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

[Bob Butler 54]

(07-28-2016, 12:43 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: The same basic meme that still holds true today, despite all the liberal memes that place government, it's bureaucrats and their knowledge above all else. The same liberal  memes that lent to rise folks like Hitler and the Nazi's who supported him, reinforced the power of Stalin and the Bolshevik's who supported him and a former King of Great Britain and the aristocracy that supported him. America doesn't work that way.

Hmm...  We're dancing with Goodwin here.  I don't know that this election or any election ought to be framed by the question...  "Which candidate is more like Hitler?"

I see Hitler and the other dictators you mention as the (hopefully) last great examples of Agricultural Age thinking.  Before democracy made its comeback with the Enlightenment, the best times for the cultures that had good times came with really strong rulers...  Fill-in-the-blank the Great.  Only if you had someone who could really intimidate everyone else within the culture into submission could one wield the full and effective force of one's people, one's nation.  During the Agricultural Age, use of military force to acquire territory was pretty much cost effective... at least for the winners.  When agriculture is the driving force in the economy, more land is more power.  The sort of strong men that might acquire more land and power strove to do so.  Stalin, Saddam and now Assad and ISIS still embrace this meme... only a dominant personality who can successfully bully and intimidate can achieve enough power to absolutely control a country and then expand it.

The Enlightenment and Industrial values work for the benefit of the common man.  Autocratic demagogues are viewed as dangerous threats rather than being considered great.  One wants balance of power to check the demagog rather than seeking out the strong man.  One gets power by helping the common man and hoping the common man approves enough to vote one back into power.  The Whig tradition that shifted into the progressive tradition still tries to embrace this approach.

Anyway, Hillary isn’t the candidate who endorses Saddam, Putin and Assam.  She doesn’t endorse Autocratic Age tyranny and intimidation.  From the way I look at the conflict between Industrial and Agricultural Age values, it is Trump who is trying to embrace the old ways represented by Hitler and his ilk, and Hillary who is trying to continue the Whig tradition of government working for the common man.

I think you are straw manning the 'liberal memes'.  What do you think the liberal memes are?  As a progressive, I don't recognize you as representing or even understanding the liberal memes well at all.  Rather, you are obsessed with anti-liberal vile stereotypes which you embrace in order to avoid talking about the real liberal memes.  It’s hard holding a conversation with one who doesn’t listen.

(07-28-2016, 12:43 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: You and any other lib who believes they know what's best for all of us or a larger segment of us or their so-called own better rethink your importance beyond yourself or your own so to speak. Whether Trump wins or looses doesn't matter, Trump is now a powerful voice that will hamper Hillary from day one. A voice that Hillary can't control. A voice that will rip on her and weaken her every day she's in office. A voice that will give way to a stronger voice and equally committed voice reminding Democrats that they used to represent the workingman. Whether you realize it or not, the Democrats lost the working man to the Republicans in this election cycle. A trend that will continue to grow in the future.

Somebody lost something all right.  To my mind, the Republican establishment lost the Republican base.  For  years the Republican base has been told that the government is corrupt and inefficient, that you can’t trust politicians.  They’ve got so cynical and disillusioned that they have come to recognize that Republican politicians are politicians.

The emphasis at the Democratic convention is on how Hillary has tried to help people, tried and to a great degree succeeded.  The girl in a wheelchair who couldn’t get an education.  The parent who couldn’t get health insurance, who knew a major health problem would bankrupt his family and shorten a family member’s life.  The black deep south families who saw tax breaks going to segregated schools their children could not access.  The migrant farm worker who needed a little help in the deep south to register to vote.  The occupants of a small planet being threatened by climate change.  The residents of Gaza who were about to be immersed in war.

That is the rejection of the idea that government can’t help people.  It can, it does, and Hillary has been doing it all her life.  She has been fighting the Reagan mind set of people who have never needed help and thus don’t want to see people helped.  Her foes are those who can’t imagine themselves needing help, who thus work hard to leave folks in misery.

And that leaves aside what Trump is…  someone who has looked out first and foremost for himself, and has left behind a trail of people who have felt scammed and used.

I of course see the long term dynamics between the parties differently.  The more the Republicans push a government that doesn’t help the People, the more the People will need help, the more they will turn to the party that will help them.  I also don’t anticipate Trump as the candidate who lost will be any more an influence than McCain, Romney or other recent Republican losers.  Heck, the last closest thing to a Republican winner was Bush 43, and nobody wants to be associated with the disasters he created.  The best thing he can do to help his party is to avoid associating himself with it.

The battle for ideas depends on whether the People recognize that the government can improve life in these United States.  The Democrats are trying to prove that it can.  The Republicans are trying to prove that it can’t.  I know who I’m rooting for.

Note that we’re due for a realignment.  The Republicans are clearly a party in flux.  They need to reinvent themselves.  I don’t think Trump represents the best model for them to build on.  Meanwhile, the Democrats are a party that has been filibustered into impotence.  Crisis magnitude transformation has been out of reach, and might well remain out of reach.  Change will remain a struggle.  The struggle will have to continue.  Successes must be made visible.  A good size dent has to be made in the notion that everything the government tries to do is a failure.  For Democrats, success will come with programs that work.  I don’t see any other approaches, no easy short cuts.

Grumble.  I don't usually like to go all partisan.  We have enough blue partisans on the board without me beating yet another blue drum.  I'd rather push the notion that there are real reasons the red values came into being, real reasons they aren't going away trivially.  Reagan really did have his finger on the pulse of the country in his time, and really did try to take it where it had to go.  His ideas in moderation do make a reasonable check on big government.  One party, either party, any party, will take its ideas way to far if left in control too long.

But at the moment we have two choices.  It may be that the country would have been better served by two different choices.  Still, Trump isn't a choice.  We've had a former CIA chief and a current Supreme Court justice among others flat out say he isn't qualified for the job.  This is bad form, against all tradition, true and necessary to say.  I guess I've got to say it too.