He already has strong thinking.
Trump insulted European Union leaders, calling them "weak, decadent, and prisoners of political correctness." He made these remarks during the launch of the new US national security strategy and reiterated the American administration's full support for European far-right parties. Beyond destabilization, the destruction of the European Union is a political objective shared by both Trump and Putin.
Let us pause, however, on this point: European leaders are undesirable because of their "political correctness." This is nothing new: for many years we have heard and read voices on the right deploring political correctness and weak thinking as the cause of all the ills of the West. It suggests that postmodernity and relativism have plunged us into a wasteland of acculturation and alienation, and that strong ideas are sorely missed—ideas that serve as a reference point not only intellectually, but also in life. Verticality versus horizontality, hierarchy versus egalitarianism, meritocracy versus openness, authority versus lateral thinking, and so on.
As youngsters, we liked to quote the line from Harry Lime, Orson Welles' character in The third man"In Borgia's Italy there was nothing but terror, war, and massacres, yet Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and the Renaissance emerged; in Switzerland, they've had five hundred years of love, democracy, and peace, and what's the result? The cuckoo clock." In reality, the paths of strong, or supposedly strong, thinking often lead to one form or another of authoritarianism. The most misguided and cynical of these self-proclaimed "nostrada birds" flout the call for "strong thinking" to prevent the collapse of Catalonia, imminent according to these chickens and trigger-happy types. It's precisely the opposite: the chances of small nations prospering are always greater in contexts that favor plurality and diversity, cross-pollination and mixing; essentialism, on the contrary, benefits large and powerful nations. That's why Trump's nationalism is also based on the supposed need to save the nation from the enemies and traitors who are corroding it from within. The difference is that the weak nation the orange man is talking about is the United States of America. Not a country of eight million people in southern Europe.
Strong thinking is one of the many traps the powerful use to prop up their power. In this sense, the theocratic regime of Iran, which is now crushing revolts by spreading terror and leaving the country littered with corpses, is an expression of strong thinking. The ICE agents who murdered the poet Renee Nicole Macklin Good are also examples.OdysseyUlysses exemplifies what is best for the small when they must confront their elders: to oppose cunning to force. We Europeans should know this better than anyone. It turns out that if we shake the foundations of our boring democracy, what emerges is not a new Renaissance, but the delusions of tyrants, the filth of their flatterers, and the cynicism of murderers.
