10-13-2018, 08:42 AM
(10-12-2018, 04:15 PM)David Horn Wrote:(10-12-2018, 02:59 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:(10-12-2018, 10:08 AM)David Horn Wrote:(10-11-2018, 02:12 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Yeah, I know Galen and folks like him would love nothing better than for millennials to not learn from Obama and not to vote, and they usually get their wish, Obama notwithstanding. But Obama tries his best.
Up to now, he's been an aloof guru on the mountain. He needs to decide that Presidential decorum is out of style for now, and get into the fray.
He does. On the other hand, though he was great at overcoming the odds and getting elected himself, his record of helping others get elected is poor, even when he tries hard.
He may have the same issue as Trump, though obviously for other reasons. He connects personally with people and can easily gather a following, but it's his alone. I'm not sure that's something that can be overcome.
He cannot keep his following (22nd Amendment).
All Presidents are unique whether for the good (FDR) or ill (Trump). The President most similar to him (someone has to be!) is Dwight Eisenhower, as you have seen in some of my arguments. Like Ike, he is also unable to get people elected on his behalf. Just look at the 1958 midterm election, when Republicans got torched politically.
The political Regeneracy will depend upon someone building a coalition that crosses lines of ethnicity, region, and social class. Obama came close to doing that in 2008, but did not quite succeed. It is unlikely that Trump will do so. His all-for-the-few economics will satisfied the economic elites, and his vulgarity appeals to 'low-information' voters who share his rudeness and vulgarity can win over people who want to give people who are not politicians a chance to solve our political and economic problems. Although the political process has always room for politics that satisfy the economic desires of economic elites who can buy their spokesmen for their reactionary causes, no political movement has been able to win with that alone in a democratic order. To fully achieve a political order that serves such elites those elites must kill democracy with either an aristocratic order or with genocidal fascism. Trump has pitted lower-class white people against the middle class and poor non-white people while siding with the economic elites who want America to become an aristocratic plutocracy side with people that they never need meet.
Trump hurts people, and he delights in hearing people that he hurts curse him much as a stage or screen villain 'loves to be hated'. But the stage and screen character of a gangster, brigand, or Nazi is all for show. The rest of the world is something other than show. Just think of how tiresome, or worse, it would be to do this in family or social life. Edward G. Robinson was by all accounts a very good person, and played gangsters because he looked like one. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are not Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in real life. Some of the most convincing Nazis on celluloid are British (we know the role of the Brits in World War II) or Jewish (OK, you may have seen me say that there was nothing wrong with the German people in the first half of the twentieth century that Judaism would not have solved; in some respects, the Germans were the gentiles most similar to the Ashkenazim, the Yiddish-speaking Jews that the Nazis obliterated in central and eastern Europe. Oh, the irony!)
Americans are going to have Obama as an expression of the better angels of their nature (from Lincoln's first inaugural address) in contrast to the economic folly of Dubya and the hollow cruelty of Trump's design for an aristocratic plutocracy. The elites needed someone willing to bail themselves out of the dangerous eco0nomic meltdown from the bursting of the real-estate bubble of Dubya -- and then they wanted all the recovery for themselves. People other than themselves were to be livestock at best and vermin at worst in an economic system that sees people solely as their economic functions. Maybe there would be a need for some welfare to keep Marx' "reserve army of the unemployed" from either starving or rebelling, if not both. To describe 'our' elites of ownership and management as an aristocratic plutocracy is to compare them to the sorts of people who made the American Civil War possible (I recall reading an old article in American Heritage in which it exposed that the slave-owning planters saw themselves as benefactors to their slaves) or a proletarian revolution. 'Our' elites would love to use patriotism and nationalism as pretexts for excusing their exploitation.
We are more than our economic functions, or else we are not fully human.
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.