06-10-2020, 11:46 PM
(06-10-2020, 02:11 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(06-10-2020, 01:52 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: We think we are nowhere near the end until something is decided. Consider the Battle of Petersburg in 1865... the Confederacy seemed to be holding on until it ran out of troops to hold a defensive perimeter guarding Richmond... in a 292-day siege. Yes, there had been plenty of war in Virginia, but the Confederacy always seemed to slip out of a trap. This time the trap sprang upon the Army of Northern Virginia and Robert E. Lee. The decisive, definitive Union victory came swiftly
Perhaps it was Sherman's taking of Atalanta when somebody started singing, "Turn out the lights, the party's over." It became pretty clear how it was going to end from there. The conservative faction went on fighting. They always do, even when they could salvage something and save lives by quitting.
Can you see Trump and Pence conceding that a scientific response to the epidemic is necessary, and that it is a good idea to listen to the people on police racism and violence? Unlikely. They will go on until February 20th.
The Confederates were still defending slavery, an institution that underpinned their way of life. After three years of war they were shut off from any alternative view of the world. Cognitive dissonance dies with great difficulty; sometimes it takes the death of those into whom it is most entwined to put that manifestation into oblivion. A cause is truly lost when it has no credible supporters.
My best hope is that Trump, Pence, and their enablers suddenly become irrelevant in January 2021. I had the fear after Trump's surprise victory that liberal America would itself be doomed to permanent irrelevancy as America was becoming a pure plutocracy in which an economic elite could command suffering on their behalf forever. In essence, anyone in America lives for the power, indulgence, and gain of a small cadre of tycoons, executives, and enforcers -- maybe organized crime as well. That was absurd, but absurd regimes can have their durability; just think of what Vaclav Havel called "Absurdistan" (obviously Communist Czechoslovakia) ... or Apartheid-era South Africa... or the Jim Crow South.
Reality can catch up with absurdity and break it. Just as reductio ad absurdum in mathematics breaks the possibility of something being right and thus that something different is the undeniable truth, so it can be in political life and economics.
Donald Trump is himself a proposition... that nothing matters except elite indulgence, power, and gain. He expresses such in a vulgar, abusive, and even despotic manner. He tells others who dissent with him that they are no longer relevant. The table can turn fast in a 4T... amazingly fast.
We do not have revolutions; we have elections.
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.