03-03-2025, 11:45 PM
What we're experiencing in the US now (and, consequently, the world to a degree) is disillusionment or, better, disenchantment.
Not, as some would have it, disillusionment of Trump fans with their hero. His enemies would love that, but it's not happening.
No, what we have here is disenchantment - the sudden breaking of a spell that had endured for six or seven decades and has now dissipated like a bad smell, in weeks.
The enchantment could be called DEI or wokeness, but those are only its terminal and most extreme manifestations. It started, as many moods and fashions do, with a worthy idea: shame at America's treatment of its black people and desire to do right by them in compensation. Then, about 1964, it all began to go wrong.
The thing about an enchantment is, it makes the world (seem) different from its reality - this is the illusion - and the enchanted behave in objectively foolish, self-destructive, or downright insane ways. Toward the end of the now-ended enchantment, people commonly believed that transsexualism was something other than a derangement, that BLM was something other than a violent grift, Hamas brave, honorable, and not a murder-suicide cult. Anti-racists not, objectively, racists in their performance and statements. All these mad things were current shibboleths all were expected to say and at least pretend to believe.
And now, in a few weeks, the spell is broken, the enchantment gone. No one believes in woke any more (though some retain the tropes of speech and alignment it once enforced, crying bitterly for their vanished, comforting self-harm). It's a new world. America is now acting upon its actual national interests, not emotional sentiments. False friends have a choice to make: be real friends in need, or get off the bus. You can call this betrayal, but it's betrayal of betrayers at worst, clear-eyed realpolitik at best.
Welcome to the new world. It's going to be a rough ride if you don't hang on like your life depended on it. But that shining city on a hill is back, and we're headed for it again if you don't fall off.
Not, as some would have it, disillusionment of Trump fans with their hero. His enemies would love that, but it's not happening.
No, what we have here is disenchantment - the sudden breaking of a spell that had endured for six or seven decades and has now dissipated like a bad smell, in weeks.
The enchantment could be called DEI or wokeness, but those are only its terminal and most extreme manifestations. It started, as many moods and fashions do, with a worthy idea: shame at America's treatment of its black people and desire to do right by them in compensation. Then, about 1964, it all began to go wrong.
The thing about an enchantment is, it makes the world (seem) different from its reality - this is the illusion - and the enchanted behave in objectively foolish, self-destructive, or downright insane ways. Toward the end of the now-ended enchantment, people commonly believed that transsexualism was something other than a derangement, that BLM was something other than a violent grift, Hamas brave, honorable, and not a murder-suicide cult. Anti-racists not, objectively, racists in their performance and statements. All these mad things were current shibboleths all were expected to say and at least pretend to believe.
And now, in a few weeks, the spell is broken, the enchantment gone. No one believes in woke any more (though some retain the tropes of speech and alignment it once enforced, crying bitterly for their vanished, comforting self-harm). It's a new world. America is now acting upon its actual national interests, not emotional sentiments. False friends have a choice to make: be real friends in need, or get off the bus. You can call this betrayal, but it's betrayal of betrayers at worst, clear-eyed realpolitik at best.
Welcome to the new world. It's going to be a rough ride if you don't hang on like your life depended on it. But that shining city on a hill is back, and we're headed for it again if you don't fall off.
Non-practicing atheist