The question whether Donald Trump is a political idiot savant or Jerzy Kosinski’s, Chance the Gardner – has been much debated over the last four years. His niece, the psychologist Mary Trump, describes him as both a malignant narcissist and the product of an abusive father who instilled in him an almost feral instinct to achieve dominance at the expense of any who crossed his path. She suggests that his sociopathy is the logical consequence of a cruel and shallow childhood, where his need to be emotionally rewarded was never met by his sociopathic father – a man who favored white supremacy and racist ideology.

We all sort of guessed that.

But the question for which we still seek an answer is why one half of our country follows Trump as if he were a god. Why does he still hold at least 1/3 of the Republican Party in his thrall even if what he’s selling acts directly against the self-interests of his disciples? Trump’s renunciation of mask wearing during an epidemic, his use of the presidency to create a false narrative of reality, and his chronic abuse of power, make him an enemy of those who look to government to solve societal problems such as crime, poverty, and social unrest. But Trump is an apostate from democracy. His tacit approval of white supremacy and his attempts to politicize our armed forces for his own political ends makes him an enthusiast of fascism. And his transformation of government itself into a vehicle for his own organized crime makes him a reverse Robin Hood; he steals from the poor to give to the rich.

Donald Trump has taken Friedrich Engels’s definition of False Consciousness and made it into a fatuous reality TV show. Engels described this process of propaganda as the deliberate effort to mislead the working class with a series of ideas, values, and stigmas that conceal the actual exploitation of it by its ruling class. The plutocrats of our society cultivate notions like “upward mobility”, “liberty”, and “the makers and the takers” to imbue a highly stratified society like ours with the notion that this upper class will preserve the lower class’s access to prosperity, justice, and security. Republicans have taken ownership of memes like “tough on crime”, a “self-made man”, and “the war against terrorism”, to instill in the remaining 99% the idea that continued management by Republicans is a bulwark against mob rule.

The reality that Donald Trump is the opposite of a self-made man is unthinkable to the pipe-fitter in Ohio or the electrician in Michigan. The Republican Party sells “dignity-adjacent” to those it exploits. The fact that Mitch McConnell – the Republican Senate Majority Leader – represents the interests of one of the poorest, least educated, least upwardly mobile states in America doesn’t pierce this corporate veil of conservative propaganda. Perhaps it is because it presents a sort of simulated reality behind which lies a deeply eroded constituency of aimless souls.

We live in a simulacrum of reality where half of the country has taken the blue pill, and the other half the red; where what lies beneath is “the desert of the real”. We actually call what has slowly crept into our culture over the last 20 years: Reality TV. It is a form of entertainment for lotus eaters. Some can remember a past where the pursuit of ideas like equality and freedom from oppression gave life nobility, dignity. But in the simulacrum where half of our population now resides, a life of nobility is defined as though through the looking glass.

Islamic terrorists are to the 21st Century what Jews were to the 20th Century in Nazi Germany; obsession with them conceals the business of business – “the desert of the real”, where the only things left moving are the drilling rigs bobbing their alien-like heads as they extract old energy from dead realities to fuel a somnambulist reality of today.

I hope that November 3rd, 2020 has brought back democracy in a form that we all can agree upon. A democracy wherein religion will finally repudiate the very crimes for which it was intended to proscribe. A democracy where pluralism is a virtue that brings new ideas from the cornucopia of disparate human cultures. And a deeply held humility that acknowledges both the grandeur and the limitations of our own view of life. We must somehow bring Donald Trump’s disciples back to reality, back from the simulacrum that has sucked the life out of them, because there are far better ways to see the world, to be self-made, and to have dignity and purpose.