03-13-2021, 12:29 PM
(03-12-2021, 04:26 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:(03-12-2021, 12:16 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:(03-12-2021, 10:26 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I see Trump as an example of how not to do it. It is traditional to precede the grey champion with a bad leader who represents the old values very poorly, and thus contrasts with the grey champion and makes it a bit clearer that something new should be tried. George III, Buchanan, and Hoover are the other three US representatives of the old values, with Bush 43 as an honorable mention.
Trump did it so extremely to be in a class by himself.
Trump isn't so much old values as he is an exemplar of 3T fads that get swept aside in a 4T. Much of what gets blown away is from the most recent 3T.
I wouldn't consider racism, the elite dominance including division of wealth or red violence fads. The reluctance of reds to solve problems was in great part racism. It was though that if you stuck poor people without services, you were increasing the division of wealth and hurting the minorities at the same time.
These are genuine crisis problems, not fads.
Sometimes it is tricky to discern the bad new fads of the recent 3T from the bad old ways from earlier times. Racism is a bad old practice, but it can be 'modernized', as into eugenics in the last 3T or into genocidal racism as in Germany within the NSDAP, definitely a 3T innovation. Antisemitism is nothing new; it is always vile and potentially lethal. Popularization of the horrid Protocols that asserted that all Jews from childhood to senescence are part of some great evil conspiracy to exploit and dominate gentiles was a 3T innovation. Refutation of those charges may be easy enough, but not by the standards of people who fully believe it. This bilge resurfaces when it is convenient, as it is popular in the Arab world to explain away failures of dictatorial and incompetent regimes.
(Most obviously, the work self-contradicts; people who can achieve what they want from economic success to cultural achievement ordinarily have other explanations and stay clear of criminal conspiracies too dangerous to put into practice -- criminal conspiracies are for schmucks; there is no Jewish 'race'; Judaism is a religion connected to a culture, and its ethical tenets are as decent as any religion 'out there'; it is a blatant forgery; it fosters a paranoid conception of Humanity that itself suggests mental illness; the work is above all a supposed "insider" manual, yet much of what it says is Jewish isn't. As someone with a love-hate relationship with Germany (I love much about German culture, admire some German figures of history, and have much German ancestry) it is easy to imagine what I (and anyone claiming any goodness at all) despise about German history. Let's put it this way: there was nothing wrong about the German people in the early half of the twentieth century that Judaism would not have solved. If I had to choose between being a Nazi and a Jew I would be a Jew, as such would require no ethical and cultural compromises.
Modern antisemitism is racist in nature. I cannot say that racism in our time is somehow any better than that of a century to seventy-five years ago, as it has the same potential for destructiveness. Maybe the Nazis could be banned once and for all in Germany... but neo-Nazis appear in, paradoxically, the countries that were victorious in World War II, even in Russia! Klan groups have much the same objects of hatred as Hitlerites did, and I can imagine some Kluxers doing massacres and setting up extermination camps. Hatred gets revivals even if the basis is ancient disputes such as the Crusaders. (Don't fool yourself; not only did the Crusaders kill Muslims and Jews, but they also persecuted Eastern Orthodox Christians who often had to take shelter in Islam to save their lives from the Crusaders. To be sure, the Crusades did not have racism at their core, but they have scarred the human psyche.
The last Crisis of course destroyed German and Japanese militarism once and for all.
...As for Donald Trump I see him as far more innovative in American politics than is comfortable. He unleashed a paranoid style of politics on a national scale that both lacks merit (OK, there really was a Communist plot to steal nuclear secrets; illegal drugs really are dangerous; pedophilia is destructive; the Axis powers were genuine menaces to much that defined the American political heritage) and that has apparently solved nothing. Both Presidents Bush made sure to distinguish Islam from al-Qaeda and the Taliban, let alone the fascistic regime of Saddam Hussein. Trump attempted to make all American politics fit through his ideological prism and established a personality cult that still has followers. His disdain for vital components of the American political tradition, including his sore-loser approach to an election that he lost, has no precedent in American political tradition.
People are going to be in deep trouble for following Donald Trump on January 6. They put their lives, their fortunes, their freedom, and their reputations on line as did those who signed the Declaration of Independence... except that they put their lives, their fortunes, their freedom, and their reputations at risk for something worthless and both morally and intellectually indefensible. Had it been successful it would have been more analogous to the Bolsheviks storming the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1917; it failed, and except that Donald Trump is unlikely to have any relevance in American political life ten years from now and that there will be no political careers that rise from the ashes of a failure, this is more like the Beer Hall Putsch.
The big political fad to be dumped is neoliberal politics best described as having mirror-image Marxism at its core. COVID-19 shattered many of the complacent assumptions that many of us -- and especially people in our economic and bureaucratic elites -- have depended upon. It will be easy enough for people who have been overworked and underpaid all their adult lives to repudiate neoliberal ideology... but perhaps too late to start over or even to establish some comfort in old age.
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.