Two worlds collapse

     Thoughts of China Mieville’s The City & the City – overlapping worlds existing one on top of the other.  People of the other world there but not there, seeing them being illegal.  Law requires the other denizens – physically there, geographically overlapping – to be unseen.  Diplomatic proceedings are needed to interface with the other city.  Basically the United States now.

     I’m all for the idea that perception forms our reality, that our experience of reality is mediated and therefore is constrained by that mediation – not just sight and hearing but, more importantly, the intricate, sophisticated ways the mind forms reality.  The mind sells the product that it produces as concrete, cold-hard reality – “no, not mediated – that sure is reality you’re seein’”.

     Different realities, different worlds, overlapping.  The two worlds of Trump.  The polarities are so interesting – the passions enflamed on both sides.  A savior on one side.  A Hitler on the other.

     So what happens when these worlds collapse and synthesis is made?  Recently pundit David Brooks gave some insight into a sort of forced bridging of the gap:

NPRs ROBERT SEIGEL: [. . .] you wrote an anti-Trump column today - not your first, I should note. And on the subject of not having seen Trump's appeal early on, you wrote this - (reading) for me, it's a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I'm going to report accurately on this country. Elaborate.

DAVID BROOKS: Well, you know, I didn't - I wrote many columns saying he would not get the nomination.

SIEGEL: And you did mention that here as well.

BROOKS: Yeah. And I have probably said on this microphone many, many times. And so it looks like I was wrong. And I think it's because I wasn't socially intermingling with the sort of people who are Trump supporters. So I knew they were hurting. I didn't know they were hurting - they were going to express their hurt by supporting Donald Trump. And so in the years ahead, I've got to spend a lot more time with different sorts of people.

     At first it seems amazing that Brooks would have this gap in his worldview.  Perhaps it was a game of wishing the world to be a certain way.  As a voice of the political establishment, Brooks has been used to accurately representing the world as it is.  Now the dominant world must take into account a secondary, co-existing world.

David Brooks

     On the other hand the is Thomas Frank, who has specialized in analyzing how people vote against their own interests.  In his What’s the Matter with Kansas he looks at two worlds in conflict: the rich and poor, the establishment and the progressives, during the Great Depression.  I’d like to conclude with a quote from his new book Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?  It goes a long way in describing the economics of the two worlds now:

There was a time when average Americans knew whether we were going up or going down – because when the country prospered, its people prospered, too.  But these days, things are different.  From the middle of the Great Depression up to 1980, the lower 90 percent of the population, a group we might call “the American people,” took home some 70 percent of the growth in the country’s income.  Look at the same numbers beginning in 1997 – from the beginning of the New Economy boom to the present – and you find that this same group, the American people, pocketed none of America’s income growth at all.  Their share of the good time was zero.  The gains they harvested after all their hard work nil.  The upper 10 percent of the population – the country’s financiers, managers, and professionals – ate the whole thing.  The privileged are doing better than at any time since economic records began.