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I. Blindspotting
It’s not their fault. There is just something endemic to the educated liberal mind that makes it incapable of grasping Trump’s appeal.
Here’s my diagnosis:
Democrats are products of the Academy, which cultivates only intellect, and instructs only in words and numbers. As clever as its graduates become at manipulating language and data — i.e., ‘knowledge work’ — they gain little to no training in the real substrate of politics: images, symbols, and myths.
The Corporation draws largely from the Academy. So today’s corporate managers, bankers, bureaucrats, non-profit executives, doctors, engineers, and lawyers toil for 4, 6, or 7, or 8 years to learn how to think (science and scientism). This neglects the core humanity and humanities required for citizenship:
how to see (art, cinema)
how to listen (music)
how to move (theater, dance, sports)
how to be moved (philosophy, literature)
how to surrender (religion)
Trump, like Reagan, is a humanist — not an analyst.
Both are masters of image: sight, sound, feel. Both were ridiculed by the left as mere entertainers. Both won — twice; the second time, decisively.
And intellectuals don’t understand why:
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We all assume going to college and graduate school makes you smarter. But what if it makes you more arrogant, less empathetic, and less objective, too? Is that intelligence?
Experts like Bill Maher, James Carville, and Dr. Allan Lichtman all got it not just wrong, but so spectacularly wrong, that obstructed vision is the best explanation. You can’t analyze what you can’t see. And these brilliant but wishful thinkers couldn’t even see what most Americans, especially the 2/3rds without a college degree, already felt:
Joe Biden is comatose, Kamala Harris is vacant, Trump is already the president.
No one is clairvoyant.
We all have blind spots as voters, viewers, and human beings.
Political experts have the biggest blind spot of us all: an insistence on data, logic, language — always and everywhere — to make sense of a world governed by image, narrative, symbol, and myth.
To make sense of politics, you must use your senses.
Experts think too much and sense too little.
They deploy analysis alone for a task that demands observation, perception, and most of all, empathy: feeling the feelings of people not like you.
And they apply intellect to a domain that primarily demands intuition.
This is a category error of epic proportions — and it made them blind.
Aditya Pai is a 33-yr-old trial attorney, writer, and recent Democratic congressional candidate in Orange County, CA. He earned a B.A. Summa Cum Laude from Claremont McKenna College, where he served as student body president, and M.Phil. and J.D. degrees in history and law from Cambridge University and Harvard Law School, under the supervision of Nobel Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen. Pai is a naturalized American citizen from Bombay.
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