02-02-2021, 01:25 PM
(02-01-2021, 11:48 AM)mamabug Wrote:(02-01-2021, 01:34 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Donald Trump left plenty of warning signs. He has huge funds and he gets attached to a porn star. He is taped talking about grabbing women by their "kitty cats". He mocks the handicapped. He denounces people for their religion and ethnicity. A bit fewer than 46% or the American electorate vote for him in 2016, and an even larger share vote for him in 2020. Character is destiny, and people of bad character eventually get bad results even if they have competence and talent. Just look at Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, and Phil Spector.
Again, nothing you say about him changes the fact that there were a number of people who voted for him despite all of that simply because, in a binary system, the things his administration might or might not accomplish was preferable than the policy agenda of his opponent.
OK. So the vote for Trump was not based upon some conventions of morality. We should thus quit assuming that the Right has "morality" as an objective. As the old bumper sticker of liberals said at the time, "The Moral Majority is neither". It was heavily associated with a cultural shift in the Mountain and Deep South in which an aggressive wing of the Southern Baptist Church largely cannibalized the old Presbyterian churches of the regions, replacing a church that was much less political with one that was stridently political -- and reactionary. It was delighted to sell out to reactionary economics to win the support of capitalists outside the Mountain and Deep South to attract sponsorship.
Remember that the Presbyterian Church is Calvinist. It offers an austere expression of Christianity; it is Low Church in its rejection of elaborate ritual and imagery. Presbyterian churches reject even church organs -- the musical instruments -- and anything that even resembles an icon such as a stained-glass window. But the original Calvinism as the doctrine that economic success is evidence of God's Blessing and that economic failure is evidence of God's Curse tended to go into the background as reality showed otherwise. An ally of the Southern Baptists is the Pentecostal churches such as the Assemblies of God, which is even more blatant in the expression of the Wealth Cult. Pentecostal Christians tend to have low Social-Economic Status (SES) and, as one frequent poster puts it, poor impulse control that poorly serves educational achievement and vocational development. Note well that so authoritarian an establishment as the Roman Catholic Church or the Church of Latter Day Saints can sponsor colleges with academic rigor. One can attend Notre Dame or BYU and get a high-quality education. Jimmy Swaggart University? That's good for some laughs, but not for academic respect or career advancement in the secular world. Anti-intellectualism that goes beyond disdain for some wayward academic or creative person is for economic losers.
As the Presbyterian Church weakened in the South, the political Right arose there. States like Arkansas, Missouri, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Georgia that typically went D (or in 1948 or 1968 to racist secessions from the Democratic party) started going Republican in most elections. With this political Right comes an attitude that no human suffering can ever be too severe so long as it enriches, indulges, and empowers the economic elites. The region went from populist to plutocratic. As late as 1996 Democrats still could win in this area at the Presidential level. Then they lost most elections for the House. Then they lost all but one Senate seat in this region. The Republican Party in the Mountain and Deep South is a firm believer in economic sadism (Or as I am tempted to call it "Sadonomics".
The Tea Party is much the same except for being less strident about such nonsense as Creationism. It has the backing of many economic elites outside the South. It is anti-abortion, as it is clearly plutocratic and militaristic. Abortion has the offense of preventing the births of future cheap labor in the "dark satanic mills" and, of course, cannon fodder for wars for profit (wars themselves and, after victory, neocolonial control of markets, resources, and super-cheap labor). The Tea Party aligned itself heavily with the firearms and fossil fuel industries hostile to political liberalism, and it got lavish backing. Trump is the third stage, the expression of F--- Y-- rhetoric toward anyone who fails to accept the anti-intellectual, racist, and plutocratic threads of the American Right .
Quote:The moral objectionability of Trump allowed the left to spend four years pretending that vote didn't happen and try to figure out how to jury rig the system so that it would never happen again instead of regrouping and determining why the loss actually happened and coming back with a stronger, better party that appealed to more than a bare majority of America. Continuing to act as if nobody except a racist would have voted for him is furthering this ostrich-like mindset and is only going to further the partisan divide.
Worth remembering: America has model minorities that may not be white, Christian, or straight. Trump did win heavily among white Cuban-Americans in Florida, but he did not do so well among Latino Americans who are at most ambiguously white. The black bourgeoisie, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, Jews, Muslims, non-Cuban Hispanics, and the LGBT are not as amenable to attempts to punish the poor. The distinction between White America and African-Americans in politics seems to be that well-off black people care about not-so-well-off black people... and white America tends not to care about the white poor (largely in the Mountain and Deep South). Mexican-Americans are much like blacks in that respect.
Note well that model minorities are the people most vulnerable to racist, demagogic assaults on their assets, careers, and personal safety. The extreme example was Jews in Germany. German Jews thought themselves Germans, and Austrian Jews thought themselves Austrians. It is telling that Austrian Jews were among the most strident monarchists in Austria (OK, Otto von Habsburg was about as good an expression of constitutional monarchy as there ever was). Most of us would likely agree that the world would have been far better off had six million Germans and Austrians had converted to Judaism than, well, something that almost everyone regrets. I've taken a swipe at neo-Nazis to the effect that if I had to choose between being a Nazi and converting to Judaism I would find Judaism no compromise to my morals and the German part of my cultural heritage. Model Minorities are always vulnerable in times of political chaos and economic calamity. Note well how the Model Minorities of America voted; they saved America from the proto-fascist ideology of Donald Trump.
Quote: But, I'm getting tired of being Cassandra so I may just have to stop engaging in discussions on this topic. I've made my points, consider them or not.
Now if
(1) middle-income white people started voting like middle-class black people, or
(2) middle-class white people started giving a damn about the welfare of poor white largely in the M&D South...
America would get the renewal that it needs.
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.