Literally, Be Serious About Trumpism
You don’t have to pick apart the bad words to know why they’re bad.
Last month, I wrote about Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). I’d most recently read about him in Julie E. Cooper’s Secular Powers: Humility in Modern Political Thought.
Rousseau came up again today in Joshua P. Hill‘s post, “Who killed the social contract?” Hill talks about the social contract in the political sense that Enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau gave it but also in the everyday, interpersonal meaning of “treating each other with common decency, especially strangers in public places.”
Those meanings are related, Hill says. Without “a broader social contract that binds us together,” we’re less likely to express care for strangers in our daily interactions. Sadly, “we’ve been locked into a world where we’re told that only looking out for number one is a virtue. We’ve been told being cutthroat and saving thirty seconds getting off an airplane and being ruthlessly competitive are the way we’re supposed to live.”
In the United States, some people have held to “a patriotic American idea that we’re all in the same boat here, all pulling together, all bound together by the social contract of this country’s great promise,” Hill says, yet this principled unity was never a reality. People…
