Let's make fun of Trump, bash him, etc. while we can!

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-25-2016, 11:00 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(07-25-2016, 09:56 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I was watching a clip of Newt Gingrich trying to create a reality out of feelings.  The interviewer kept presenting him with FBI crime data showing crime sharply declining since the 90s, but Newt kept pushing that there was a 'feeling' otherwise, that the people felt unsafe, and this feeling somehow made the hard data irrelevant. These feelings justified continuing a campaign based on suppressing crime, latinos, muslims, blacks.

Color me dubious.  A rant based on media and politician based agitation and propaganda ought not to define the race.

But part of me noted a partisan flip.  Democrats pushing gun control do the same thing with the same crime data.  Something must be done about guns because the crime rates are so high.

While in a lot of ways the Democrats can try to present themselves as the party of reality, they too will go with feelings, fear and disregard for reality when they think they can score political points.

Bob, what you don't get is that there are a lot people who have completely lost faith in their government and the politicians who are supposed to represent them. Priorities, it' all about the priorities and the perception of where one fist in as far as the priorities of the current Democratic party. Trump recently changed the priority of the Republican party. The division is only going to get worse from here on. Democrats are to corrupt and to deep into big government to change on their own. What happens to Democrats down the road? Don't know and don't really care at this point?

Well, you're repeating the basic Reagan memes.  The government is corrupt an inefficient.  Projects attempted by the government fail.  The culture should do more in the private sector, less in the public sector.  When in doubt, cut taxes as a short cut to force the government to do less.  The Republican base has been listening to these themes for decades.  They have embraced these concepts to the point that they are applying them of the very Republican politicians who pushed these ideas, who used these ideas to acquire and maintain power.

That's the feeling.  As with the problems of crime and violence mentioned above, the question is whether the feelings have any bearing in reality.  Trump is pushing to make America great again, to return to our heyday of power and plenty, the 1950s and 1960s, the time at the very apex of tax and spend liberalism.

I think there is a balance somewhere.  One can have too big a government, and too little.  FDR did much that had to be done.  LBJ was overly ambitious, and tried to do too much.  He burned out the mood of our peak era, the time when we would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty."  That was the spirit that once made America great.  LBJ burned it out.  The fall of Saigon, Watergate, oil crisis, hostage crisis and national malaise buried it.  Reagan read well the mood of the country at the time and scaled back America's greatness.  We should not try to be great because America's government is inherently too corrupt and inefficient to be great.  We should cut taxes so that any possibility of the attempt to be great will be cut off early.

Reagan wasn't entirely wrong.  He felt well the mood of his time.  Before Reagan, we were overly confident in our ability to do several impossible great but expensive tasks at the same time.  The GIs had been bearing too many burdens, paying too many prices for too long.  Reagan harnessed the cycles, made them work for him, taking the country away from the crisis values of working together for the common good to embrace the selfishness and indulgence of the unravelling.

To me, Trump makes a fine symbol of or personification of the unravelling spirit that fell out of Reagan's memes.  He embodies selfishness, greed, egotism, and a willingness to trample on the little guy to gratify his own desires.

So, yes, I believe I do understand the spirit of the Republican base, their distrust of America, their fear of greatness, their selfish desire to focus on themselves rather than consider the common good.  While they want the strength and plenty of the era of tax and spend liberalism, they aren't willing to bear burdens or pay prices.  They seem to think they can achieve greatness through wishful thinking.

But it comes back to feelings rather than reality.  The Republican base still feels the Reagan memes.  One can point back to the good old days, suggest that in fact government is not always inefficient and corrupt, that in fact our times of greatest strength are when we pull together for the common cause.  Alas, they aren't going to 'feel' it.  They will refuse to acknowledge that the time America was great was when the government brought us together to achieve great things.  They will try to ride America and the Reagan memes all the way down into the dust.  The selfish, corrupt and egotistical Trump is just the man to do it, just the man to lead them into ruin.

That's the core of things, specific issues aside.  Do we have a regeneracy and return to a crisis mood of problem solving with a healthy respect for the common good?  Or do we stick with the unravelling values of selfishness and greed.  In Hillary and The Donald we have two pretty good personifications of two positions in the cycle.  I can get the Republican base's hunger to see greatness again, but they shouldn't expect a free lunch.  Indeed, it is their unwillingness to trust the cooks that is making them hungry.