[quote]After his ouster from the West Wing on Friday, ex-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon declared the Trump presidency that his brand of populist, right-wing conservatives helped make a reality is “over.”
“The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said in an interview with The Weekly Standard.
“We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. It’ll be something else.”
“There’ll be all kinds of fights, and there’ll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over,” he added, according to the Weekly Standard.[/quote]
No, it’s the White Queen. Part of the point is that Alice is the only sensible person in Wonderland. All of the adult characters are quite, quite bonkers. (The White Queen also may be Alice’s obnoxious mother.)
I’m not a relativist, and I’m definitely not post-modern. The company I was working for at the time acquired a president who announced that “perception is the only reality”. I very politely suggested he try that one on the International Electrotechnical Committee and Underwriters Laboratories. It did not go down well, and soon after I decided to leave.
I mention this solely because at some point people like Trump and Bannon are going to come up against the laws of physics, and they will lose. A few days working as a volunteer in a mental hospital will soon persuade anyone that insanity is hard to define, but you know it when you see it.
I think that societies themselves can be reasonably described as insane or neurotic. For example, most people who believe in American exceptionalism are not narcissists, but America is a narcissist because it views itself as exceptional.
Auden would agree with you. (1st September 1939) But it is a fact that mentally ill people tend to reflect the less sane aspects of their society - Victorians went in for religious obsession, post Freud sexual obsession became popular and now we have jihadis and right wing extremists - though Breivik seems not to be mentally ill but to have a brain malfunction, it has manifested itself in far right politics.
I have long since framed bigotry as being a cognitive defect/impairment. To my surprise, those who approach bigotry in terms of purely soft/social framings are generally hostile to this perspective. They tend to worry more about it being an excuse to “give attention” to those who are already narcissistic, rather than the strategy of finding a way to inoculate people and groups against it.