11-11-2021, 05:39 PM
(11-11-2021, 09:59 AM)Anthony Wrote: My mother died on October 30 of last year (at the age of 88) and my father died on January 24 of this year (at the age of 90).
Thank G-d for them - they were both "Always Trumpers" - they never lived to see the "damage" that the Biden Administration is doing.
My father was a life-long Republican. He was distressed when I became a liberal Democrat about the time of Watergate. Maybe I met people very different from those that I knew as children in rural Michigan.
He saw through Donald Trump for his cruelty, demagoguery, hollowness, and narcissism. People of little substance often get full of themselves, and I could explain that. He voted for John Kasich in the primary election, and as Trump won primaries and consolidated the nomination he got even more arrogant. Donald Trump is everything wrong with the Idealist pattern --- arrogant, ruthless, and self-indulgent as salient vices while being weak on erudition and expression of a viable morality. I concede that he is decisive, but he is decisively wrong.
Yes, I am a Boomer, and I am satisfied that a Boomer who has a well-defined culture and a capacity for moral discretion and can express such decisively and convincingly -- but has toned down the arrogance, learned to recognize the validity of restraints upon fanaticism and narrow-mindedness, and has come to recognize material excess as a trap can relate to people not Boomers. I can assure you that Boomers who have done real work have learned what they cannot get away with among others who don't have everything made for them because they are born with silver spoons in their mouths. People who realize that there is more to life than 'sex&drugs&rock-n-roll', bureaucratic power, class privilege, and material indulgence can relate to people who have endured hardscrabble lives.
Note well: the GI childhood was rarely one of material ease, especially if one's parents were marginal farmers or industrial laborers. The Millennial childhood of the children of toilers isn't as easy as that of kids born into the Boomer childhood of the small-screen Ward,June, and "Beaver" Cleaver. Someone like Donald Trump cannot relate to Millennial adults who have not had easy lives. Trump got elected under freakish circumstances, and the American electorate turned on him.
I at least understand the people who believe that life can be best only if people accept the streamlining of regulations, tax cuts for investors and executives, the evisceration of labor unions, wage cuts, reductions in welfare, and the further concentration of wealth and power because such will create more productive capacity, create more opportunities in industrial work, allow more opportunity for the formation of small business and of course ensure that there will be more income to go around. That's trickle-down economics, which has some defense. What Trump and most of the Right now stands for is an aristocratic order in which entrenched elites keep getting richer by limiting opportunity and creating and intensifying scarcity for minimal wages and maximal prices. The aristocratic elite fares best when it makes the lives of proles and peons worse, which implies pathology of economics, politics, and human relations. Note well that the bulk of America's immigrants from the Irish potato famine to the chaos of the First World War left aristocratic societies in which they had no chance for a better life. Trump is for making America resemble a nightmare that your grandparents or great-grandparents fled.
Donald Trump can roast in Hell, so far as I am concerned.
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.