11-16-2016, 10:30 AM
(11-14-2016, 09:02 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(11-14-2016, 08:11 PM)taramarie Wrote: "People will wonder how so impressive a political order as the USA could shatter "
I do not know if Americans have noticed this but many around the world are not impressed with America at all. Instead they shake their heads at what they hear goes on. May be painful to hear for some proud Americans but it is the truth.
This is what you get when what started out as a maritime (and therefore, reasonably globally connected and worldly) former British colony expands into a continental power. The vast interior turns into Slobovistan. An insular, inward looking people evolves in such zones. But, those who people the coasts* remain globally connected and worldly. Rancor arises, as the coastal people look down on the inlanders and vice versa. The supposed "Alanticist" vs "Eurasianist" style of conflict comes into our own sphere as a domestic conflict. Wish us luck!
* About the Gulf Coast and Southern Atlantic Coast. Somehow those areas did not retain the maritime connection with Europe. It's understandable, given the gazillion islands in the Gulf and Caribbean. It has its own type of insularity.
With America the divide is cultural, low-brow vs. high-brow. Donald Trump is an economic elitist playing the undereducated white people against minorities of all classes and the middle class of all ethnicities on behalf of people who think much like feudal lords: that people exist at the privilege of the lord, abandoning all hopes and desires to that lord in return for survival at the lord's terms... and that if one refuses to accept the feudal lord as the unqualified leader one is to be killed.
What does the low-brow culture offer? NASCAR racing, Ultimate Fighting, tabloid media, country music, FoX News... I certainly belong in a different country.
This will go badly. I fear the community in which I live because the other side gloats with anger about its victory. It is my fault that I cannot be a cultural simpleton willing to take a menial job for starvation pay.
So why do I not belong there? I think, therefore I am a traitor.
Donald Trump could be the Slobodan Milosevic of America even to the point of stoking anti-Muslim sentiments. I could never convert to Islam, but at the least I can recognize its virtues just by contrasting heavily-Muslim Dearborn against godless Southwest Detroit. Addicts, drunks, whores, and pimps are busted if they venture into family-friendly Dearborn. Of course one need not be a Muslim to like things that way. Many Christians and Jews have no problem with such.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.