Thread by @MattCarr55

When #vanjones broke down on CNN and said it’s now easier to be a good person today because ‘being a good person matters’ he was highlighting something very important about Trumpism and its counterparts elsewhere

One of the things these politicians have tried to show is that it’s not necessary to be good or even to try to be good, or at least to be better than you are. Trump has made it clear that he believes that lying, cheating, bragging, bullying are all perfectly ok

Like the soldiers he once mocked, anyone who thinks differently, in terms of sacrifice or public service say, is a ‘loser.’ Anyone who has qualms about the cynicism that he embodies and espouses is a ‘virtue signaller.’

One of the great tragedies of the rightwing populist wave is that millions of people identified with this atrocious behaviour, or at least accepted it, because they felt it liberated them to be as bad as they yearned to be, or because it allowed them to release their resentments

Or because Trumplike behaviour ‘triggered’ people, or ‘owned the libtards’ or whatever. Perhaps there was an element of vengeance in this - towards people they imagined look down on them, or who really did, and previous politicians and governments who they felt had ignored them

Naturally Trump played on these resentments, and - sociopathic narcissist that he is - revelled in ‘vice signalling’ because that is how he lived his entire life, w/out even paying lip service to decency, goodness or any of the common virtues that makes society function

Such behaviour, for his flunkies and toadies, and for an alarming number of his followers, appears to have been liberating, in a nihilistic & destructive way. Now his fall, as Van Jones suggests, will hopefully be a crucial step towards the recovery of decency as an aspiration

That doesn’t mean that American public life was a paragon of virtue and decency before - clearly far from it. But if a society abandons even the pursuit of virtue and decency it has no chance of ever becoming virtuous or decent.

So, I can understand why Van Jones cried, because it’s painful to see your country reduced to the worst it can be, and led by a man who is fundamentally morally worthless, and I hope he’s right, and that Americans seize this brief opportunity to build something better.

Because there are many more Trumps out there, and some of them will have looked at the seventy-odd million votes the orange bastard received, and reached very different conclusions about what happens next.