It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence…
What I think of when I see this is Einstein saying that the study of Physics is like a series of wars. During the Newtonian war, the generals of physics needed a solid grasp of mathematics and an ability to observe. When relativistic physics emerged, the old Generals were designed for the last war, and poorly suited to the new battles, where vivid imagination was as important as mathematics. When Quantum Mechanics hit the scene, it defied imagination, meaning the Relativistic Generals were again ill suited to the new battle, which required a sort of blind faith in ideas and new math that couldn’t be easily imagined or converted to an easily understandable model.
George Will is a General in the last GOP war. He was designed for a specific world that no longer exists. When he started out a newspaper pundit had to have specific skills. He needed to have a large vocabulary. He needed to know a lot of arcane minutia. He needed to be able to write pithy statements that would appeal to elitists. He needed all of those traits, because his path to success arose from appealing to some elitist ivy-league educated newspaper editor. In his old world, the editor was the gatekeeper. If he could appeal to that editor, he could get a job writing a weekly column. If he could do it good enough to appeal to numerous editors he could get syndicated and his articles would be disseminated to a lot of people. He might even get a Pulitzer from all those peers doing the same things he was. Then he would have power, and become a gatekeeper granting public acceptance to the politicians of his choice through his articles.
Back then, politicians needed different skills too. In order to gain national prominence, they needed to suck up to columnists like George Will. They needed to appeal to Will in his language. They needed to expand their vocabulary. They needed to memorize arcane minutia. They needed to make pithy statements that would appeal to ivy league geeks, while holding a pinky in the air. As we can see by the trajectory of the country under that scheme, the politician’s ability to actually lead or manage was of secondary importance.
That is what George Will is used to. It is what is familiar. But now things are different, and he can’t process what has changed.
Today, success does not depend on appealing to the ivy league elitists, because they are no longer the gatekeepers. Today politicians talk directly to the people. President Trump issues a tweet in a certain way, and if he knows how to do it right, everyone hears it. If he does it in the right language, aimed at the average man, and designed to be understood by the maximum number of people, a maximum number of people understand it. If he weighs the statement properly, he can open the Overton window, and change the nature of the debate over the issue, perhaps allowing him to then normalize a more moderate position he intended to stake out all along. If he further crafts it to affect cognition, he can focus the mind on certain ideas beneath the subject he talks about, elicit certain emotions that help his cause, or cause the listener to assume some precept that is beneath the overt subject of the tweet. He can avert the mind’s opposition to an idea by phrasing it without clear certainty to not appear decisive and trigger the amygdala. He can actually implant ideas and forestall any opposition to them without the tweetee even knowing.
Compared to that, a too clever statement about some arcana nobody heard of, using words nobody knows, designed to appeal to geeky eggheads, decisively stating something nobody is certain of, and without greater interest, is destined to fail. But Will can’t grasp that. He is convinced President Trump is mentally inferior, despite his nearly perfect political record of seemingly neverending successes.
To George Will, President Trump’s success is all imaginary voodoo. Will is a Newtonian physicist being told some particle is in two places at the same time, as part of a smeared-out wave form that neither exists or doesn’t exist, and even if you pin it down, you can’t know its position and its vector precisely at the same moment. It is unlike anything he has ever seen. But Will not only doesn’t understand it. He not only denies it even exists. He doesn’t know there even is an explanation to deny. He has no idea there is even a method to President Trump’s success to try and rebut.
The funny thing is that Will then writes this:
As this column has said before, the problem isn’t that he does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.
How ironic is that? He is describing his own exact situation with respect to understanding Trump’s ability to communicate and succeed. He does not know that President Trump is using techniques which Will could try to argue over. He has no idea why President Trump has succeeded where every other Cuckservative the elitists have foisted upon us has failed. He has no intellectual curiosity to understand the Trump phenomenon better, or examine the techniques that have propelled him to the most powerful and desired position on the face of the planet. He does not know what it would be to know how to do what President Trump does.
George Will is the last General from the last war, unable to even comprehend the war has changed and everything he is, is now obsolete.
Thankfully we have a new General, and this one isn’t obsolete and won’t lose.
Spread r/K Theory, because cucks don’t know what cucks don’t know
[…] George Will Says Trump Has A Disability […]
george will is a dried out old douche bag. never had an original thought in his head. never did an honest day’s work. probably a fag, too.
Will doesn’t have an excuse. He has worked in media for decades. He watched the counterculture movement of the 1960’s. He watched Hollywood drift from right to left to very left. He claims to be an American conservative so he should understand capitalism, ie. supply and DEMAND. Media is demand driven. He was dramatically proven wrong in 2015-2016. This guy is just stubborn, refuses to learn, isn’t punished for being wrong and is probably approaching senility. The effete, milquetoast, fall on your sword Waspy-cuck era is over. Bury it and good riddance. He has known there is a very popular traditionalist (ie. “Cowboy”) strain in American society. It worked in spades for Reagan and George W. Bush, although both were acting. He ignores this because it scares him, because fundamentally at his core- he’s a pussy. Everything else is ego defense arising from that.
