Explaining the one-sided anti-Trump criticism of your friends
There is an odd movement afoot. There seems to be entire ZIP codes of our co-workers and neighbors, Facebook friends and peers attacking only Donald Trump, without leveling a single critique against Hillary Clinton. It appears that a great swath of our tender electorate prioritize embarrassment or having their feelings hurt as a more significant problem than dealing with the actual order of evil itself. Even well organized evil, well financed evil, unsupportable evil as well as unrestrained or shameless evil is not as important to them as the perception or pretense of appearing uncouth to their peers.
I am no Trump fan. Trump is a boorish lout. Understood. He is habitually and perhaps clinically as abrasive as an oral surgical saw. The wet, wooden dry rot of his speech violates all of the well combed etiquette and dinner manners most of us were raised on these last 25 sensitive years, but he is not evil. He is not even soft evil or an evil by omission.
On the other hand, we have another candidate who is as morally inured as advance-staged arterial sclerosis, who can hide her appearance as effortlessly as a Decepticon and transform the mud of her past into perfectly edible audio cupcakes of misinformation.
The conclusion we are left with: your anti-Trump acquaintances and friends clinging to the politics of peer pressure (either on social networks or elsewhere) must prefer her cackle to his goonish guffaws. That is the only assumption we can make, even as they protest they are no fan of Hillary, either, and yet never cite one instance of her dozens of readily available transgressions, most of them serious as well as non-partisan. That is deliberate moral obtuseness, a one-sided moral criticism that is itself a perversity.
It is also a giveaway. It is the classic tell of an unspoken bias – that in actuality, not only do they not support Trump, but they are just as happily complicit in fealty to one of the most evil candidates of the 21st century. They complain incessantly about Trump but level not one solitary criticism about his opponent because that may presuppose an accidental backing of the man who lacks manners. Not civility, mind you, but mere table manners. They have no problem with the transformation of an entire country for an entire generation or more as the SCOTUS is transformed into a left-wing Berkeley sit in, but God forbid they should ever let one of their neighbors or Facebook friends know they aren't upward, sophisticated Americans.
Flattery is preferred to the blunt edge of truth in today's soft American dying culture. Pandering and paternalism and patronage, lies with benefits, are more attractive than the crazy guy spitting out commonsense realities and offering fixes to a dying economy of zero growth.
Trump is offensive. Hillary is criminal. America will fall because today people have misplaced priorities, favoring institutional lying over a guy who refuses to coo.