Joey Mannarino, with 168,000 followers — just one crackpot out of a million on Twitter. "In 2015, when this man" — Trump — "walked down the golden escalator," he once tweeted, "he changed my life." Not for the better. A college-educated Obama voter — a sign of some rationality — Mannarino became entranced by Trump. And down the rabbit hole he went; so far down, he now tweets vacuous items like this:
We have a problem.
— Joey Mannarino (@JoeyMannarinoUS) May 30, 2023
Chick-Fil-A just hired a VP of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
This is bad. Very bad.
I don’t want to have to boycott.
Are we going to have to boycott?
Elsewhere, Mannarino displays his proclivity toward rather confused thinking. In one post: "My problem with DEI is not the 'diversity' and 'inclusion.'" In another: "I have no problem with diversity." Yet after all that, he then writes: "We have a problem with [diversity, equity and inclusion]." Some might object, "No no, that's not 'confused thinking,' that's stupidity."
I mention this because a Montreal correspondent of mine has been asking about a seemingly intelligent friend, a writer and poet, who also went down the many rabbit holes of Trump — and has stayed there. Why? asks my Canadian friend. What would possess a literate person to sign on to such fatuously transparent demagoguery?
As a blanket answer, stupidity is out — consider my friend's intelligent friend — although stupidity surely accounts for a good deal of Trumpism. Thus I suggested to my Canadian friend that political ignorance and naïveté are the major contributors. And to that I shall add something else.
Of late I have been reading a fair amount of Isaiah Berlin's works on the Romantic Era, roughly 1770-1830. Its essence, as the Oxford philosopher emphasizes again and again, was "the attempt to blow up and explode the very notion of a stable structure of anything." This came in reaction to the Enlightenment Era, in which discoverable answers to humanity's travails were held as the ultimate objective. We could have lasting peace and social harmony, if only we put our minds, our Reason, to it. The truth is out there, to quote "The X-Files."
The Romantics — painters, poets, politicos — rebelled at this, rebelled at what they saw as a stultifying ideation. The true nature of "man," they contended, was to release his inner self, his thundering thoughts, his supreme individualness, his (coming) Nietzschean energy — even if he is altogether barmy in his formulations. Because there is no truth, no eternal, universal values — only the heroic deeds of man. (One can see how modern fascism took root in Romanticism's ethics.)
I submit that my friend's friend, a poet, has been captured intellectually by the aged frissons of Romanticism. There is no truth; there can be no "stable structure of anything"; the Enlightenment's ethics are those of enslavement to faulty Reason.
Real life lies in blowing things up. Hence the endless appeal of Trump.