With statements like that, I’d say George Will is more like a general from two wars ago. He’s like a Napoleonic General transported into WWII, where he sees strange metal boxes and large flying birds and the soldiers are considered poorly disciplined as they will simply not form squares and march en-mass across the open fields towards the enemy.
Would it be fair to generalize it further to say that rabbits think wolves have a disability and would use that disability to try and out-group them from both the rabbits (wolves can’t work with us) and wolves (they can’t do anything for the other wolves) in one fell swoop?
Started reading Carnegie’s seminal work and at the end of the first chapter the summary is:
“Do not condemn, criticize, or complain.”
The chapter is basically a “your words won’t change their mind, so why generate unnecessary animosity?” It struck me as very rabbit-like, to the extent that I understand it right now (your book is on the reading list right after this one.)
The reason is that we don’t always care about changing minds that are the result of, not the source of, behaviors, but changing the root conditioning that the mind is responding to, and we can definitely change the conditioning through condemnation and criticism, as we’re seeing from Trump, and is being decried by folks like Will, who were accustomed to a different sensibility.
Every time Trump denounces someone or something, everyone (who would agree with Carnegie at least) recoils in horror and starts waiting for the comeuppance that is surely due for this “disabled” wolf trying to get his way in the properly civilized rabbit world, yet it never seems to come.
To build on what you’re saying in the post, in that while it’s apparent Will can’t understand the new paradigm professionally, wouldn’t his behavior indicate that even if he did understand at a logical level, that would not make any material difference in his behavior, because he’s ultimately just a rabbit trying to out-group a wolf?
I think among successful republicans there is a strong element of rabbitry. At the top, the environment is filled with wealth, and it is gained by the “In” people scratching each other’s backs, so conflict avoidance is probably conditioned. They use the power fo their group at the top to try and marginalize those on the outside to maintain their control, and that even holds with the way they make their money. Evopsych will never be mentioned by National Review, because NR is part of a publicity machine which only offers free publicity to establishment products, which are published by the same publishing houses that scratch the backs of NR writers with book contracts.
So I think you are right that Will is used to a very specific environment, and Trump has upended everything he is used to. But Trump also marks the beginning of their hold on the gate, and their ability to be gatekeepers for the money making parts of their industry too. Trump now is making all their publicity machines much less popular, because you don’t need to subscribe to them to get the latest info on Trump. Trump will tweet it right to you. SO Trump makes them uneasy, and he also threatens their rabbity resource stream.
Your description of the paradigm for newspaper columnists is, likely, very accurate. Funny thing is, I’ve been following politics for over 45 years, since reading the papers that I was delivering as a boy, and, since first coming across Will in my 20s, my opinion of him has not changed: pompous ass with nothing to say. So, given that I am approximately 25 years younger than him, there are now 3 generations of people who think Will is a pompous ass dinosaur with nothing to say. That’s a long time for a man to live in one little bubble and not notice what is outside of that bubble.
WON’T LOSE? I’m sorry, but you would categorize what we’ve gotten so far AS WINNING? Really? Because I was sold on the first openly a$$hole president that would restore American sovereignty in trade, deport existing illegals while building a massive barrier to hinder new arrivals, and someone that would avoid any further pointless military adventures that needless waste American blood and stupidly burn American money. So far we’ve gotten a budget the Dems would proud of during the last Bush administration and and heath care tweak that will lead to the total collapse of the system and permanent overhaul into a single payer socialist nightmare in about a decade or so, exactly as the architect of Obamacare envisioned in the first place.
So, please enlighten us, how it this winning, exactly?
My policy with the Trump administration is to take nothing seriously except the final result. The budget may be brilliant if it ushers in Apocalypse for reasons I already wrote of. I am not sure doing perfect budgets from her on out wouldn’t create Brazilification and a gradual increase in rabbitry for the next five decades, to the point everyone is either a man with an aftermarket vagina installed, or a woman with a surgically constructed penis, and gun owners are hunted by Blade Runner like units.
Healthcare I can’t judge, just like everyone else. I do not think at this point you could just erase all healthcare, and go back to the free market like it was, because everybody who had preexisting condition coverage before would now lose it and have to start over. Once everybody got covered, it eliminated the idea that you buy healthcare to be responsible, and then enjoy superior coverage, and if you don’t there are consequences. So it will have to be a gradual pushback, putting the free riders on something more barebones, and letting people buy something more if they want to be responsible.
What we do have is massively less immigration already and wall prototypes being chosen. We have guns secured, maybe silencers on the way, and some stories saying NFA weapons may get classed as simple long guns. We have the Supreme Court, and may get it even more secured in the future.
Trump is not King. He needs to works within a system that openly opposes him at every turn, because for eight years leftists were filling it with their people. But so far I think he has done better than I could possibly have hoped to, and way better than any Cuck like Jeb would have. Libs are in meltdown, which will destroy their electoral prospects for some time to come, and we are even regaining control over the intel, LE, and national security apparatus.
And the real work is still to come.
So far, this looks fairly good to me, and probably as good as we can hope for until the swamp is drained and we have a greater grip on the machinery.
100% for both your column and your comment.