which powerful heads of government appropriate the resources of a country for their own purposes. For kleptocrats, enough is never enough. They think of themselves as the anointed with those underneath existing only to serve superior beings, John Galt (“Atlas Shrugged”) on steroids.

For whatever reasons in his unrewarded childhood, Trump has been drawn to kleptocracy. He and Musk are entirely unconcerned by those underneath them, a perspective made clear by Musk when he said that empathy is the fundamental weakness of Western culture, drawing on Gad Saad’s theory of suicidal empathy, diminishing oneself by caring for others (Rogan Podcast). 

In Saad’s terms, Musk imagines himself as privileging his empathy for culture over individuals, a bit of a rabbit hole through which exploiters can justify exploitation of their neighbors. These economic aristocrats pretend they are working for the greater good of humanity by fighting against regulations that protect the masses from price-fixing, global warming, pollution, and social integration (DEI programs). For kleptocrats, democracy is a downer, an ideology that redistributes to the takers the property of the makers (Paul Ryan, 2010 [a quote Ryan subsequently disavowed]), without whom humanity would stagnate. 

I doubt that President Trump, an essential illiterate, has any concept of evolutionary psychology. Rather than an objective materialist (Ayn Rand), he is a psychopath consumed by a deep inferiority complex driving him to obsessively demonstrate his power over everyone else, maniacally disregarding the rights of others (Bill Faw, DNR, 3.11.25). Faw, a psychology professor, makes the distinction between a successful and unsuccessful psychopath: Putin is the former; Trump is the latter, incapable of moderating his behavior or checking his primary impulses, often getting into trouble (e.g., signing and non-signing the proclamation of the Alien Enemies Act). 

Faw’s distinction might account for the attraction Trump feels for Putin. Putin is clearly who Trump wants to be. Freud might characterize this worship as transference neurosis, an attempt to resolve through another what one cannot resolve in one’s self. The same phenomenon might also account for the attraction of hard-core MAGA enthusiasts blind to the obvious psychosis of Trump.

There is perhaps in addition a more insidious relationship between Putin and Trump, one the media, perhaps out of fear, has largely ignored: Trump’s economic dependence on Russia. The economic link between Trump and Russia is well documented, beginning with Trump’s visit to Moscow in 1987 during which he connected with several oligarchs ready to pounce on state-owned resources during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Having failed in his business attempts in the United States, Trump may have been ready to do a little pouncing of his own . 

By the mid-90s, he had burned through his inheritance and declared bankruptcies four times. American banks wouldn’t touch him. But he surprisingly received huge loans from Deutsche Bank, notorious for channeling large sums to recipients notably incurious about their lenders, i.e., the Russian mafia and oligarchs. Alan Lapidus, Trump’s architect, said “[Trump] could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia.” After Trump had begun to get back on his feet, Donald Jr. said, “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assests” (Michael Hirsh, “Foreign Policy”). Un huh.

Given the Trump administration’s project to destroy our infrastructure, our affiliations with long-time allies, and deliver Ukraine to Russia on a platter, it seems as if Putin has Trump in his pocket. Putin wants to demonstrate to his people and other countries the weakness of democracies, for which he, like other kleptocrats, has nothing but contempt. Democracy just gets in the kleptocrat’s way. 

We daily experience from the Trump administration new assaults on democracy, which began with his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. His administration is thumbing its nose at judicial rulings, arresting and deporting people without due process, attacking the press, threatening law firms, alienating the United States from its traditional allies, undermining NATO, accusing Ukraine of starting the war with Russia, dismantling the Department of Education, USAID, and Radio Free Europe, withdrawing funds from research and universities, and threatening to freeze social security payments if he doesn’t get his way. This is just for starters. 

A generous interpretation of Trump/Musk’s actions are that as members of the billionaire class, they see no purpose in government that takes wealth from them to redistribute to the ninety-nine percent. Members of the billionaire class, after all, do not need social security, health insurance, or public schools. 

A less generous interpretation is that Trump and Musk are Putin’s parasitoids, larvae planted inside the host to destroy it from within, not unlike the worm that seems to have eaten out RFK Jr.’s brain.

#TraitorTrump, #DumpTrump

See Trump/Russia