(12-01-2016, 11:52 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(12-01-2016, 06:02 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: The triumph of stupidity: 100,000 people in 3 states vote to destroy everything that's valuable in this country and in the world.
Now I'd call that pretty damn stupid.
Irony - if one were to get down to those 100,000 or so people, among them you would find many who are of early 20th century immigrant stock. Many of Italian, Polish, Ukrainian, Belarussian, and Irish extraction. But the thing is, they didn't like blacks moving into their inner city neighborhoods during the 1950s and 60s. Lots of cheap subdivisions beckoned in the inner ring suburbs. My type locale for this is Warren MI. Even though it contains the GM Technical Center, in terms of residents, it is a core "Northern Ethnic" zone, which boomed due to White Flight. That's essentially who swung it for Trump. QED.
The trick of the demagogue is to make sure that people do not make rational choices but instead follow more primitive drives in the subconscious. I am guessing that those white ethnics (as a rule they are not stupid) fell for dog-whistle racism. If Lee Atwater said at one time that Republicans could no longer use a word that rhymes with the name of Roy Rogers' horse... Donald Trump showed that one could come very close to saying that. So take a visceral concern (Hey -- your daughter might be dating a n----r!) and keep pounding it into the subconscious. Of course it is not rational thought, but if a demagogue has a crazy agenda that rational thought would cause one to reject, it is necessary for the demagogue to put the debate outside the zone of rational thought.
Of course that also works on non-'ethnic' whites like WASPS...
By doing so Donald Trump can Make America Great Again -- as it was in the 1920s. Of course, the 1920s were bad times for any non-WASP whites. If one was "Irish" and successful, then one was almost certainly Scots-Irish, which is a WASP group, or was well up in the hierarchy of an urban machine. Catholic 'ethnic' groups did not enter the American middle class in large numbers until the end of World War II.
When the Trump nightmare is over we will need major changes in American life, changes beyond undoing the damage to political life. Going back to Obama will not be enough, for if we should have another bad time not of his doing, some other demagogue will be in the wings... and if President Trump didn't establish a police state fast enough, then this one will start on Inauguration Day. We will need to teach youth the philosophical basis of a workable democracy -- formal logic that allows people to parse political claims and enough psychology at the least to have a defense against crass manipulation. That may require expanding the expectation of schooling from K-12 to K-14... but just think of all the teaching jobs such will create. Because such will be in public education there will be some control of the topic. It may be arrogance on my part to say that reality has a liberal bias, but when conservatives choose to sacrifice rationality and service for power, reality defaults to liberalism.
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN -- it looks much like a sign I saw in an archive of Italian news footage from the Fascist Era. It roughly translates "Restore the glory of the Roman Empire!"
(Slavery? Gladiatorial contests? Feeding Christians to the lions? No thanks!)
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.