For all our talk of democracy, it's pretty obvious that the country is run by elites in business, media, and politics. The rest of us get to ratify the general leftish or rightish direction they seem to be going, but the actual power of the people is pretty crude and is in effect plebiscitary. Elite thinking is the only thinking that really matters, and all talk about the will of the people is really pretty fanciful.
And so people across the political spectrum for their different reasons have become extremely frustrated that the political system seems so utterly unresponsive to their will that it's completely understandable that cynicism about politics should be so pervasive. This cynicism has turned toxic in the more populist precincts of American society, and Democratic elites bear much of the responsibility for the loss of the white working class to that was solidly Democratic before Reagan to the current fever dreams of the Right.
So we can talk all we want about how delusional Trump supporters are, but it wouldn't have come to this if it weren't for a fundamental nihilism or fecklessness among the country's elites--including its Liberal elites. I hold the Bill Clintons, Dick Morrises, Rahm Emmanuels, Larry Summers, and the whole Neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party as significantly responsible for the rise of the Tea Party, MAGA, and Q anon--if not quite as responsible as spineless Republican elites like Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio or the calculating cynicism of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and so many other game players like them. Not to mention Rupert Murdoch.
My point here is that the because Democratic elites were criminally negligent in their Neoliberal Washington Consensus cluelessness, and that combined with their run-of-the mill Beltway swampiness and their capture by a kind politically correct silliness, they gave Fox and Limbaugh enough to work with over the years so that even sane people began believing the worst. So I think it's fair to say that If Democracy fails in the United States in the next decade, it won't be caused by White Supremacist militias and Q anon conspiracists, but because of the accumulated failures of elites that created the conditions for their emergence.
In a very blunt sense, Q anon, insane as its specific assertions are, isn't wrong. Elite culture may not be dominated by Satan-worshipping pedophiles with space lasers made by Jews, but there is a kind of nihilism in which ego, greed, and will to power are simply accepted as normative as the main motivating driving forces in politics, business, and media. Mythologizing that nihilism by way of demonizing it in conspiracy theories takes what is kinda true and twists it into something that isn't, but that doesn't mean that the kinda true part of it can be dismissed because of the crazy way it's being distorted.
This is not an indictment of many individuals in business, media, and politics because clearly there are many fine people in each of these areas, but there is a pervasive cynicism about the corruption of our institutions that pervades popular culture for good reason. It's understandable why so many people are inclined to think the worst of someone like Joe Biden even if he doesn't deserve it. But why anyone can think the best of a sleazy crackpot like Donald Trump--that he is a better man, a truer American than Joe Biden or Barrack Obama--is one of the most astonishing feats of political jiujitsu in my lifetime. The irony of Trump being adopted as if he were Michael the Archangel leading an army to slay the Satanic armies is so absurdly whackadoodle, it leaves one speechless.
During most of my adult life, media--especially prestige fiction, film, and TV--present a picture of American institutions that are run by psychopaths whose ego, greed, and will to power are the ugly truth that determines policy no matter what the decent people who work in these institutions would prefer. There is a feeling that the evil power that they and their institutions represent has a kind of stolid inevitability, that Don Quixotes can break their lances tilting at it and might win a victory here or there, but that the power and inevitability of this evil power is implacable. At best the decent folk are the John Kellys or Jim Mattises who try to provide some check on the worst instincts of the really terrible people who rise to the pinnacles of power in these spheres. But in the end, the good people are either coopted or purged.
Trump isn't an aberration; he's just someone who daylights, magnifies, and exaggerates what's already there almost everywhere. He's somebody who believes that everybody is as bad as he, as cynical and self-interested in his or her motivations as he, and he's more right than wrong about that when it comes to so many of the people who rise to positions of power and influence in this country.
Does that sound extreme or overly cynical on my part? Maybe, but it seems pretty clear to me that those motivations are by and large accepted as normative within these elite spheres. People working in these institutions as individuals may be more or less decent, but the institutional ethos is deeply corrupted by the exigencies of capitalism, and it makes sense that those who are most successful in such a corrupt values environment are those who have the least compunction about behaving corruptly. Is there any wonder that decent, but poorly informed people in great swaths of America are inclined see the ruling elites the way they do?
But perhaps that's why I feel a scintilla of hope. Yes, it might prove naive, but it's precisely because Trump has daylighted and magnified for all to see what we have in fact become that maybe, just maybe, especially as more comes out about him in coming months, that we will come to some broad collective resolution to reject elite nihilism for something better. The catch, of course, is whether something better will present itself. Biden might buy us some time, but he's not it. Will it come from within elite precincts of American society or from somewhere else? Don't know. But it's more likely to come from African American people of faith than from a soul-eviserated white elite, imo. Not the Corey Bookers, but the Raphael Warnocks. We'll see.