Anti-Trump Industry

Sitting on a friend's coffee table were three, large, hardback books, all of whose subject matter was Donald Trump. It seeems there is a whole industry springing up to feed the appetite of the rabid anti-Trumpistas of both the left and the right. And I suppose if all I cared about was book sales I could get in on the craze, because the genre requires no special talent or intellectual accuity whatsoever. The three books were "I Alone can Fix It" by a couple of political reporters, "Betrayal" by some other guy and "Everything Trump Touches Dies" by political operative Rick Wilson. What I am about to write is not a review because there is no way I could read these things. The most I could accomplish was a scan of the jackets and a few pages of the intro. The point I wish to make is that the fanatical fixation on the person of Trump, by both progressives and conservatives, is misdirected. Make no mistake, I think the man is an abomination. But he is also a reflection of a society, and none of these authors want to talk about the deep structural issues that brought Trump into being. They can avoid Trumpism by their sensational focus on a person. It is pathetically simplistic to frame Trump as an abberation from a just, rational norm. My friends on whose table the books sat think of themselves as good, tolerant liberals who wish to preserve the capitalist "democracy" which helped them become fabulously rich. Trump and Trumpism threaten that imaginary country where politicians represent their constituency, where we have government of, by, and for the people and voting is your most precious right. Respect for institutions, for norms of decency, for all the things Trump turned into the butt of his jokes, this is what outrages the defenders of the status quo. The worst of these is Rick Wilson. His umbrage stems from the fact that Trump subverted his beloved conservatism. Rick is a political operative hack, writes attack pieces and specializes in negative campaigning for the worst of the beltway slime. But he is all moral outrage when it comes to The Donald and those conservatives who sold their soul to support him. As if these cynical ghouls had a soul to start with. I'm sure there are a dozen more Never Trump books on the shelves or being written along with the usual MSNBC schlock. All of it is a diversion from the real issues facing not just the USA, but so-called liberal capitalist democracies everywhere.