12-23-2016, 10:33 AM
(12-23-2016, 03:57 AM)Galen Wrote:(12-22-2016, 08:41 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: If Trump were just a bit more hideous I'm willing to bet there would have been enough rogue Electors to stop him. Be careful what you wish for. The Electoral College is part of the system of checks and balances. If the electorate goes insane, it can intervene. We were close to that happening this time.
Long term thinking is not something the left is good at. I bet they are wishing they hadn't changed the filibuster rules in the Senate right about now. Oops!
Both sides of the political spectrum are as vulnerable to political myopia, to contempt for the Other Side, to stereotyping...
Few saw the 2016 election turning out as it did.
Now we are stuck with a pathological leader and stooges in Congress. We have gone from having sensible politics to having something more reminiscent of some proto-fascist regime like that of Hungary in the late 1930s. We have a President who got elected with the aid of a foreign power hostile to democracy, and one who shows no willingness to bend to try to win over some who 'failed' to support him electorally. If you didn't support him, then 'ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what your country can do to you". The now-dominant Republican Party has gone from seeing service as the objective of government to the enforcement of the will of the economic elites. Those elites have much the same ethos of plantation owners, Gilded-Age plutocrats, and a Soviet-style nomenklatura that people are nothing more than their economic roles, a truly dehumanizing attitude toward the common man. The President won heavily on a contempt for learned, imaginative people in favor of anger, tribalism, and greed. Our incoming President lacked the spine to reject the likes of David DuKKKe and has willingly denied science (climate change) in favor of ideology.
Trump supporters aren't all bad people. They are often decent enough toward family members and neighbors. But I can see the narrowness of their thinking. These people tell me that he will "make America Great Again" without being able to say what that means. What does it really mean? Only for straight, white Protestants? Only for plutocrats? Back in the 1920s, when minorities 'knew their (subordinate, exploited) places' and workers didn't retire until they died on the job or retired to quick death, and when Big Business didn;t have to face unions? Their fault is the superficiality of their thought; they attach themselves to a slogan that can mean whatever they want it to mean but that the person who offers it can then make it mean what he wants it to be. Back to the 60-hour workweek under management as brutal as that of the 1920s? Back to the time in which kids dropped out of school to become industrial workers? Add to that, Donald Trump coarsened American politics, calling for violence toward opponents (something that no prior nominee for a major party had done) and bragged about grabbing women by their crotches.
Oh, there will be plenty of work. That's how it is in a fascist regime; it's just that people get paid just enough to barely survive if they accede to their own exploitation and dehumanization. Yes, Nazi Germany quickly had a labor shortage -- and its workers were serfs. and Donald Trump shows many of the hallmarks of a fascist. The Republican Party seems to act upon the assumption that no human suffering, no inequality, and no environmental degradation is in excess so long as the Right People get what they want.
I see two possible dangers. One is that the Republican Party will use its accession to power with a President who won almost as small a share of the popular vote as Dukakis in 1988 and McCain in 2008 has a right to entrench the power of the Master Class of big landowners, plutocrats, and the executive nomenklatura. Donald Trump is a severely-flawed person, a demagogue, who will surely give America a truly raw deal. Entrenched power on behalf of rapacious elites? Welcome to the Jim Crow South. What could be as bad? The 'Left' winning in much the same manner in 2020 because of its ability to exploit a failure. Imagine the liberal or quasi-liberal nominee winning with the aid of the intelligence services of China as Donald Trump did in 2016 with the connivance of Russia.
I expect to hate life under a Trump Presidency much as non-communists hated life under Fidel Castro. I might not be the sort who takes a makeshift raft with no idea of how to navigate a strong current in waters full of sharks and jellyfish under the baking sun to freedom or to put myself in the wheel well of a jetliner headed toward Europe with the risk of being tossed out early or perishing of hypoxia and cold along the way. I will be ill fit for a fascistic America, but I can easily imagine myself being in a position in which death solves all my personal problems. Donald Trump offers the antithesis of my core beliefs, and at my age I am unlikely to change those.
The best thing for white America (and it was white America that voted for Trump and the Reactionary Party) is that it will adopt values that the non-white part of the American electorate. The black, Hispanic, and Asian parts of the American middle class respect learning and rational thought; they must have done so to get into the middle-income category. White people can get away with a contempt for reason that other people can't. I can think of educational reforms (we need more formal education -- not less -- just to deal with the economic reality of robot production that will cut the need for work.
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.