under trump's skin

‘I just love how she gets under Donald Trump’s skin.’

Supposedly the democratic process was about presenting your program – as reasonably as you possibly can, so that people would start to trust you – and then letting the electorate decide.

Unfortunately things have become anything but.

People belonging to both sides of the political divides, on both sides of the Atlantic, are acting more like spoiled brats than like the responsible politicians they are supposed to be. Instead of presenting their ideas using a rational discourse they ‘energize’ their followers using all kinds of tricks developed by ‘political marketeers’ until reason is completely numbed.

And the worst thing is that by repeated mutual validation individuals generate social norms. That’s why so many of us don’t find anything odd in the way politicians are currently pandering to their ‘special needs’.

Because of our lassitude and at our own expense.

“The fourth lesson is that voters don’t seem to care about the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the anti-elite politicians. Never mind that Oxbridge-educated politicians were railing against the elites and the EU. Never mind that Trump loves outsourcing and immigrant labor in his struggling businesses, while campaigning against, um, outsourcing businesses and immigrant labor.

The sense of betrayal by and distrust of the elites is so rampant, it doesn’t matter who says it. “I think people in this country have had enough of experts,” said Michael Gove, the Oxford-educated justice secretary, who also compared pro-EU economists to Nazi scientists.”

It was by meeting their ideologically blind ‘hypocrisy and inconsistency’ with despondency that we, ‘the people’, have allowed this to happen.
Pretending that our side is nevertheless better than the other one will only prolong the agony.
We must imperatively ask that both sides mend their ways. Comprehensively.

And for that to happen we must stop pretending that any of the naked emperors have any clothes left on their backs.