Everything was going fine, when all of a sudden ...

It sounded interesting. At Reddit, Anger in America: US Institutions No Longer Fit For Purpose. At Project Syndicate, it comes with a great intro:

US President Donald Trump has exploited popular anger to advance his own interests, but he did not create that anger. America’s elites have spent decades doing that, creating the conditions for a figure like Trump to emerge.

That's exactly right, I think.

Here, the first two paragraphs:

Many blame today’s populist rebellion in the West on the far right, which has won votes by claiming to be responding to working-class grievances, while stoking fear and promoting polarization. But, in blaming leaders who have seized on popular anger, many overlook the power of that anger itself, which is aimed at elites whose wealth has skyrocketed in the last 30 years, while that of the middle and working classes has remained stagnant.

Two recent analyses get to the heart of the issues at play, particularly in the United States, but also in the rest of the world. In his new book Tailspin, the journalist Steven Brill argues that US institutions are no longer fit for purpose, because they protect only the few and leave the rest vulnerable to predatory behavior in the name of the free market. According to Brill, this is an upshot of America’s meritocracy: the best and brightest had the chance to climb to the top, but then essentially pulled the ladder up behind them, as they captured democratic institutions and used them to entrench special privileges for themselves.

And there is my problem: they "pulled the ladder up behind them".

As long as we insist on evaluating problems in terms of MAS (metaphor, analogy, and simile), we will never understand the problems well enough to solve them.

Beyond that, there is the explanation of motives: "the best and brightest ... captured democratic institutions and used them to entrench special privileges for themselves." On second read, I might question my first-read conclusion that this is a description of the motives of others. But no: it is. The sentence not only tells what they did -- captured democratic institutions -- but also why they did it:

to entrench special privileges for themselves.

A description of something that happened is entirely appropriate, as long as it is actual and not metaphorical. But one person's description of another person's motives is never, under any circumstances, appropriate.


Come to think of it, this also is somebody's description of somebody else's motives:

... Trump has exploited popular anger to advance his own interests ...

We hate him because he's advancing his own interests. We hate him for his actions, but we hate him even more for his motives.

His actions, we can see. That's his record. Judge him on his record. His motives are made up by somebody else.

Evaluating Trump based on someone else's description of Trump's motives may make the old clit tingle but will turn out as fruitless as evaluating problems in terms of metaphor, analogy, and simile.

"It is necessary to be gracious as to intentions."