11-13-2020, 12:51 PM
(11-11-2020, 10:42 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(11-11-2020, 09:14 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Who cares? Biden won. So, what's so great about Bumbling Biden? I didn't see anything great about Biden. So, what do you know about Biden? Was Biden ever great? Well, I have to say is he better be great because that's what the Democrats are going to keep the country and fulfill all of its obligations or find themselves being depleted and directly competing with America itself. We're going to win dude because nature always wins.
They said much the same of the governor of New York, FDR. The reason FDR got elected in as decisive an election as Biden was because their predecessors went with the old values and did not address the primary problem the culture was facing. Not a good idea in a crisis. Yet, Hoover thought he shouldn’t try to regulate the economy or find jobs, and Trump aligned against solving the bug and racist violent policing. For that matter, Buchanan was all in favor of slavery.
I figure that the time makes the man, not the other way around. In a crisis the old values fail and are dumped on, but that cannot happen until they and the new values have been debated and a bad president who tries to implement the old values after their time is passing, and shows their weakness and failure. At that point the grey champion steps in and oversees the new values. He later gets the credit associated, perhaps not fully deserved.
I would not have picked Biden either, but right now he is set up in a good place.
Joe Biden will at the least recover some of the social virtues of the recent past, virtues that Donald Trump brushed off. Maybe he gets a chance to start anew what Obama started and take it further into real progress for more Americans.
He has said that he wants to earn the trust of people who did not vote for him, and that will take not doing something that Donald Trump did to us: Trump stuck it to those who voted against him. To be sure there are toxic people, typically extremists, who demand what a sane leadership can never offer. Trump acted as if the fascistic Alt Right was a constituency worth cultivating. Such people are nothing but trouble. If a politician wants to cultivate people as a new part of the base, then seeking the votes of people whom the Other Side has taken for granted for decades but don't offend one's moral values is a good idea. That is how Dwight Eisenhower won over the Mormons. Don't fool yourself; we Democrats would love to have them on our side in partisan politics again. The Alt Right? Marxist-Leninists? Neo-Nazis? The Klan? Pedophilia advocates? They can get lost.
It's hard to see what the Republican Party has to offer unless it can sell out the ideology of Donald Trump. There will be a need for a Loyal Opposition.
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.