CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Theatrical release poster L to R: Harpo, Zeppo, Groucho, Chico – Fair Use

Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot. – Marx Brothers, Duck Soup

Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you: he really is an idiot.

– Marx Brothers, Duck Soup

Among the many WTF questions that the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup politics flooding the land since Trump ’24 took office is surely this one: What’s Wrong with the American Voter?

Some runner-up questions: Will there be MAGA after Trump is gone? Will Trump, alive or dead, ever be gone? Can the Democratic Party “unwoke”/”un-DEI” and what would they be then? Does factually/objectively based reportage die for good ? Does the American mind wander off into TikTok? Will Silicon Valley tech-broligarchic BS replace electoral democracy? Will Trump lackeys, propagandists and stooges be brought to trial? Will the Trump nightmare follow the destiny of Shelley’s Ozymandias:

Nothing beside remains Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Nothing beside remains Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I chose first the question of the American voter’s sanity.

To assume that the American voter is as nuts as Trump is would amount to FOX News-like reportage. What you want to begin with is Jean Renoir’s observation that it’s a terrible thing in this world that everyone has their reasons. What is not terrible is when everyone reasons within empirical/rational methodologies, a way of knowing that has served us well since the Enlightenment.  Because our reasoning has descended to an uninformed, opinionating, online “liking” level that is deaf to opposing arguments and blind to facts and evidence, we now live in a society in which not only does everyone have his or her “reasons” but each is prepared to employ violence to defend their stupidities.

Why would anyone vote twice for a man who is transparently a bargain store hustler/grifter who learned the trade from his father, who was a bargain store hustler/grifter? The father made his money as a slum landlord and the son made his money off the U.S. Presidency. Before that, he was a bankrupt “thousandaire.” Father and son are not alone as pure products of America, William Carlos Williams’ label in a 1923 poem for Americans lost in a rootless, degraded consumerist culture. What’s surprising, given the long fall of America into such a culture, is that someone like Trump........

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