It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Fascinating as an example of a profound lack of self-awareness. From Is President Trump a Stealth Postmodernist or Just a Liar? by Thomas B. Edsall. Edsall is one of the more knowledgeable, sophisticated journalists of the liberal/progressive wing of the Democratic party.

Whether one agrees with the argument he might be making in a column, it almost always has a useful insight and is usually rich with relevant and revealing information.

But like so many in the "intellectual" establishment, his worldview has been powerfully shaken by the inconceivable election of Trump. The quality of his columns has declined and he more and more frequently is shouting "Get off my lawn" rather than making an informed argument. The trappings of the old form are still there but gone is the rigor and insight.

You can see the rot in this most recent column. When you lead with a classic example of an informal fallacy (the false dilemma in the headline), it is a good tell that the argument might not be rigorous.

The trouble deepens in the lede paragraph.

How should we explain the fact that President Trump got away with making 2,140 false or misleading claims during his initial year in office?

That is a disturbingly fragile foundation for an argument. There is a whole philosophical debate to be had about that assumed "fact" of 2,140 false or misleading claims. Even if you accept the oddly precise 2,140 at face value, compared to what? What is the average number of false or misleading statements for the first year of earlier presidents? And of what consequence? Do all, or any, of the these false or misleading claims, in sum or in part, equate to "weapons of mass destruction" or "if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor"? This 2,140 claim is stripped of definition or context. It is without meaning unless you accept it a priori as meaningful and true.

It is also a reminder of Salena Zito's insight during the campaign:

When he makes claims like this, the press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.

Pundits and press want to find fault with Trump's enthusiastic oratory and rhetoric. And they are right, there is conflation, and approximation, and inaccurate estimation galore. His is not airtight public policy forum-speak with tight logic and rigorous evidence. You want white paper speak, get a white paper. He speaks rhetorically. You learn more about the direction he is signaling rather than his command of the facts and figures. He might indeed have those at his finger tips but that is irrelevant when speaking rhetorically. His supporters are not wrong to take him seriously (direction) but not literally (facts and figures.)

Pundits and the establishment want Trump to adhere to their class norms and their customs of communication. The fact that he speaks rhetorically and to great effect undermines there class sense of what is right. It is not hard to see the class bigotry and disdain behind so many critical articles and opinions.

Which is ironic. Most establishment bromides are wrong. Their favored policies frequently fail disastrously. They suffer confirmation bias, interpreting everything according to their prior beliefs and not factually and dispassionately. From a logic and empirical evidence perspective, they get things as wrong as does Trump. Edsall's column is an example of this. Yes, it looks learned. Yes, there is a bandying around of sophisticated notions. But really, there is no evidence to support his thesis, simply a massive appeal to authority. It fails from both a logical/evidence based point of view as well as in terms of rhetoric.

The opening paragraph is a tautology (an argument in which the conclusion is also it's premise; an example of circular reasoning). The opening paragraph is also an example of unstated assumptions, limited scope, and confirmation bias.

Six logical fallacies in only two sentences totaling 34 words. That red flag gets bigger and redder.

Edsall then serves up a 68 paragraph long word-salad of quotations from 25 academics who are ideologically and politically opposed to Donald Trump. It is an extensive but shallow discursion into the fields of postmodernist philosophy, deconstructionism, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, comparative literature, religion, English, and political punditry. These are very smart people but it is worth noting that these are also fields in which the overwhelming majority (greater than 70%) of published research fails to replicate and/or is retracted.

Edsall's evidence is essentially a compilation from ideological opponents speaking from positions of authority in fields where most the accepted knowledge is actually untrue. That seems a pretty shaky argument. No balance, no data, no facts, no empirical evidence, just opinions from smart people in academic fields of discredited research.

This is a massive intellectual smoke screen. More artfully:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

"And then is heard no more" - were that we were so lucky.

All this noise leads up to Edsall's overwrought conclusion.

If tribalism has begun to supplant traditional partisanship, their argument suggests, lying in politics will metastasize as traditional constraints continue to fall by the wayside.

Trump’s success, such as it is, has been to accelerate the ongoing transformation of traditional political competition into an atavistic struggle in which each side claims moral superiority and defines the opposition as evil.

These developments have been unfolding for decades, but the 2016 election was a turning point that appears to have the potential to corrupt the system beyond repair. Trump is determined to leave the destruction of democratic procedure as his legacy. Instead of granting him the title of postmodernist, let’s say instead that Trump is a nihilist who seeks to trample, to trash, to blight, to break and to burn.

There are three conclusions to this long, long argument -

The 2016 election was a turning point that appears to have the potential to corrupt the system beyond repair.

Trump is determined to leave the destruction of democratic procedure as his legacy.

Trump is a nihilist who seeks to trample, to trash, to blight, to break and to burn.

Edsall has just invested 2,655 words talking about a variety of things that have nothing to do with these conclusions. He starts with the assumption that Trump is a liar and concludes that 2016 marked the decline of our system and that Trump is intentionally destroying our system of government.

That isn't an argument. That is simply an existential scream of an establishment which sees its influence and sinecures under threat from this new agent of the citizens. I am imagining a Trump tweet on Edsall's column. I suspect it would be a one word summary of the 2,655 word essay.

Sad!

A summary which I would also imagine being endorsed by 50-70% of citizens. And a summary trashed by the 0.000001% of the population who are establishment pundits and establishment insiders as lacking artfulness, sophistication, and nuance. Missing the point that he won the argument through artful rhetoric versus their earnest, but inadequate, effort to appear logical and empirical.