Trump, who must never, or barely, heard of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault or Guy Debord, has mastered the idiom of the superlative. He thereby dominates the GOP, and perhaps soon again thereby, America.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its...
Enter farce. As the late French philosopher Guy Debord observed, we live in the Society of the Spectacle.Or as New York Magazine writer Olivia Nuzzi recently nailed it in her cover story, Chasing Trump: Thirteen weeks on the campaign trail with the Republican also-rans: Time for us to brush up on our deconstructionists, neatly summarized by PBS as "the multiplicities and contingencies of human experience necessarily bring knowledge down to the local and specific level, and challenge the tendency to centralize power through the claims of an ultimate truth which must be accepted or obeyed by all."
"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence ... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
This has powerful political implications. I, from the brilliant Walter Truett Anderson's "Reality Isn't What It Used to Be," am one of a tiny handful of archconservative postmodernists, a belief-about-belief system ideologically neutral and perfectly consistent with free markets, peace through strength, and traditional values, the Reagan Trio to which I so happily and bitterly cling.
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