Dear Tom Friedman: Get a grip. We should be rejoicing in this Hour of Trump.

I hadn't read Tom Friedman in years. It wasn't that I was boycotting Friedman in protest of his warmongering zeal and utterly wrongheaded analyses more than 10 years back. I just didn't think he was worth reading. My Friedman-free mornings have been the result of a studied indifference to bovine twaddle, not a pretentious boycott of it. (Whenever I want first-rate twaddle, there's always Charles Krauthammer.) I have since seen Friedman in interviews, his chin resting on clasped hands, looking every bit the scrupulous intellectual. I then recall the real Tom Friedman — impetuous, thoughtless, easily herded — and I remember why we became strangers, why I drifted away.

But, he hooked me this morning. "Bonfire of the Assets, With Trump Lighting Matches" was the ideal click-bait for a reintroduction. The headline held promise: Friedman would explain not only Trumpism, but the world along with it. Suddenly I just had to revisit his mind and see if it still grazed with the roaming critters of conventional thinking. I was not disappointed:

This is not funny anymore. This is not entertaining. Donald Trump is not cute. His ugly nativism shamefully plays on people’s fears and ignorance. It ignores bipartisan solutions..., undermines the civic ideals that make our melting pot work … and tampers with the very secret of our sauce — pluralism, that out of many we make one.

Here is Friedman in all his fussy horror. He hasn't the genuinely unfunny Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction to kick around anymore, but Donald Trump will do. And in classic Friedmanesque style, he got much of it wrong. Which is to say, I'd put money on my contrary opinion. ($10,000, Tom? If I had it, I'd bet it. How about $10?)

Trump is not only perpetually funny, he is vastly entertaining (excepting last night's Dubuque performance, which was a bore). Of course his nativism plays on people's fears and ignorance. That's the whole fucking point, Tom; that's the conventional commentary from months ago; and that's the bugaboo-as-revelation that continues to seize "pundits" who are horrible at chess — which you, Tom, most decidedly were some 13-odd years ago, and still are.

If watching Trump's nativists — who were there last generation, the generation before that and the generation before that, almost ad infinitum; the Irish-haters and the Chinese-prohibitionists and the Italian-detesters and the Jew-loathers — isn't amusing in its pitiable continuity, then, in politics, what is? These are the "rabble" of whom we speak when we write of the rabble. These are the Chosen of American unexceptionalism, The Virtuous People, the Christian soldiers who thrive on fear, malice and ignorance. And they are any student of democracy's dream, since their "shameful, ugly nativism" accounts for a pretty good chunk of reoccurring populism.

As for the third portion of Friedman's "insights," well, it left me in awe - a quite familiar awe, the very awe I recall experiencing some years ago, when reading Tom's awesome insight's into the Middle East. He dismissed the "big picture" then, and he fails to see it now. Donald Trump is some sort of demagogic pioneer? It is a prototypical Trump who ignores bipartisan solutions and undermines our civic ideals and tampers with pluralism? Good! God! Tom! Trump's "innovations" are but a weary extension of a decades-long Republicanism.

It's been in the papers, Mr. Friedman. And somewhere, George Orwell is lamenting that his advice to political commentators goes so resolutely unheeded by so many: "To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle."

In Trump's case, one needn't struggle for long. For it's rather easy to see that Trump is the best thing to happen to the American political system in years. He is the Destructor of our eager imagination; he is that which labors — finally — to make the Republican Party immensely radioactive to about 80 percent of the American electorate; he is become death to the GOP.

The Friedmans of this world see 20,000 cheering nincompoops in a football stadium, and tremble. Others see tens of millions of trembling Americans, and cheer. I am among the latter.

 

Comments

[Peter G]

Come now. Trump wasn't entirely boring in Dubuque. I thought the bits where he was slamming Bush and Rubio and then Christie were quite entertaining. As did his audience. There were other choice bits too. You can't have highs without lows. Otherwise another spot on analysis of Friedmanian hypocrisy.

If I may though, I would like to address the opening paragraphs of Friedman's piece wherein he reinforces his claim to be wrong about everything. That would be his critique of the Chinese government's vast stock purchases in search of some bottom to their markets. Clearly Friedman doesn't understand squat about what is happening in China. For what he condemns is actually the smartest move they could make. For if they do not support those markets and allow the vast numbers of people who they themselves persuaded to gamble on minuscule margins in the Chinese stock market to exit the market with some remaining shirt then those people in their millions are going to be wiped out. And with it will evaporate equally vast amounts of domestic demand. The Chinese have been working assiduously to transform their economy towards one more balanced one with respect to domestic and foreign demand. A deep and prolonged domestic recession will end that promptly. And create massive and not unjustified anger among their nascent middle class. This is quite unlike the liquidity crisis that faced the US banking system in 2008. It is the Chinese people who are going to have the liquidity crisis. So the Chinese government is doing exactly the right thing in spending money to stop that from happening. They are, essentially, doing what everybody over here thought they should be doing, if indirectly, they are supporting main street.

The worst part I fear is that the Chinese government may panic into further currency devaluations in order to stimulate export demand to compensate for falling domestic demand. That could cause us all some severe problems. Inflation doesn't scare me as much as out of control deflation.

[Anne J]

I tend to see both.

[Bob]

First, making DT the Robert Oppenheimer of the Republican Party is sheer poetry. Now on to the guy who can't write. Friedman sucks up the most mundane conventional wisdom and pushes it back out like hot air from a whoopee cushion. Evidently he fluttered out something about DT just in case anyone had missed Maureen Dowd's or Matt Taibbi's pieces that say exactly the same thing. All Tom adds is his insufferable affected gravitas that's every bit as believable as Trump's. And like Trump, the fact that Friedman is so successful is proof the American intellect is in darkly hilarious trouble.

[chapworthy]

What Bob said, for the win.