Trumpwatch: The Art of Deflection

20 March 2017 Frank Macskasy Leave a comment

pointing-fingers

The Art of Deflection

The Right make a big thing out of Personal Responsibility. It is core to their philosophy of the primacy of the Individual, as National’s website points out again* and again* and again;

With the Cult of Hyper Individualism, “taking Personal Responsibility” is the corollary of the “Small State” and reduced government services. The Right demand Personal Responsibility from everyone. (So when an individual ‘fails’, the fault – and responsibility – must lie with him/her, rather than the State’s tilting the playing field toward the rich and the powerful.)

The leadership of the National Party have demonstrated on numerous occassions how ‘dedicated’ they are to their philosophy of Personal Responsibility;

When faced with a failing policy and worsening social and economic indicators, National automatically defaults to three standard deflections;

#1 Blame the previous Labour government

#2 Blame ‘welfare abuse’/Release a ‘welfare abuse’ story in the media

#3 Blame Global Financial Crisis or similar overseas event

If the problem is Auckland housing-related, there is a fourth default-deflection the Nats can rely on;

#4 Blame Auckland Council/RMA/both.)

Works a treat!

Doing it right-wing style – why take personal responsibility when there are perfectly good scapegoats available?

The newly-elected right-wing Donald Trump administration appears to have taken lessons from National’s strategy for blame-gaming over the last eight years;

Trump’s three default positions appears to be;

#1 Blame the media

#2 Blame Obama/Clinton/government departments

#3 Blame the rest of the world

Blaming Hillary Clinton also appears to be a personal favourite of some Trump’s supporters. Faced with their hero – an unstable, thin-skinned narcissist in the White House busily tweeting bizarre comments in the early hours of the morning – pointing to Clinton as a “worse alternative” is the only possible strategy remaining to mitigate Trump’s increasingly irrational behaviour.

Without the bogey(wo)man of a “worse alternative”, one is ultimately left with assessing Trump’s actions and utterances on it’s own merits of what is, or isn’t, acceptable behaviour.

After all, for most left-wingers and liberals in New Zealand, it can be generally agreed that our former Dear Leader, John Key, is nowhere as bad as odious characters throughout history such as Franco, Mussolini, Pol Pot, Pinochet, et al…

But, would you still vote for him?

As with National, the Republican Party is also big on personal responsibility;