(11-20-2016, 07:29 AM)b Butler 54 Wrote:Lobbyists and their financial suppliers are the real power in the legislative branch in America. At this he will be no worse than Dubya, and we survived eight years of that. It's the other stuff that gets scary.(11-20-2016, 06:29 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(11-20-2016, 03:05 AM)Galen Wrote: Consider the following idea for a moment. If Trump is a tool of the economic elites that have run the US for the last century then why did they expend so much effort to keep him from being elected? One way to take the measure of a man is to look at his allies. It is also possible and necessary to look at his enemies as well.
I do not know whether you are a libertarian, a conservative, or a fascist, but either way you should recognize the danger of populism. Politicians running on populist lines often betray the people that they use to achieve power once achieving the promises become inconvenient to the Judas who wins election. People who feel cheated (and they will feel cheated) keep the old anger and herd instinct which together prove incompatible with domestic tranquility. They will be angry as long as the leader who betrays them remains in power. Another possibility is that the populist tries to deliver on his often contradictory and absurd promises, which usually has the effect of draining the treasury in measures that counteract each other. Quite possibly the hazard to someone on the Right is that the populist fails to have your agenda.
I expect Donald Trump to reconcile with the economic elites with which he is a member and support the usual right-wing agenda of gutting the strength of labor, attacking intellectuals of all kinds when they find that even scientific data (as on global warming) contradicts the will of the economic elite), crushing academic freedom when it runs afoul of a profits-first ideology, and fostering the brutalization of corporate management. This is not the capitalist ideology of, for example Ronald Reagan; this has a dictatorial style attached.
We are in new and uncharted lands. Here be cannibals inland; here be crocodiles in the waterways.
Quote:It's too soon to know exactly what Trump will do, but he does seem to be disregarding the 'drain the swamp' promise. An awful lot of the people he is bringing in are former lobbyists.
Quote:One can also find any number of articles suggesting he intends to abandon this promise or that, but anyone can float a rumor. I don't really know where he is going to go.
The one promise that he has made to the working class that he will most certainly keep is to 'stick it' to people that he castigated as arrogant elites out of touch with proletarian culture -- mostly educated people, the sorts of people who think the National Inquirer fit only to line bird cages, people who recognize science as the arbiter of natural reality, people who have discovered something richer than the pop culture in music. That is rhetorically cheap. Donald Trump has not turned the masses against the big landowners, financiers and industrialists, and the executive elites. A left-wing populist would have turned against real exploiters instead of against cultural 'offenders'.
Quote:I have a sense that the various people fighting for positions and status in his new White House are selectively leaking to the press in their own self interest. Thus, I'm taking lots of stuff with many grains of salt.
They do that for every Administration. So what's so different this time?
Quote:Still, he's no longer a robber baron. He's the robber king. I anticipate you are correct, that he will end up abandoning the populists promises and support his own kind. I'm just going to wait a bit before making a call on how far he'll go in that direction.
He might keep the promises on abortion, anti-intellectualism, and deportations. Those will cost him nothing, and there are profits to be had (coddling polluters, publishing school textbooks full of propaganda and pseudoscience, and filling private prisons) to be made from them. As a crony capitalist he will need to keep fellow capitalists happy with him -- so I expect any big spending by him to be full of budget-busting graft. Republicans have the majority in both Houses of Congress, so I expect the Republicans to use this time to weaken occupational safety laws and establish a national Right to Work (for far less!) law intended to cause wages to crash and Big Business to have more power over employees. Financial firms could do well with the privatization of Social Security, perhaps changing it into a system that requires people to deposit retirement savings into non-interest-bearing accounts on which the holders get to charge maintenance fees.
Quote:I also don't think he has the people skills to build and hold a coalition. The cast of Hamilton can join all the other people he is displeased with. The New York Times has earned a special place in a media he scorns. Repeating lies worked on the Republican base, but that won't fly with the media and professional politicians. He reacts directly and emotionally to any form of criticism or opposition, and he's going to get lots of that. Will he learn the discipline not to shoot from the hip at the first sign of disparagement? Will he try to use the government to retaliate against political opposition, or will he stick with 3:00 AM tweets? I just don't know. I suspect he is too old to change his temperament, but if he doesn't he'll find himself constantly swarmed by angry hornets. How many hornet stings before things get fatal?
He does. He could apply the same 'people skill' that every tyrant from Nero to the current Kim in North Korea has used -- brute force.
Can he get away with it? Here's the best answer: watch for any new or expanded federal police force that starts appearing at demonstrations. Watch for any sponsorship of state secret police units such as the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission of the 1950s and 1960s. Watch any private, politicized militia taking any roles as counter-protesters. May none of this pass. But can you trust someone who has called for violence against opponents at his political rallies when the whole American political system has him as the focus of all political life?
Quote:There are enough people on this forum anticipating the worst, rousing up anger and distrust for stuff he hasn't had a chance to do yet. Fine. Enjoy yourselves. There is plausible reason to anticipate the worst. I'm just concerned that minds are being closed by the hatred and paranoia. Is one paranoid if there is reasonable cause to believe he is out to get you? Perhaps not.
Low expectations are a good defense against ominous situations. Of course it would be unwise to escalate a scary situation with violent language and rhetoric. We who dislike the President-elect can take notes and prepare for the worst in American history... and expect for the disgraceful treatment of First Peoples, such is either the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, government complicity with Big Business in suppressing the labor side of labor strife, and the subjection of Southern blacks. If we prepare for something that does not happen, then we simply wasted a little effort.
The same sort of non-violent resistance that broke Segregationism in the American South, Marcos in the Philippines, Communism in central and Balkan Europe, and Apartheid in South Africa can work here. In a way we are in better shape: the police and the military got their training in democratic times and can be trusted to not fire upon peaceful protesters.
Are we heroes who stand for the rights of strangers, or are we cowards who feed people that we are told are 'enemies of the people' to American equivalents of Gulags as if casting kittens to hungry alligators? Our national character can come under test now as it did when Nathan Hale was caught as a spy or when brave Rangers scaled Ponte du Hoc under mass-killing fire of German soldiers defending a critical piece of Normandy on D-Day. But this is a Crisis Era, and even something so precious as Freedom itself is at stake.
Quote:There are some who think it's a good thing to keep one's head when everyone else has gone bonkers. Might be quite a trick these days. I may try to give it a shot.
Good idea. Don't provoke trouble, as that may be exactly what the Dark Side wants us to do. But cultivate reason, compassion, and courage nonetheless. We may need them in very difficult, ominous times. [/quote]
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.