12-06-2016, 12:44 AM
(12-05-2016, 10:46 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:(12-05-2016, 10:05 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: I have never seen a demagogue turn into a desirable political figure. All demagogues that I have ever read of have gone bad. I expect no better with Donald Trump than with a left-wing demagogue like the late Hugo Chavez.
But hold me to what I say this summer. Miracles have happened. Sometimes those who adopt an extremist agenda decide after seeing it begin to fail begin to moderate. Even Lenin turned away from his extreme War Communism after he started to recognize economic failure.
Of course I have very low expectations of Donald Trump. having lost almost all resources that could get me a new start in something other than a minimum-wage job, and disliking the community in which I am likely stranded for life, I could be in a situation in which death solves all my problems. Just get me some cheap grace for not taking my blood pressure pills. Poverty in a hick town in the Midwest after taking care of two parents who died of degenerative diseases isn't Hell, but it is purgatory.
I have nothing good to say about a politician who used racial and religious bigotry as a campaign appeal, who bragged about acts that would get a poor black man a long prison term if he had done such to a white woman who didn't consent to it, who called for violence against people who heckled him, maintained the canard that the current President was not born in the United States long after it was settled, and egged people on with "Jail Hillary!"
Donald Trump did the trash talk. Gentlemen do not do trash talk. I expect any leader to be at least as gentlemanly as George W. Bush.
None of it apparently mattered to people hell bent on sticking it to the system.
Irony - many conservatives have bemoaned the coarsening of society. And, well, I'll be damned, His Royal Coarseness will get sworn in a few weeks from now.
I think that they wanted to stick it to what they saw as intellectual elites -- to them, middle-class people with college degrees.
No, to Hell with their National Inquirer, bad reality TV, Ultimate Fighting, and even country music, I say.
I'll take English and Irish literature, French and Dutch painting, and the music of the German-speaking peoples (yes, I consider Gustav Mahler a German) -- reference to my ancestry -- over the low-brow American culture that thought that Donald Trump was so wonderful.
Jewish intellectualism and Italian opera sound pretty good, too.
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.