quote:

The Occupy protester turned Trump supporter (24, New York)
‘His candidacy is ripping the soul of America apart – we deserve it’

I work in a liberal arts department. I’ve read the works of Karl Marx, Herbert Marcuse, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Plato, Judith Butler, Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault and so on. I am more inclined to listen to what Slavoj Žižek or Noam Chomsky have to say about current affairs than Rachel Maddow or Bill O’Reilly. If one were to take account of my demographics, the smart money would be to peg me for a Bernie Sanders supporter.

My interest in politics did not truly develop into an intellectually mature form until 2011, when Occupy Wall Street broke out as a populist leftist grass roots movement to combat the evils of unrestricted robber baron capitalism.

Early in 2014 I began concealing my political opinions from people, and it was shortly after this time that I began plotting to vote Republican in hopes that the party would send the country so far in the direction of complete unrestricted neoliberalism and libertarian free market superstition that Americans would come to recognize the dangers of these ideologies and eventually reject them.

I don’t find conversations about how morally repugnant Trump is to be interesting when the rest of the candidates seem to also support imperialistic and fascist policies concerning drone strikes, torture and mass surveillance.

I don’t agree with discussions of how Trump is making the national dialogue more base and vulgar when Obama has instated common core standards to gear humanities education in public schooling to be teaching children how to read memos, rather than cultivating critical thinking skills that would allow them to understand subtle arguments.

Do I like Trump’s platform? No, I think most of it is silly and misguided, but at least it is not the same bullshit casserole that has been on the menu in Washington DC for as long as I have been alive.

His candidacy is a happy accident that is currently ripping the soul of America apart, which is something that I think we desperately need (and deserve) at this time in our history, for better or for worse. I support whatever strange gods happen to be behind his candidacy, for, as Martin Heidegger proclaimed in his famous Der Speigel interview, although for slightly different reasons, “Only a God can save us.”