Pondering a historical analogy - of Trumpism's doom

Actor and political commentator Sam Seder meets the enemy: the feared Atlantic Wall of Trumpism.

The clip is but one of Seder's encounters with 20 Trump supporters this year, all of which were produced and monitorily advertised by Jubilee Media as "brain-damaging."

You may have found my introductory reference to the video somewhat puzzling, yet the Wall's historical reality is precisely what hit me right upside the head when watching those 39 agonizing seconds of embedded, buttressed and bolstered immovability. And it hit me with a pleasing, simultaneous conclusion.

A brief refresher. Prior to 6 June 1944, most feared by the Allied Command was Nazi Germany's so-called Atlantic Wall, a line of defensive fortifications stretching from the north of occupied Norway to France's southern border with fascist Spain. Allied fears were justified: The Wall was an invasion-repelling behemoth of steel-reinforced cement structures housing machine guns, mortars and artillery (think the terrifying, opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan); the beaches filled with "Bouncing Bettys," anti-personnel mines that when triggered by human weight would launch waist-height, explode and spread shrapnel up to 100 metres.

So what in God's name does that have to do with the idiot interviewed by Mr. Seder? I hear you ask. However loosely related it may be, the answer is twofold: Allied fears were indeed well-founded, and yet the West's civilized powers breached Hitler's monstrous Atlantic Wall in one day. Object lesson: What had appeared unbreachable — a surefooted rampart of unyielding defenses inspired by fascistic primitivism and undergirded by constant reinforcement — cracked like an egg. From there on the Second Front was wide open to Allied exploitation.

Again we find ourselves in a war — a paradoxically similar while manifestly different kind of war, a war of minds, a war of rational thought confronting fearsome ignorance fortified like clockwork by Trumpism's Hitlerian overtones, if not undergirdings. And the Seder-interviewed youth is one pebble in America's cemented Atlantic Wall of millions.

Tom Nichols, a former professor at the Naval War College, also saw the Seder video and wrote this: "It's not that the kid is wrong, it's that he's wrong with utter and serene confidence. When people ask me why I wrote The Death of Expertise, it wasn't ignorance that compelled me to write, it was this kind of unbreakable, completely self-assured stupidity that did it."

The words ignorance and stupidity are often (and incorrectly) used interchangeably, though in his diagnosis Nichols takes care to distinguish from which the kid suffers. I concede he appears to be about 135 pounds of pure, solid stupidity. On the other hand, the vast majority of human beings are, statistically speaking, of roughy equal intelligence. For all I or Nichols knows, the kid is one of them. The Trumpism Effect, however, is that of converting normal though generally ignorant cognition into a massive wall of what seems to be impenetrable stupidity.

In short, brainwashing. I'm not a psychologist, but said process strikes my understanding in terms of what the profession calls behaviourism: a combination of "classical conditioning" — e.g., the right's Pavlovian response of barking "crime family" upon hearing the name "Joe Biden," even though the two stimuli are unconnected — and Skinneresque "operant conditioning," in which thinking behavior conforms to its consequences; in the mental disorder of Trumpism, seemingly stupid yet in reality profound ignorance is relentlessly reinforced by Trump's fascistic media machine and often rewarded by friends and family, hence repeated.

I further concede that today's cognitive Atlantic Wall appears fearsomely unbreachable, much as its 1944 material structures did – and here I'll flip the script — to most of those of who built it. They were spectacularly wrong; their doom having caught up to them through their overconfident leader's equally unbreachable blundering.

Sound familiar? It's that, week by week, that will undermine Trumpism. Its byproduct: steady, incremental changes in cognitive behavior among too many of its supporters. No longer rewards, just pain. Ultimately — Das Ende.